Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, has somewhat belatedly announced a $2.75 million funding round it closed last year, led by BlueRun Ventures. CEO Darian Shirazi says since closing the round last fall, the company still has the majority of the money left. Alongside today’s funding news, the company is also launching a new ‘Wire’ API that will allow third parties to integrate the company’s stream of news updates into their sites and apps.
The basic idea behind Fwix is fairly simple: it aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant.
Fwix has evolved considerably since its launch last August. For one, it has seen a total redesign, shrugging the Facebook-like interface it launched with in favor of something more streamlined. The site has also been making some recent strides in getting distribution — itlaunched a widget that allows bloggers to embed Fwix’s local news feeds into their sites, and the widget network is now seeing over 9 million monthly unique visitors.
Shirazi says that the new API has been in private beta on a handful of sites, including Weather Underground and RawStory. He also notes that the company’s iPhone app (which also has changed significantly since we covered it in March) was built using the API.
Um, who are these people? has anyone ever heard of them until now??
Sites like this suck, just because my ISP reports that I’m from Manchester it doesn’t mean I am.
Silly site.
You are only fed news based on your ISP location as a last resort I think. For example, if you are on your iphone, its geo targeted based on GPS. Also, you can always manually set what city you want to see news from.
So Locaion based services are back like in the old nineties!
if the IP geo location is not right, people can always search zip code or city, state pair like they do at AAfter Search.
Isn’t Darian Shirazi the same dude who raised 1.65M for redux? Yo what happened to that?
yeah but I heard his cofounder there disagreed about direction or something, so he left. sounds like that was the right move.
Let me know when you expand coverage to Europe…
location based site helps as I misses lot of local news though I know what is happening across the continent.Good Job
I worked on a similar project a few years ago that not only looked at the geographic location/coverage of a particular news feed, but used NLP to try to figure out the precise location of individual stories.
For dense population areas you could aggregate news and provide a live geographic news feed for (say) a half mile radius of your home/current location.
It mostly worked and mostly rocked, but for one reason or another never went public.
We did a fun project at work (couple of days) to basically do the same thing:
http://www.newspaperninja.com/
Parse out titles, content & images from newspapers+blogs RSS feeds, monitor who clicks on stories and make them more important than others.
We don’t really know where to take this project. If you have any ideas, feel free to email us at info@deeplocal.com
Good to see others tackling the same problem.
Looks like it will do well.
another news aggregation service….
glad these bright minds are continuing to solve the world’s problems.
What are you solving?
Local is the new global.
i love that site very nice design