In November, Amazon began shipping its new Kindle. At the time, even though reactions were varied, though Amazon hoped for the best, as some projected it would sell as many as 5 million by the end of 2011. Though the indications are that it didn’t get there. However, the media hype and early Kindle sales have still been a boon for a young startup that you’re probably by now familiar with: Pulse. → Read More
So the Kindle Fire shipped Monday, and the early reviews are out in full force. The reactions, as per usual, are varied. But, for what it’s worth, The Fire is already the best-selling item on Amazon, and many are now saying that the eCommerce giant could sell 5 million of its new devices by the end of the year. No, it’s not an iPad killer, but people are excited by the Kindle’s touch and Android-based evolution, and at $200 there’s no doubt Amazon is going to sell more than a few.
But what’s more interesting (at least to me) than the potential growth of Amazon’s market cap should the Kindle sell like hot cakes, or Apple looking over its shoulder, is how Kindle sales could be a huge victory for one of the little guys. → Read More
Pulse, an innovative news reading app for mobile devices, is debuting a new cross-platform syncing feature that allows users to access their accounts and saved sources across devices.
Pulse, which is developed by Alphonso Labs, launched last year via an iPad app as a more seamless (and visually appealing) way to read your RSS feeds. But Pulse ditched RSS in favor of hooking up with APIs to access content. Pulse’s home screen renders stories from your feeds on a dynamic mosaic interface and via a touch interface, allows you to swipe up and down to see headlines from various sources, and right and left to browse stories from a particular source. Pulse users can also bring in their news from 60 sources. → Read More
Kobo has been cultivating their Reading Life initiative for a while now, and with the announcement of their new Pulse feature, they’re digging even deeper into the social space than before. Slated to launch in their Kobo iOS apps first, Pulse is a new way for readers to connect with others while digitally thumbing through their collections.
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Alphonso Labs, the fledgling company behind Pulse, a nifty social news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android devices used by roughly 5 million people, aims to pose a challenge to simple bookmarking tool Instapaper (and a range of other bookmarking and ‘read it later’ apps).
The startup is today debuting both a bookmarklet and a Chrome add-on that enables users to ‘save stories to Pulse’ with a mouse click. Extensions for other browsers are ‘in the works’, I’m told. → Read More
Pulse is not just for news feeds and Facebook links. Now you can also get nearby daily deals. With the latest update to both the iPhone and Android apps, when you enable location sharing, Pulse will pull nearby Groupon deals.
Pulse lets you subscribe to different deals by city. You can see them as a stream in your Pulse reader, along with deals from nearby cities. If you click through to purchase one, Pulse will get an affiliate fee. It’s certainly a better way to peruse the deals than the daily email. You can also save a deal for later purchase. → Read More
Apple doesn’t hand out a lot of design awards. When they do, it’s a pretty clear indication of the apps they feel best showcase their platforms. This year at WWDC, one of the winners was Pulse, the visual news-reading app created by Alphonso Labs. And Apple isn’t the only one taking notice of the app, so are investors.
New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures have just poured $9 million into Pulse. As you might imagine, the nice-sized Series A will help the small team grow and continue to push towards creating the perfect news reading apps for modern devices. NEA’s Patrick Chung will join Pulse’s board, and Greycroft Managing Director Alan Patricof and Lerer Ventures Manager (and Huffington Post co-founder) Ken Lerer will serve as advisors to the company. → Read More
Livescribe smartpens allow you to record and send the ink you draw or write on paper. They also record the surrounding audio so you can sync the audio with the drawings, something that’s great for students, reporters, and anyone who goes to meetings regularly. For a while, they had little apps that could run on the pen including a very cool piano app that allowed you to draw a piano and then play it on the page. Now, however, they’ve added an interesting new feature: Livescribe Connect, a system that allows you to send entire pages to multiple recipients including Twitter users, Facebook, Google Docs, and various other cloud services. We got a quick hands on and were able to talk to the company about future plans. → Read More
We love the “RSS Is Dead” meme here at TechCrunch. Hell, we started it. And while RSS isn’t exactly dead as in gone, it is dead in that the vast majority of people who consume content on the web have absolutely no idea what it is and will never know what it is. But even that’s not necessarily bad news for RSS. What is bad news is that services that previously only relied on it are now moving beyond it.
Today, Pulse, the visual news-reading app for iPhone, iPad, and Android, is announcing that they’re moving beyond RSS, and instead hooking up with APIs to get access to content. What type of content? Content from Reddit, Digg, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and PicPlz. Yes, you’ll now be able to browse all of those within Pulse. → Read More
Today, during their Android Honeycomb unveiling event, Google took a little bit of time on stage to mention one app: Pulse. The social news reading app began as an iPad project, but has since found a comfortable home on a wider range of devices, including Android devices. And now they’re ready to fully embrace Android tablets with Honeycomb.
Co-founder Akshay Kothari notes that they’ve been working “very closely” with Google to build the latest version of their app optimized for Honeycomb. And while it won’t be out until later this month (presumably when Honeycomb is also actually available on devices such as the Motorola Xoom), Kothari sent us some screenshots of how it will look. Find those below. For now, you can find Pulse for Android here in the new Market Webstore. → Read More
Over the weekend, there was a ton of talk about 2011 being the year in which Android “explodes” onto the market. You could argue that 2010 was already that year, but plenty of numbers indicate that 2011 will be much bigger for the platform. But despite Android as a whole already outselling the iPhone, there’s little debate that amongst developers, iOS is still the platform you develop for first. But this could change as well in 2011, at least according to one developer. And it’s significant because he’s been an iPhone-first guy up until now.
Akshay Kothari is the co-founder of Alphonso Labs, the development house behind the popular Pulse news reader app. Pulse started as an iPad app first, then expanded to the iPhone, then came to Android. Kothari credits both the support they’ve received from Apple and the press surrounding the iPad as the reason why they’ve been so iOS-centric up until now. But, “our thinking about the Android platform has changed significantly over the last couple weeks,” he writes to us. → Read More
News aggregators and RSS feeds have been around for awhile now, but only with the rapid proliferation of touch technology on mobile devices and tablets, have we started moving closer to a truly appealing news feed experience.
For the average web user, the traditional staid design and text-and-headline-heavy interface of the RSS feed and feed aggregators have offered user experiences to be endured rather than enjoyed.
News apps for both the iPhone and iPad, like Pulse and Flipboard, have garnered quite a bit of attention of late for disrupting the aggregation and RSS reader experience by offering up new, intriguing ways of representing data. But when it comes to news consumption, I’d rather look to feeds emanating from editorially directed and curated magazines and websites, rather than a template populated by Facebook and Twitter such as Flipboard—or a design and user experience that is a bit sexier than Pulse—and I’d love to have quality versions on my iPhone (that have true staying power). This is why I’ve recently become a fan of FLUD, which allows users to plug in feeds from favorite sites (like TechCrunch, ahem) and read, peruse, and share articles through a neatly-presented, tile-based interface—for free. And unlike Flipboad, FLUD is on both the iPad and iPhone—and it’s coming soon to Android and the desktop. → Read More
It’s perplexing to me that Facebook still hasn’t released an iPad app. And recent comments from the company suggest that they’re in no hurry to. Because of this, apps like Friendly have risen that wrap Facebook’s touch site in a cocoa skin and sell it for $0.99. They’ve undoubtedly made a killing doing that. Now the popular visual RSS reader, Pulse, is about to add Facebook support as well. Luckily, they’re doing it for free. And it’s fantastic.
To be clear, Pulse has not made a full-fledged Facebook client for the iPad. But what they have done is integrated Facebook into the overall Pulse experience so that you can do some social exploration in a very visual way. → Read More
News Corp is taking the iPad very seriously as a new way to distribute the news. The media giant is taking it so seriously that it is developing a new publication called the Daily which will only be available on the iPad (no print edition, no Website). News Corp is hiring 100 journalists for this iPad newspaper and is reportedly working with engineers on loan from Apple to make it shine.
The last time a big media company hired so many journalists to launched a splashy new publication was Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which was more of a print venture and didn’t survive. I hope the Daily fares better and really takes this opportunity to rethink how news is presented to readers without any of the limitations of print. For one thing, based on who is getting hired for this project, it looks like the Daily will be heavy on video, interactive graphics, and rich photos. Nothing too startling there. Pretty much every newspaper and magazine edition on the iPad is going in that direction. With all the hype that is brewing around the project, hopefully it will push the envelope beyond those obvious iPad features.
But the fact that News Corp. is putting so many resources into this project raises a basic question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily: What should an iPad newspaper look like? → Read More
Last May, we noted that Pulse was a “must-have news app for the iPad.” A few weeks later, no less than Apple CEO Steve Jobs agreed, showing it off on stage at an Apple event. Then the app got pulled over a content dispute. Then it reappeared. Then a competitor with big-time backing appeared, Flipboard. It’s been a crazy ride for the two Stanford grads who built Pulse. And now they’re back on the offensive with Pulse 2.0.
The latest version released into the App Store today brings a big list of improvements. The key ones: → Read More
Alphonso Labs‘ Pulse app for the iPad provides a beautiful way to read your favorite feeds. Unfortunately, compared to the newer entry Flipboard, it’s not very socially personalized. An update tonight hopes to change that.
Pulse is teaming up with Posterous to create a simple way for users to create their own “Pulses.” What this means is that they can with one tap add any article to their own Pulse — thus making any user an aggregator of news. Posterous comes in because each of these Pulse items are transfered to a free blog which is automatically created for you. “This blog will post the articles you have picked, hence enabling you to share this even with friends who don’t have Pulse,” Alphonso Labs co-founder Akshay Kothari says. → Read More
Created by Jason Baptiste, PadPressed is a Wordpress plugin that makes any Wordpress blog look like a native iPad app when accessed from iPad. Bestowing upon your humble blog the iPad features we’ve come to know and love such as “swipe to advance” articles, touch navigation, accelerometer positioning and home screen icon support when you’re really jonseing for that authentic app feeling.
While Baptiste started with WordPress because 8.5% of all websites (including our own) are Wordpress but has grander aspirations, “We did Wordpress first because it’s the largest thing there is next we’re doing Tumblr, Posterous, Moveable Type, and then custom CMSs.” Exciting! → Read More
Back in May, we first wrote about Pulse, an innovative and pretty news reading app for the iPad created by a couple of Stanford grads. Just about a month later, it hit for the iPhone as well. Today, they’re wasting little time graduating beyond the iUniverse with the launch of Pulse for Android.
Pulse is essentially a better-looking and more intuitive way to read your favorite RSS feeds. That’s because the experience is visual and touch-based, rather than being a bunch of text you click on. The fact that it uses RSS also differentiates Pulse from its new rival Flipboard, which pulls in actual content rather than RSS in a way that may be legally murky. You may recall that Pulse was taken down from the App Store shortly after its iPad launch after the New York Times complained about the use of their content. This was especially odd since just 24 hours earlier, no less than Apple CEO Steve Jobs praised Pulse on stage during his WWDC keynote. But (and perhaps because of that) Pulse was quickly reinstated, and has stuck around with no problems since then. → Read More
Remember Pulse, the awesome RSS reader application for the iPad built by a couple of Stanford grads? The app that was mentioned by Steve Jobs himself on stage at WWDC, got pulled from the App Store after a complaint from the New York Times, but was reinstated pretty quickly?
Well, it was no secret that a Pulse iPhone app was coming, too, and we just got word that it’s available as of now (iTunes link). Sure, there are plenty of RSS readers out there, but you might still want to try this one (even if the price – $2.99 – is perhaps just a little steep). → Read More
It’s amazing what an on-stage Steve Jobs mention will do.
Everyone has been buzzing today after Pulse, the awesome news aggregator, was pulled from Apple’s App Store after the New York Times apparently complained about their use of content. But what’s really odd about this is that just 24 hours ago, Pulse was highlighted on stage by no less than the Apple CEO himself as a great new app for the iPad. Jobs and those running the App Store seemed to be on a completely different page. Not anymore. → Read More
