Once upon a time, there was a magical innovation called RSS, for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It freed news articles, podcasts, and other content from their original homes on the Web and allowed news junkies to follow their favorite publications and blogs through story streams called news feeds, which could be bundled together inside programs called RSS readers. For a long time, RSS readers were the best tools for browsing stories from lots of sources quickly.

But RSS was invented by geeks and didn’t belong to any single company, so there was nobody with an incentive to make the whole scheme more user-friendly. Finding a publication’s RSS feed and adding it to your reader was always a hassle, and the RSS readers themselves weren’t particularly fun to use. On top of that, publishers didn’t have good ways to make money on all the content they were sharing in their news feeds. So the RSS system, while important and useful, never really developed into a booming product category.

Now fast-forward a few years to the birth of tablet computing. With their big screens and touch-based interfaces, tablets look and feel a little bit like real magazines. So programmers naturally started thinking about how to revive the news aggregation idea on Apple’s iPad and other tablet devices. Pulse, released for the iPad in May 2010, was the first tablet reader to feature a combination of features that has now become standard in this category: a graphically rich table-of-contents page for navigation, and a stripped-down story page for reading. Flipboard quickly followed in July 2010, adding a social element. Feeds now consisted not just of the articles being pushed at you by news organizations, but also of the content your friends were sharing on Facebook or Twitter.

In the free-for-all world of Web and mobile software, what’s worth doing twice is worth doing a dozen times. Today there so many social news reader apps to choose from that it’s hard to know how they differ and which ones are most useful. To help you get oriented, I’ve rounded up the most noteworthy tablet news readers on the following pages and made note of a few strengths and weaknesses for each.

Note that I’m restricting my list to free reader apps available for the iPad (since I don’t have an Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, or Amazon tablet). I’m leaving out apps that require a paid subscription, such as Ongo, and I’m not including pure RSS-aggregator apps like Reeder, which tend to lack the graphical and social features of the newer crop of news apps.

Click “Go to First App” to start reading, or jump directly to an app from the list below. Be sure to continue all the way to The Bottom Line on last page, where I share my personal favorites.

GO TO FIRST APP >>

	Editions by AOL
	Flipboard
	Flud
	Google Currents
	News.me
	Pulse
	SkyGrid
	Trove
	Yahoo Livestand
	Zite
	The Bottom Line

… Next Page »

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Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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Any iPad owner who uses Flipboard a lot knows the familiar disappointed feeling: You left your iPad at home, you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, and you just want to pull out your iPhone and spend a minute or two browsing the app’s beautiful lineup of stories pulled from your Twitter, Facebook, RSS and feeds. But wait, you can’t—Flipboard doesn’t have an iPhone app.

Or it didn’t until today. At midnight Wednesday the Palo Alto, CA-based startup released the long-awaited iPhone version of its popular news browsing app. It brings users all the same stories that showed up on the iPad version, but the interface has been redesigned from the ground up for the iPhone’s smaller screen. The signature “flip” or page-forward action in the app now works vertically instead of horizontally, for example, to allow easier single-handed operation of the app with a free thumb. The app also includes a few interesting new features, including “Cover Stories” and “Fast Flip,” that are designed to speed users’ journeys to the content that interests them most.

The Cover Stories screen on Flipboard for the iPhone

Flipboard has raised just over $60 million in venture financing on a reported valuation of $200 million, and to justify the high expectations it has set with investors and users, it had to make its first smartphone app truly amazing. Marci McCue, a spokesperson for the company and the wife of co-founder and CEO Mike McCue, told me yesterday that the company’s designers and engineers went back to the drawing board several times before they came up with a way of presenting content that felt right on the iPhone. This Steve Jobs-like perfectionism was the reason for the long delay in delivering the app, which was originally expected by mid-summer.

Making a great iPhone app, in other words, wasn’t just a matter of shrinking down the iPad version of the app. “We went through a lot of interaction design changes,” says McCue. “On the iPad stories flip right to left. How does a story open on the iPhone? How does it flip? Should it flip at all?”

For the most part, the company has come up with elegant solutions to those questions. There are, however, a few first-day hiccups with the app. I had trouble signing in (it worked on the third try), the content for many sections wouldn’t load at all, and I wasn’t able to add new social accounts from the app.

But the problems will likely be short-lived, and are probably due to the huge crush of people downloading the app, signing up for the first time as Flipboard users, and linking the app to their social-media accounts. Flipboard is, in essence, a social magazine that grabs and reassembles the headlines, images, and text for online stories mentioned by your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, 500px, and other services. That involves a lot of behind-the-scenes processing, and the glitches today are probably just a repeat of Flipboard’s July 2010 launch, when virtually everyone with an iPad wanted to add the app simultaneously.

McCue and Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll (who are pictured above) spent about an hour walking me through the new app yesterday at the company’s crowded-to-bursting headquarters (McCue says the company is looking for a larger space, but doesn’t want to leave downtown Palo Alto). The trick with the iPhone app, McCue says, was to … Next Page »

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NextDigest, the San Francisco-based parent company of StartupDigest, said yesterday that it has raised $390,000 in new financing to expand its network of weekly e-mail newsletters focusing on events in the Web and Internet startup sector. Equity investments from 500Startups, Charles Hudson, Tim Trampedach, Marco Magnocavallo, Joshua Baer, and Ron Gutman brought in $190,000 of the total, while the Kauffman Foundation has provided an additional $200,000 in sponsorship funds. The company’s newsletters on startups, mobile and social-media technology, gaming, and other sectors are available in 14 cities, including Austin, Boston, Boulder, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, and Seattle. “You could spend all day scanning through twitter, Facebook, Quora, RSS, and every other service all day…or you can have your information hand-picked by someone who knows that industry well and delivers it directly to you,” said NextDigest founder and CEO Chris McCann. “This is what we are doing with NextDigest for the fastest growing tech verticals.”

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My passion is for storytelling, and the stories that fascinate me most are about new technologies, how they’re brought into being, and how they’re changing everyday life. But there’s a wrinkle that’s been distracting me from doing my best work and getting it out to the readers who will appreciate it most. It’s called the news embargo. It’s a failed institution, yet some players in the news ecosystem refuse to let it go, causing journalists like myself untold grief. Well, I’ve had enough.

The decline and fall of the embargo system is, admittedly, an inside-the-sausage-factory issue. It’s the sort of thing readers of news shouldn’t have to think about. But it affects the way consumers learn about important technology news stories, which makes it relevant to every entrepreneur and startup. So allow me to dwell for a moment on why the embargo is dead, why it’s time for companies and the public relations community to face up to that fact, and what we might put in its place.

An embargo is a gentlemen’s agreement between a newsmaker and a news organization to keep a story secret until a specific date and time. One of the main purposes of such agreements is to give every reporter who agrees to an embargo an equal amount of time to research and write a well-informed story before the publication date. Of course, the newsmaker benefits too; when a volley of press stories appear all at once, it heightens the sense that the news must be important. (Whether this is always true is a different matter.)

Embargoes emerged as a common practice in an era when there were far fewer major media outlets, meaning it was much easier to keep secrets. But in a 24/7, Internet-driven media world where anyone can be a publisher and PR professionals are sharing embargoed news more and more widely, there’s a growing epidemic of accidental and deliberate embargo-breaking. In the world of infotech coverage, they get broken 10 to 25 percent of the time, by my personal count. When an embargo falls, every organization that agreed to the embargo gets burned. Except the one that broke it; they get a scoop, and more and more often, there’s no punishment attached.

Frustration over that situation has led a few organizations to attack the system. In 2008, notably, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington declared “Death to the Embargo” and said that henceforth his publication would work to undermine the system by agreeing to embargoes, then breaking them at random. They’ve done this with gusto, and Arrington’s campaign has worked. Embargo promises, at least in the business and technology space I cover, are now tissue-thin. If TechCrunch—now a division of AOL—doesn’t break the embargo on a given story, someone else emboldened by its example often will.

Yet technology companies and their public relations firms cling to the practice. Every day I get half a dozen or more offers of embargoed stories. And I have a new standard response for these offers: No thank you.

Let me say that again. I will no longer agree to embargoes. If you are a tech company or a PR person and you’re looking to share a story under embargo, don’t even bother to contact me before the embargo time. Just send me your announcement once it’s public. I’m not saying that I will never again cover a story that was originally shared with other reporters under embargo. I’m just saying that I’m not going to do a bunch of work in advance of an embargo only to get burned at the last minute by … Next Page »

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Interesting hiring news in the Seattle-area innovation community: Rebecca Lovell of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network is now chief business officer at GeekWire, the tech-news startup run by former TechFlash and Seattle P-I journalists John Cook and Todd Bishop. Lovell has been executive director of NWEN for just over two years, and worked as program director for the Alliance of Angels for nearly three years before that. Lovell is a fixture on the Seattle tech and startup scene, recently overseeing the “First Look” forum that showed off a diverse collection of startups to investors. Cook writes that Lovell will continue working part-time with NWEN as it searches for a new director. It’s more evidence of the fertile ground for online news companies in Seattle—GeekWire and Xconomy cover a lot of the same territory, and there are good examples of neighborhood news blogs, political sites, and the online-only P-I.

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San Francisco-based Storify, which is helping publishers such as Washington, DC-based TBD assemble social media updates into narrative news stories, has raised $2 million in new venture funding, according to a regulatory filing. The company, whose service is still in a private beta testing phase, identified Khosla Ventures as an investor in a blog post yesterday.

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Fremont, CA-based HipLogic, a group of former Sun engineers funded by Benchmark Capital, Bay Partners, Stage 1 Ventures, and Route 2 Digital, today released the full version of its Spark application, which is intended as a replacement home screen for owners of Android and Symbian OS smartphones. Available free from the Android Marketplace, the app shows weather, news from CBS, daily deals from Groupon, and social media updates from Facebook and Twitter at a glance. “Spark enables personalized mobile discovery, without a cumbersome search process,” CBS Mobile senior vice president Rob Gelick said in a statement.

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Last week marked my three-month anniversary here at Xconomy, and as I reflected on my time here so far (which just happens to coincide almost perfectly with the third quarter), I realized there have been so many interesting stories—and important ones at that—that even I have forgotten about. It’s hard to keep up with news, especially in the technology circuit, where the headlines move almost as fast as the latest technology trends and fads. Yet these stories don’t stop being relevant just because they’re yesterday’s news.

With that in mind, Luke and I decided to put together a list of top stories from the last quarter to help readers, and ourselves, stay abreast of interesting deals, trends, new technologies, and innovations that are still making waves long after the news first broke. These lists, divided into our respective sectors of technology and biotech/life sciences, reflect our favorite stories of the third quarter. Some were stories that got lot of attention when they first ran. Others may have slipped under your radar. All of them spoke to trends and analysis we’ve spotted as observers and reporters of the innovation space here in the Pacific Northwest.

We tried to be as comprehensive as possible, but it was tough keeping these lists down to 10 stories each (in fact, I’ve been so excited about the Seattle-area tech scene, I cheated a little, and threw in a bonus story). So dig in, read up, and enjoy.

Thea’s Top 10 technology stories, plus one bonus:

Where Do You Check In? The Northwest’s Location-Based Search and Social Networking Mini Cluster

Seattle’s Deal-A-Day Sites, DealPop and Tippr, Challenge Groupon and LivingSocial

Casual Connect’s Main Theme in 2010: The Intersection of Casual and Social Gaming is a Game Changer

The Northwest Tech Scene, Public Policy, and Collaboration: WTIA CEO Susan Sigl on Her First 100 Days & What’s In Store

Teachers Explore How to Integrate Computer Science into K-12 Curriculum at UW Conference

McKinstry Innovation Center Cozies into Position as Cleantech ‘Accelerator’, Director Elsa Croonquist On What’s Next

Buildings that Act Like Guinea Pigs for Energy Efficiency: The Puget Sound Regional Council Plan for Green Jobs

Wetpaint Rolls Out New Platform to ‘Reinvent Publishing,’ Wetpaint Entertainment

Northwest Energy Angels Executive Director Margo Shiroyama on Her First Six Months, and the Future of the NW Cleantech Scene

Livemocha Seeks to Upend Rosetta Stone, Taking Language Learning to New Heights Online

Bonus story: How Hydrovolts’ $250 Development Deal Could Turn into a $20M Contract and Global Market

Luke’s Top 10 biotech and life sciences stories:

Seattle Genetics, Millennium Generate “Dream” Data With Empowered Antibody Drug for Cancer

Lee Hartwell, at 70, Tackles Personalized Medicine, Education in Latest Career Phase

Seattle Children’s CEO, Between Meetings, Invents Cheap Ventilator to Save Babies Worldwide

Gilead’s Lung Drug Ace, Bruce Montgomery, Hits Free Agent Market, Scopes Startup Ideas

Larry Corey, Virus Hunter with Midwest Roots, Seeks to Unleash Health Innovation at Hutch

ZymoGenetics Reaches End of Road in Seattle, Faces Uncertain Future, Potential Job Cuts

Allozyne, After a Stealthy Year on a Slim Budget, Re-Emerges with MS Drug and Fat Pipeline

Swedish’s Young Social Media Ace Coaches Docs in Ways of the Web

What Will Happen to ZymoGenetics’ Landmark Headquarters When Bristol Calls the Shots?

Immune Design Follows Corixa Playbook, Sees Data, Deals on Horizon in Year Three

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Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital introduced an Android app called EvriThing Tech back in May, taking advantage of the startup’s semantic search technology to help on-the-go tech news addicts track the latest developments on subtopics from gadgets to venture capital. But at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco this week, the company is expected to introduce a fleet of other mobile apps for multiple platforms that round up news in additional areas such as sports, celebrity gossip, and music.

EvriThing Tech will now be available on the iPhone as well as Android (as soon as Apple approves the app, that is), with channels covering smartphones and tablet devices, social media, venture capital, and the like. On top of that, the startup is introducing EvriThing Gossip, covering celebrities from J Lo to Lady Gaga; EvriThing Baseball and EvriThing Pro Football, with live game scores and news channels for every team; and EvriThing Rock, with news about new music, festivals, and channels for specific rock music genres.

All of the apps draw on Evri’s information discovery engine, which automatically parses news and other Web content in near real time into “feeds” tied together by common subjects—people, places, companies, sports teams, and the like. The apps funnel millions of such feeds into specific categories relevant to users’ interests, sparing them from having to sift through the noise inevitably included in traditional search results.

In addition to news stories, the categories include images, recent Twitter posts, real-time stats such as sports scores, and videos. The videos in the EvriThing apps are the one element that Evri doesn’t discover or aggregate on its own—instead, they’re provided by San Francisco-based Blinkx, a video search startup that announced a partnership with Evri today.

At a dinner for journalists hosted by Blinkx last night, Evri CEO Will Hunsinger showed me the iPhone versions of the EvriThing apps, which have clean interfaces dominated by news stories from sources that Evri’s discovery engine judges to be both popular and reputable. In the baseball app, for example, news about the San Francisco Giants is drawn from sources such as Bleacher Report, ESPN, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Giants’ own website.

Hunsinger told me part of the goal of the Evri apps is to make conducting a specialized news search as simple as opening a specific app on your smartphone. “EvriThings are our first step in eliminating the need for tedious searching, instead enabling content to intuitively find us wherever we are,” Hunsinger says in an announcement scheduled to be released tomorrow.

The baseball, gossip, and rock apps are already available from iTunes App Store, but Evri is still awaiting Apple’s approval of the technology and football apps. All of the apps will be available from the Android Marketplace starting Thursday.

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Bruce D’Ambrosio wants to make online content sharing easy. Eager to bridge the gap between content owners, and publishers, the 63-year-old serial entrepreneur and computer science professor at Oregon State University founded DigitalScirocco in 2009, and rolled the startup out of stealth mode in March. Since then D’Ambrosio, who serves as the company’s CEO, says the venture has only been growing. Fast.

The Seattle-based startup jumped into the digital content marketplace, positioning itself as a middleman between website owners, and media organizations. The idea is to make mainstream content published online more readily—and affordably—available for website owners, bloggers, and publishers who would like to repost the content on a secondary site. For example, if a local chef wants to publish a related article or photo from, say, The New York Times food section, on their blog or website, they would have to first contact either the Times, or a third-party media organization like the Associated Press or Getty Images, to negotiate a deal and buy the rights to republish the content.

This can be not only a long and difficult process, but an expensive one as well. That’s where DigitalScirocco comes in, providing an automated marketplace for website owners and content owners to connect. Using an online auction platform, websites can search for and purchase rights to content they want, at cheaper prices, while DigitalScirocco earns a cut of the sale for facilitating the transaction.

After being online for a few months under stealthy cover, DigitalScirocco tipped its hand, making its services publicly available five months ago. At the time “We were then in the ‘I know there is a market somewhere’ mode, and, I have to admit, a bit stuck looking under the streetlight,” D’Ambrosio told Xconomy via e-mail. But after carving out their first three partnerships—with global news organization Thomson Reuters, San Francisco-based technology and business news site VentureBeat, and city-specific entertainment information site BeDynamic, DigitalScirocco found new areas for expansion.

“We’ve now found several markets we can reach at a viable cost of sales and are ramping up sales efforts,” D’Ambrosio says.

And as of today, the growing company has teamed up with Atlanta, GA-based sports newswire service US Presswire, to build a sports photo news service targeted at small-market news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites. Through the service, DigitalScirocco and US Presswire will be able to automate and track delivery of recent and historical photos and edited captions to purchasing websites that have limited or no in-house editing resources. Conversely, these sites will have access to all of US Presswire’s new and archived photos almost immediately, with no first-use wait times that many media organizations employ.

“We are building an end-to-end workflow such that images can appear on our client websites within minutes after photographer submission of the image from the venue,” D’Ambrosio says.

The service was scheduled to go live on September 1, but has seen some last minute delays. It will allow website owners to select photo feeds to match individualized topics based on a variety … Next Page »

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[Updated, see page 2] Say a reviewer goes to a performance of the latest Broadway extravaganza, and the elaborate stage machinery breaks down before the show even starts, forcing everyone to go home. This actually happened to me once, at a showing of Sunset Boulevard in New York. It probably wouldn’t be fair for the reviewer to write his piece based on this disastrous non-performance.

I’m in an analogous situation with Flipboard, the Palo Alto, CA, startup that released an ambitious “social magazine” app for the Apple iPad this week and was almost immediately overwhelmed by technical problems. But I’m going to go ahead and write my review anyway. I’ll tell you why. On a tactical level, there are some interesting lessons for other startups in the way Flipboard has handled, or rather mishandled, the app’s launch. But more importantly, even the crippled version of the Flipboard app that I’ve been testing is pretty cool. It begins to deliver on some of the enormous, but still largely untapped, potential that many people see in the iPad.

Once Flipboard has overcome its launch-week fiasco, its software could earn a place as one of the gadget’s killer apps. Several of these are likely to emerge over the next year as developers continue to test-drive the device and figure out amazing, wholly surprising new applications for it. That’s sure to drive sales of iPads well pass the current 3.2 million mark, and could boost demand for competing tablet devices as well.

What is Flipboard designed to do? You can get a good introduction from the company’s marketing video, and from accounts from bloggers such as Robert Scoble and Kara Swisher who were given exclusive previews of the app. (It was partly their rave reviews that touched off the avalanche of signups Wednesday, overwhelming Flipboard’s servers and forcing the company to put in place an invitation system to throttle down the rate at which the app accepts new users.)

In essence, you can think of Flipboard as a wastewater treatment plant for your social-media accounts. It sucks up the flotsam-filled stream of information confronting heavy users of Twitter, Facebook, and the Web. Then, by exploiting some valuable old principles of print magazine design, it re-emits the material in a form that makes browsing all those updates far more appetizing.

Once you’ve given Flipboard your Twitter and Facebook credentials, the app pulls in tweets and status updates from everyone you follow. Which is exactly what popular apps like Tweetdeck or Seesmic do. But then Flipboard goes several steps further. To start, it arranges your incoming updates on the iPad screen in an attractive magazine-like format, with the tweets or updates themselves presented as headlines. If the tweets or updates contain links to Web pages, images, or videos, the app automatically downloads excerpts from those materials as well, and appends them to the headlines as if they were article text and illustrations. To scan backward in time, you simply flip from page to page of these “articles” with a swiping motion.

When you touch one of the “articles” to open it, you can see a bit more of the original text from the linked source. Exactly how much text appears depends on the policies of the original publisher, according to Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue. If you want to explore further and surf to the original source, Flipboard will open an in-app Web browser and take you there. You can also … Next Page »

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For a while now I’ve been curious about Gather, a privately funded news and social networking site based in downtown Boston. I knew that Gather was founded by marketing pro Tom Gerace, that it is owned in part by the public radio operator American Public Media, that it has an unusual way of paying users for contributing content, and that its traffic has been rising through the roof—the company claims that the number of unique visitors it attracts each month is 7.2 million, a 400 percent increase just in the last five months.

But I didn’t really get Gather. I didn’t understand who reads its articles, who writes them, or how the company makes money. And I was a bit skeptical, to be honest, about whether there’s much value in Gather’s content, which is largely a blend of news, reviews, recipes, celebrity gossip, and how-to articles, much of it seemingly cribbed by users from more traditional journalistic publications. But it’s hard to argue with 7 million unique visitors. Gather claims that its “reach,” meaning the number of households exposed to the site every day, exceeds that of CBS.com, CNBC.com, iVillage.com, PBS.com and even USAToday.com.

I recently sat down with Gerace for a long conversation about the company, which is his second startup, and also his second venture in what he calls “pay-for-performance” marketing. The first was BeFree.com, an affiliate marketing network that he founded in 1996 with his brother Sam. That company’s business was to sign up online merchants to send business to e-retailers like Barnesandnoble.com, LendingTree, and Dell in return for sales commissions. Gerace (pronounced je-RACE) says he learned from BeFree—which was purchased by rival ValueClick in 2002 for $128 million in stock—that paying commissions creates an “ecology” with “directly aligned incentives” where the affiliates themselves figure out how to win more customers over time. “We got to realize the power of that as billions of dollars in commerce flowed over our platform without us doing any business development,” Gerace says.

So the first thing I came to understand about Gather is that it represents Gerace’s attempt to recreate an Internet business driven by a pay-for-performance marketing model, but in the realm of user-generated news and discussion rather than e-retailing. In fact, Gerace, who graduated from Harvard in 1993 and spent three years writing case studies at Harvard Business School before plunging into entrepreneurship, seems to have deliberately gone searching, after the BeFree experience, for an Internet niche where he could apply the same core concept—call it the Tom Sawyer maneuver—of getting your users to do a lot of the work for you.

He chose the online media business, where traditional notions of authority have been blown to smithereens and anyone who can achieve high search-engine rankings can draw in traffic—which can then be monetized through advertising and other forms of marketing. In Gerace’s eyes, it’s all a matter of casting a sufficiently wide net.

“If you go back to 1990, everything we knew we got from one newspaper, a couple of magazines, and likely a nightly news or morning radio show,” Gerace says. “In effect, we were handing off our information sourcing to three or four editorial groups who told us what we needed to know. Today it’s completely different. More than half of all traffic, even to the largest news sites, comes from search. There are 15.5 billion searches run a month, which means 15.5 billion opportunities to … Next Page »

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In the world of news media these days, there’s no getting away from two things: online advertising, and hyperlocal sites. Where they meet is a company called DataSphere in Bellevue, WA.

On Tuesday, we reported that DataSphere had raised $10.8 million in Series B funding. The investors in the new round are Ignition Partners, also based in Bellevue, and two unnamed publicly traded companies, which are strategic investors. Ignition and one of the public companies previously invested in DataSphere’s $6.5 million Series A round back in July 2006.

DataSphere, which was called SecondSpace until last year, has been collaborating with media companies like Fisher Communications and Cowles California Media to help them roll out hyperlocal (neighborhood) websites, about 150 of them across five states: Washington (including 46 sites based in and around Seattle), Oregon, Idaho, California, and Rhode Island. DataSphere’s technology platform organizes website information, makes it searchable, and connects local advertisers with local sites and consumers. (You can check out the DataSphere-powered search capabilities and hyperlocal sites and ads at KOMOnews.com, for example.)

One outside observer thinks DataSphere is pretty interesting, but wonders about the size of the market from a VC’s perspective. “It’s a smart group of guys and investors,” says Lucinda Stewart, a managing director at OVP Venture Partners who focuses on online advertising, among other sectors. “They need to prove out the business model a bit more.”

The company currently has more than 70 employees and is led by chief executive Satbir Khanuja, a seven-year Amazon.com veteran who holds a PhD in ceramics engineering from MIT. (He has been in the business world long enough that he doesn’t sound like a PhD—probably a good thing.)

I had a good chat with Khanuja earlier this week about his company’s technology and business strategy. Here are some edited highlights:

Xconomy: Can you explain how DataSphere is new and different, in a nutshell?

Satbir Khanuja: The overall idea for us is to create a compelling hyperlocal experience for users and advertisers. We are collaborating with local media companies and leveraging their brand equity they’ve built, and applying our technology platform. In a traditional site, the [ad] inventory is accessible only to medium and large advertisers.

What we do is, let’s take all your news and show it in a contextually relevant way to all of the user base. You choose your neighborhood as a default site. We show that user a specific user experience. Now we have the ability for local advertisers from that neighborhood to show ads to only those users.

X: How does your platform and revenue model work? And how are these hyperlocal sites doing?

SK: If you work with one of the media companies, they already have the resources. We’ve created a forum and platform with them to have a conversation with their user base throughout … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Getty Images, the creator and distributor of online photos, videos, and other digital media, announced today it has made a strategic investment in Daylife, a media and content services company based in New York City. The two companies have also formed a partnership to create products that let customers more easily incorporate visual content on their websites. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but All Things Digital, citing a regulatory filing, reports Getty invested $4 million in Daylife.

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Ah, the beauties and the pitfalls of the new mobile-software ecosystem. With ready-made distribution platforms like Apple’s iTunes App Store, it’s possible for a couple of entrepreneurs to launch a company on the cheap around a single application. But if you go that route, you’re entirely at the mercy of Apple, where the App Store administrators are famously arbitrary, unpredictable, and close-mouthed about which apps get approved for the store, and when they’ll actually go live.

Fluent Mobile, a Boston startup that emerged from stealth mode today, has been sweating the App Store kingmaker process all month. Its new news-reader application for the iPhone, called Fluent News, was originally expected to show up in the App Store on June 16. Then it was June 17. Then there was long period of limbo. Fluent’s public-relations folks were forced to send journalists such as myself—who’d received an embargoed press release and a preview version of the app in early June—a string of e-mail updates about the latest delays.

Now the suspense is finally over, and iPhone and iPod Touch users can finally download the free app. Fluent News is basically a mobile multi-source newspaper—like a gussied-up RSS reader. The interface is reminiscent of dedicated iPhone apps published by individual news organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but the app combines stories from a range of major news feeds, all pre-optimized for viewing on mobile devices. So far I’ve seen stories on Fluent News from CNN, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, the Washington Post, Fox News, Reuters, ABC News, and USA Today.

When you start up Fluent, you see the Top News page, which shows the day’s hottest stories, as judged by Fluent’s content relevancy algorithms. You can also explore stories in specialized sections, including U.S. news, business, world news, entertainment, sports, technology, politics, science, health, lifestyle, and opinion. There’s also a “Most Popular” page that shows you the stories that other Fluent News users are reading most avidly. (See the video demo on the next page. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still access all of this content from any mobile browser by going to www.fluentnews.com.)

Fluent itself is free to consumers.Fluent Mobile makes money on the clickable interstitial ads that occasionally appear mixed into story lists (they’re prominently set apart inside black bars). Many of the ads relate to other iPhone apps, and are provided by AdMob, a San Mateo, CA-based mobile advertising network.

Fluent Mobile CEO Micah Adler, a former professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says the company developed Fluent News in order to … Next Page »

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Back in December 2008 we wrote about the launch of Everypoint, a Boston startup working on a platform that makes it easy for developers to write cool iPhone-like applications for Java-capable phones, which includes most feature phones (i.e. non-smartphones) these days. To seed developer efforts, Everypoint started out by releasing a few of its own apps for its so-called Nemo platform, including a stock ticker and a few basic games. Today Everypoint released its most sophisticated Nemo app yet, a news reader program, and said that the number of third-party developers writing applications for Nemo is “exploding.”

The news reader, which is designed conserve battery life and bandwidth, allows feature-phone owners to access any feed in a standard format such as RSS or XML (see screen shots below). It also supports “push” notification, meaning updates supplied automatically by a server rather than requested by the user. As with all of the mobile applications built by Everypoint, the source code for the news reader is available free to Nemo developers, who can adapt it or incorporate it into their own applications. Applications developed on the platform then get wrapped back into the catalog distributed with the Nemo software.

The size of Everypoint’s Nemo Preview Beta developer program has tripled in the last two months, according to Allan Mackinnon, Everypoint’s founder, president, and chief technology officer. “We’re excited by this momentum and we look forward to working closely with the mobile application development community to unlock the advanced capabilities of feature phones that consumers already own,” Mackinnon said in a statement released today.

One of the companies participating in the program is Pongr, a Boston startup with server-based image-recognition systems that help people with camera phones get price comparisons for items they find in stores. Pongr has applications that run on the Apple iPhone, Blackberry phones, and Android phones, and it’s using Nemo to create a version that will run on Java-enabled phones. “We are excited about the opportunity to make Pongr available to an even larger audience of mobile users than currently available with other application stores,” Jamie Thompson, Pongr’s CEO and co-founder, said in Everypoint’s statement.

Thompson will be on hand to demonstrate Pongr at tomorrow’s Xconomy Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England. And both Everypoint and Pongr are participants in the Xconomy Mobile Showcase, an online supplement to the event.

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Internet news sites are experiencing their fourth biggest traffic day ever, as millions of people who should be working instead point their browsers to online video coverage of the “March Madness” NCAA basketball playoffs, judging by the Net Usage Index: News, a Web traffic monitoring service maintained by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies.

The index indicated that global traffic to news sites through Akamai’s network hit a peak of 6,337,283 visits per minute shortly after 2:00 pm Eastern time today, amidst the first college games of the day.

That peak would put March 20, 2009 in the fourth slot on Akamai’s list of the top news days in Internet history, just behind November 4, 2008 (the day of Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency), June 22, 2006 (the day Ghana eliminated the U.S. in the soccer World Cup), and March 20, 2008 (Day One of last year’s NCAA basketball playoffs).

Akamai operates a global content distribution network that carries broadband Web content such as video for dozens of major media companies, and it’s the exclusive provider of static and streaming-media content delivery for CBSSports.com, where most of the online NCAA playoff video can be found. In a press release, CBSSports.com said today that more than 2.7 million people visited the NCAA March Madness video player during the first day of the Division I Men’s playoffs, a 56 percent increase over 2008. Online viewers watched a total of 2.8 million hours of live streaming video and audio, a 65 percent increase over last year, according to the release.

Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager, CBSSports.com, called March Madness “the largest and most popular live sports event on the Internet.”

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Seattle-based Maveron has led an investment in TheWrap.com, a Hollywood, CA-based news site covering the entertainment and media business. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. TheWrap.com debuted today.

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Seattle-based Jobster’s co-founder and former CEO, Jason Goldberg, has sold his new startup, Socialmedian, to Hamburg, Germany-based Xing for about $7.5 million. Socialmedian is a New York-based news-filtering service that works well with social sites like Xing, which is focused on professional networking. Goldberg, who left Jobster a year ago, will be moving to Germany as vice president of Xing’s applications platform division.

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