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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Kirkland, WA-based 1Cast, an online news and information delivery service, announced it has raised its first round of funding, which was led by Eagle River Holdings. 1Cast plans to launch a beta version of its online and mobile service later this year.

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Boston-based Spark Capital has invested $15 million in Inform Technologies, a New York-based startup whose software powers the content-aggregation features of major news websites such as CNN.com, the two organizations announced Wednesday.

Privately held Inform was founded in 2004 and announced its first publishing customers, including the Washington Post, in 2006. The company’s software organizes customers’ content—an archive of current and historical news articles, for example—into topic pages, lists of related articles, and other features designed to lead readers deeper into a website, and spend more time browsing, before they move on.

Topic pages and related-articles lists have long been a staple of Web publishing, but often required regular manual intervention. “Now this is all done by machine, by informed algorithms,” says Peter Longo, Inform’s chief sales officer. “And because it’s done by machine, it’s infinitely scalable. Publishers working with us have the ability to put hundreds or thousands of items into our tagging and scoring engine,” which identifies key topics and entities and can create new pages based on those topics on the fly.

For an example of Inform’s system in action, open a new browser tab, type http://topics.cnn.com/topics/, and then complete the URL with any common name or subject: say, britney_spears or iraq_war. Inform instantly assembles a page on that subject from the vast archives of CNN and other Time Inc. publications, including recent stories and videos and dozens of links to older articles.

“We have been thinking about various ways technology and next generation ad networks can help publishers. We believe Inform is going to play a big role in this opportunity,” Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet wrote on his blog yesterday. “All of this [semantically tagged] content is rich, relevant and their readers love it. And it creates new valuable advertising inventory for the publisher.”

Spark’s investment is Inform’s first infusion of venture capital; the company has been supported up to now by investments from the Stephens Media Group and the Oklahoma Publishing Company. Longo says Inform was attracted to working with Spark by “The opportunity to work with Santo [Politi, Spark founder and general partner]—who is a brilliant guy, very engaging, and has a great vision for what we can do. And Spark seems to know the space very well.”

Indeed, Spark’s portfolio consists almost entirely of Internet companies with innovative approaches to content distribution and social media, such as Buzzwire, Tumblr, KickApps, Me.dium, Veoh, and Next New Networks. The company closed fundraising for its second, $360 million fund in this area last summer.

Longo says Inform will use the capital to continue development of its core tagging software, expand its team, and introduce new products. “Once you have organized content, there are all sorts of things you can do with it, so you’re going to see more products coming out from us in the next two years,” Longo says. “We’ll also continue to go after established publishers—we have 100 customers right now but there are thousands of publishers we want to work with.”

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