Silicon Valley may believe that mobile devices represent the future of
information technology, but they've yet to come up with a slick and
comprehensive way to read and process news.
A growing group of technology entrepreneurs hopes to change that.
This
week, Wavii, a start-up founded by a former Microsoft Corp employee,
Adrian Aoun, unveiled a free iPhone app that filters news stories from
around the world, crunches them through a natural language processing
algorithm and presents them in five- or six-word summaries.
Over
the past two years in Seattle, Aoun's team of two dozen machine-learning
experts secretly developed code that boils down a news story into a
basic subject-verb-object format, and draws connections between
disparate news stories.
"Our edge has always been the technology," Aoun said.
Wavii
has been online for several months, and Aoun has noticed that readers
spend nine times longer browsing news headlines in his rudimentary
prototype smartphone app than on his desktop website.
Wavii's app
lets a user slice and dice a search into something as specific as
"employment change in the technology sector," Aoun said.
Aoun's
app pits his company against the likes of Summly, a mobile news reader
headed by Nick D'Aloisio, a 17-year-old who is being backed by Li
Ka-Shing, the Hong Kong billionaire; Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatle John
Lennon; and a host of more traditional Silicon Valley investors.
"I
use a lot of news aggregators, I use Facebook, I use Twitter" to find
news articles, D'Aloisio told Reuters last month, when he launched
Summly. Still, the actual article "is hard to consume. It took effort to
read."
Summly, also free, features a gauzy, design-rich interface
in the iPhone version of the app that summarizes stories with
several-paragraph-long blurbs that fit on one iPhone screen.
Hailed
in the UK as a "boy genius," D'Aloisio has been featured in Forbes
Magazine and on the BBC and moves almost as quickly as he speaks,
trotting around the world with a pair of orange headphones around his
neck. He came up with the idea for the app when he felt he didn't have
time to consume long-form news articles while on the move.
"The
way it's shown on the phone, it's daunting," he said. "It's 10 pages I
have to flip through. Who's actually sitting there on their iPhone
really wanting to read an in-depth 1,500-word article?"
Other
app-makers have left alone news copy but have tinkered with how stories
are laid out. One example is Flipboard, a tablet app that spreads
stories like a magazine across a tablet screen.
Aoun said the
market for mobile news reader apps has grown more competitive in recent
years, but few of them have truly caught on with consumers.
"We're getting close to figuring out the formula," he said.
© Thomson Reuters 2012