The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at… → Read More
During their time with Journalists For Human Rights, Canada’s largest media development NGO, Ben Peterson and Jonathan Wong helped train local journalists in sub-saharan Africa on how best to report on human rights, governance (or lack thereof) and uphold the fourth estate. To help them teach these aspiring reporters, the friends looked for the best examples of Human Rights journalism. But all… → Read More
Yahoo! has picked up the pace on pretty much everything since Marissa Mayer became CEO, especially mobile acquisitions. Today, it announced the acquisition of mobile news gathering and delivery startup, Summly. AllThingsD reports that the acquisition price was somewhere close to $30 million. The app itself is gorgeous, allowing you to skim and share news quickly with some really intuitive… → Read More
Miami-based startup Guide today announced its seed funding round of $1 million, from investors including Sapient, The Knight Foundation and actor Omar Epps. The company is also launching the alpha version of its product today, which aims to be the next generation in online news delivery, by pairing text-to-speech technologies with online news and blog feeds to create curated, personalized video… → Read More
We’ve learned today that mobile news-delivery company Circa has raised another $750K on top of the $900K raised previously. The company launched its app of the same name, which allows you to follow an often-changing story in bite-sized chunks, only three months ago. A few more big names have joined in this up-round, including: Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Menlo Talent Fund, Alex Bard… → Read More
LaunchGram is an alert service that allows consumers to subscribe to news about imminently launching products. After doing so, they receive email alerts and breaking news about those products.
We first told you about the service back in April. At the time they only let you subscribe to breaking news about video games, electronics, cars and movies but now TV shows are on their list of… → Read More
We told you about Matt Galligan’s news app for iOS, Circa, a few months ago. Basically, it breaks down “stories” into more consumable chunks so that you can follow something as it happens. It was particularly useful during the elections, as the narrative on who would become the next President changed almost every single second.
Today, Circa is announcing the addition of a web view to its… → Read More
News Corp today announced that The Daily, it’s iPad-only digital newspaper publication, would be stopping its standalone publication effective December 15, 2012. The Daily will continue as a brand as part of “other channels,” according to a News Corp press release, including The New York Post, which will adopt its technology section and other components, as well as take on some of its staff. → Read More
The No. 1 thing about the Internet that fascinates me is the fact that information can travel at the speed of light. One moment, something can happen in one part of the world, and seconds later, someone on the opposite side of the world can know about it. That is absolutely epic in my opinion. Be it a video, link or tweet, things travel quickly, but we rarely see how they travel. → Read More
![Matt Galligan And Circa’s Role In The Upcoming Election And News Cycle [TCTV] | TechCrunch-1](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/matt-galligan-and-circa_s-role-in-the-upcoming-election-and-news-cycle-tctv-techcrunch-1.jpg?w=250)
Last month, we told you about a new service called Circa, which set out to redefine the way that you consume news on your iOS device. The app itself is beautifully designed, and was based off of an idea that Ben Huh had and then shared with Matt Galligan. Galligan took the idea and ran with it. → Read More
The way that we consume information on the Internet has changed dramatically over the years. The main reason is because there is simply more content available to us than we could ever consume during our time on Earth. Back in the day, our only options for news were newspapers and then eventually the local TV or radio station telling us what’s happening in our immediate area. Circa has launched its… → Read More
The New York Times this morning announced a new HTML5 web app for iPad, rounding out their lineup of web and tablet products for digital subscribers. The Times is soliciting feedback from its users about the app and its features, which suggests that it’s looking at this as a way to experiment with a non-native delivery method, but isn’t quite sure about how consumers will respond. → Read More
A new study from Pew Research claims that the more devices we use, the more news we consume. In fact, rather than splitting the time spent consuming news between, say, a smartphone and a tablet, most users who own both devices tend to double the amount of time spent reading the news.
According to the report, which was based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012… → Read More
News publishers are becoming tech companies, right down to the Google Labs style experimental sites: The New York Times Company Research & Development Lab, The Globe Lab, WapPo Labs…
And now there’s HuffPost Labs, which will unveil its first project today: Highlights, a collection of the most popular sentences from articles and blog posts across the Huffington Post empire. → Read More
They came together with a common worldview and complementary personalities. Then, as they grew older and grew apart, they still tried to make it work — for the sake of the child, at least. Now that that kid is a teenager, they’ve decided now is probably the best time to finally call curtains: After 16 years, Microsoft and NBC are parting ways in their joint news venture, and NBC is getting… → Read More
Storify, the startup that lets anyone “curate” stories from around the web by collecting posts from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is today announcing its first-ever syndication deal. Through a new partnership with popular news reader Pulse, Storify’s curated feeds will now appear within Pulse’s app, allowing readers to subscribe to curated stories from a number of sources… → Read More
FLUD, the scrappy news reader backed by $1 million in seed funding, is today introducing FLUD 2.0 for Android and Windows Phone. FLUD 2.0, for those who don’t recall, was the big redesign that turned FLUD from being just another news reader into a true social news experience.
Although participating in a crowded space, where it goes up against better-known brands like Flipboard, Zite, and Pulse… → Read More
If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were… → Read More
Following its November launch, OnSwipe competitor (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Pressly is bringing another major media outlet’s content to the tablet interface. The company is today announcing the launch of a new publication called Electionism. The app was built for the Media Lab, an internal product innovation team inside The Economist Group, which includes The Economist, CQ Roll Call and… → Read More
Does the world need another social news site? That’s the big question about today’s launch of Comunitee, a new beta destination for tracking the news you want to follow, commenting and sharing stories with your friends. I mean, it’s not like we already have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for this, right?
Well, not exactly. For those who want the full, real-time firehose of feeds for a set of… → Read More
You may be familiar with Flud as the news reader app that’s trying to build an appealing alternative to Flipboard and Pulse. Flud launched iOS platform back at the end of 2010 with a heavy focus on design — and a simple user interface. Fast Company even gave Flud the 2010 Design Award of The Year. The startup has since launched its social news sharing app on Android, raised $1 million in seed… → Read More
News360, the cross-platform news reader, is arriving on the iPhone today in version 2.0, after having been previously available on virtually all other platforms, including Android, the iPad, Windows Phone, the Web and even the BlackBerry PlayBook.
With today’s launch, News360 is also adding support for logins, allowing you to sync your reading trends and behavior, (aka your “interest graph”)… → Read More
Realtime semantic startup Evri is debuting its brand-new iPad application today, where it joins the crowded “iPad news magazine” space filled with the likes of Flipboard, The Daily, Zite, Pulse, NewsMix, AOL Editions, News360 and others. To differentiate itself from the pack, Evri’s app employs a combination of social news and topical streams, allowing readers to follow their interests as opposed… → Read More
Wibbitz, a new service that functions as sort of a “play button” for the Web, has just raised a seed round of approximately half a million. The service is similar to former TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki, in that it, too, automatically generates videos on the fly using the content found on a given website.
But unlike Qwiki, Wibbitz is positioned as a tool designed specifically for publishers… → Read More
Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now… → Read More
Gas prices are going up again, not one single Gordon Gekko-lyte has been held accountable for the financial meltdown of recent years, and most of us are just now sobering up from a tax filing hangover. So if you’re looking for another reason to complain about the government, here it is: Reports are that 13 out of 36 surveyed FBI agents lack the skills to deal with cyber crime. Sounds like a job… → Read More
Online retail giant Amazon has tussled with state tax agencies before so this ain’t a new fight. But it might very well be an escalation of the beef… Reports are circulating that Amazon has decided against opening a new distribution center in South Carolina because lawmakers won’t go along with the retailers attempt to gain an exemption for collecting sales tax. → Read More
When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?
Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. … → Read More
I’m beginning to think that the old phrase “think globally, act locally” has become an appropriate slogan for Web 2.0. (Or perhaps an alternative might be “think global, try to monetize the sh*t out of local”.) With the rise of location-based services like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook Places, local-friendly deal sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Yipit, and local-happy news services … → Read More
In the old days, big data used to be called data warehousing. But that was when corporations stored all their own data on their own servers. Today, it’s just called big data and it generally refers to the vast reaches of data in the cloud. Old big data is buying new big data today, as data warehousing powerhouse Teradata just announced it will be acquiring Aster Data Systems for $263… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
