Quick Pitch: A news personalization and aggregation service.
Genius Idea: Launching on seven different platforms in its first year and integrating information from several social networks, including Google+, into its personalization engine.
The idea of a personalized news reader is almost a cliche at this point -- AOL Editions, Zite, Flipboard and News.Me are just a few startup services with their own takes. News360 joined the crowd last October with a product solely focused on news aggregation, rather than personalization. While it used (and still uses) a unique semantic algorithm to decide what the most meaningful stories are in broad categories like Business, World, Food and Fashion, it was not strikingly different from a user perspective.
What stood out about its approach was that it quickly released versions compatible with the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry Playbook, Andorid and the web.
"Our thinking is that we want to give inside the experience wherever you are," says News360 CEO Roman Karachinsky. "People have different use cases whether reading on their phones, desktops or laptops, but we want to be on every device that they have -- let them have their interest graph, have their saved articles, on any platforms that they want to use."
The app has extended the same "be everywhere" attitude towards a personalization feature that launched in August. It pulls in user behavior and interest from Twitter, Facebook, Evernote and Google Reader in order to help determine a reader's interests. Where some other apps rely on behavior you demonstrate while using them, News360 takes information from the profiles you connect -- your bio, where you comment, like, star, share and save -- in order to construct and populate categories.
News360 told Mashable it will add Google+ behavior cues to its options for personalize user news feeds Friday -- which is impressive, considering Google+ just released it's first APIs last week.
"We don’t want to collect 1,000 articles before you make the decision," Karachinsky says, "which is why we try to look at as many profiles as you can right off the bat."
By aiming broad, in both its spectrum of devices and its range of information, News360 has attracted more than 750,000 downloads. While the startup won't get specific about how many of those are active users, a spokespeson did say active users grew 27% May to June; 21% June to July; and 135% July to August. About 4.5 million articles are read using the app each month.
That's traction. But is it enough to unseat established startups like Flipboard and big names like AOL that are entering the space? Using multiple news aggregators at once somewhat defeats the purpose of using one in the first place.
Will News360 be the one you choose? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, fotosipsak
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
