My name is Robin Wauters, and I’m a news junkie.
Being obsessed with consuming as much news – mostly technology related, of course – as humanly possible in the all too short span of any given day comes with the territory of working for TechCrunch, but I’ve always been a fan of obtaining as much information as fast as I could.
You could say my ever-growing habit of trying to consume as much news in my waking hours as I can is more of a natural cause for my employment in the fast-paced tech blogging scene than it is a result.
It also means I feel very disconnected when I’m not near a computer or mobile phone I can use to tap the Internet for the never-ending stream of news that gets pumped onto the wires.
(Reading Wisdom 2.0 didn’t help – I barely found time to turn the pages)
I used to have a HTC phone (OS: Windows Mobile 6) for when I was on the go, which offered such a miserable browsing experience compared to the iPhone 3GS I own now that I’m genuinely thankful every single day for the fact that technology evolves so fast and the average consumer has so much choice these days.
Before I digress too much: there are a number of iPhone apps that I use to (try and) stay on top of the news flow, like a mobile RSS reader and apps from major publishers like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Bloomberg etc. But then there are a couple of iPhone applications built by independent programmers that provide even more news consumption bliss, and there are three that I wanted to highlight today.
The first comes from BNO News, the tiny but incredibly efficient media organization behind the popular @BreakingNews Twitter account that gets followed by some 1,320,000 people right now. The company’s ‘breaking news’ iPhone application (iTunes link) with customized push notifications is a must-have for anyone who likes to learn about news near-instantly. PaidContent’s Rafat Ali recently gushed about BNO News and its fantastic iPhone app, saying some of the majors should step up and buy them outright. I tend to disagree: as long as they’re eating the majors’ lunch on breaking news independently, which shouldn’t they keep to their own and see what happens next?
The cost: $1.99 for the installation and a $0.99 subscription fee per month.
Worth it? No-brainer.
The second is an iPhone app that was launched not too long ago: a mobile extension of Newsy.com (iTunes link). Newsy caters perfectly to people like me, who are keen on getting news fed to them in snack-size bits of multimedia that cover the essence of what’s going on. Newsy monitors, analyzes, curates and presents the world’s news coverage through short video segments available both on the web and mobile devices. It’s great for quick news consumption on the go, but also helpful in understanding it by delivering stories as covered by media outlets from around the world.
The cost: zip.
Last but not least: Zensify’s awesome ZenNews app (iTunes link).
Its lifestreaming iPhone app was already worth installing, but ZenNews – billed as “a new breed of intelligent news analysis programs” – takes the cake as far as I’m concerned. The app allows you to discover story trends from the world’s leading news sources – bar TechCrunch – in real-time. It provides you with a visual way of sifting through the news of the day by displaying tag clouds made up of essential keywords that you can tap in order to drill down to what you’re interested in reading.
You can switch to a different news source by simply swiping to the next tag cloud, which also allows you to compare news item coverage from different sources. And if the tag clouds don’t do it for you, you can switch to a list-based, chronological overview of the news as well. In addition, you can filter certain news categories out of what gets displayed on your screen. Finally, you can favorite news stories from any source and pass articles on to your Twitter friends and by e-mail in just one tap.
The cost: nada
Any other neutral developers who’ve come up with innovative concepts around mobile news consumption (on any platform) that I should know about?
The comment section is there for you.
BNO News??? There is no such thing anymore as exclusive news. Why should I pay then?
I’m with you on that one!
99% of the “news” we see is garbage.
You’re not paying for the “news” you are paying for the delivery.
BNO consistently reports things 15 to 30 minutes before the AP, Reuters, & AFP — all wire services I follow. I don’t know how BNO does it, but they are definately the best right now.
Hey Robin–
Have you checked out the iPhone version of http://www.MeeHive.com yet?
It’s a pretty cool app that brings your news about your personal interests from millions of media outlets across the Web. It’s free from the AppStore, and also comes in two other flavors–Samachar India News and MeeTV, which lets you track news about your favorite TV shows.
One thing that really sets MeeHive apart is that it works at the interest level, rather than on keywords. So if you tell the app to bring you news about the NFL, it’ll automatically know to pull stories for you about the 49ers and all the other teams–not just the word “NFL”.
Anyway, give it a spin and let us know what you think. MeeHive just launched earlier this year, so we’re eager for feedback as we develop the site and the mobile apps.
Jodi
Sounds interesting. Installed!
BNO News is the best in my opinion due to pure ease of use. Set it up once (which takes between 5 seconds and 1 minute) and then never worry about it again. You’ll get all the important news stories near instantly, while not being overly annoying in terms of volume either. I was an early beta tester for them when they released the app — and received a lifetime subscription to the app for it — but I’d gladly pay $0.99 per month for this awesome app.
News app seem nice but I would have to see it in actual action before paying the .99 fee.
It’s 99 cents buddy.. trial versions are for apps that cost a significant amount.
I’ve been using broadersheet (http://iphone.b...oadersheet.com/) since it was in beta. Great app that learns what you read and what you like so it can show you what you really want to see.
Based on your recommendation, ive just been and purchased BNO News.
Im sure they will be very happy today, as i presume im not the only one to have gone and purchased it on the basis of your recommendation.
They owe you a pint!!
As an Android user I couldn’t live without NewsRob (so perfect for text based feeds that I can’t see a better reader being available on any other mobile platform… and free!) and Guardian Anywhere, which makes great use of The Guardian’s open APIs.
Have you tried Nubinews?
how many more apps can one possibly download?
How can you forget the iPhone classic – the Techcrunch Offline Reader
http://bit.ly/3COd9x
What about twitter as a news source? I consider watching the popular trends or public timeline just as valuable(or more so) of ‘what’s going on’
We made an iphone app called twittertime http://yummylas...om/twittertime/ because we wanted to watch tweets while we are busy eating lunch. The app lets you watch without using your hands to scroll around.
Al-Jazeera English has a great app that lets you stream the live TV feed straight to your iPhone.
frankly I use the Guardian RSS thru the Free RSS Reader App, the app is simple and reliable (free obviously), and Guardian RSS has the full news article with great coverage so you can read the whole story offline.. that does it for me
Google reader for iPhone the best way to read my news..
The Google reader web app is my favorite news reader too. But a real Google reader app (incl. offline functionality, push etc.) would be great…
iGoogle with a news tab filled with RSS feeds. Beautifully simple.
I use newsy and zensify as well. I’ve recently added the zennews tool from the zensify.com folks.
Here is an article about that app: http://foxyurl.com/KbR
You should give Fluent Mobile a look. http://fluentmobile.com/
So far, I’ve enjoyed it.
really?? you’r not using the CNN application?? huh?? is the BEST out there:) http://www.uque...6748-cnn-mobile
Hi Robin, this is Georges from TwitRSS.
You may want to give it a try (http://twitrss.com), from your iPhone or any mobile web enabled phone.
It’s a webapp that allows you to get your news (RSS feeds from media, blogs, etc.) on the go.
Content is mobilized for faster access, pictures are lightened while YouTube or Dailymotion videos remain accessible.
After you’ve created your account, you can add your own feeds if not already in, and share them with others (or not).
You can also create Trackers and get alerts via e-mail or Twitter DM when a new story shows up that matches your criteria.
Sharing of stories via SMS/e-mail or thru your Twitter or Facebook account is always available, as is saving a story for later reading.
An app is in the works with even more good stuff, we’ll keep you posted.
Best,
G
You can’t beat AP Mobile (free).
BTW, “Takes the cake,” almost always has a negative connotation.
I’ve not yet found a non-centric news reader app that delivers but Broadersheet (http://iphone.b...oadersheet.com/) launched last week comes pretty close. Pulling news from a wide range of sources it can be tweaked by source and topic to deliver a personalised news service which can be fine tuned. Only flaw with it at the moment is that articles can’t be shared but this feature’s due to be added.
If you’re a news junkie with a political bent, check out our new app politicoTracker, which shows timely, relevant news about specific elected officials.
This app ships with a list of 8,000 US federal, state, and local politicians, and pulls from the global news stream only those recent articles that mention the specific person you chose from the list.
Going further, you can then group the news results by topics, such as “current events” or “industries”, which can reveal relationships you may not have been aware of between that politico and other organizations.
The grouping’s ability to reveal linkages is why we call this app a “News Discovery Tool”, and it’s just the first of several apps in our dev pipeline that will use this super targeted, highly accurate, next-gen search technology, each focused on it’s own topic (not just politicians).
Curious if it works? Check out the free sample search page at http://www.poli...cker.com/sample
here’s a product that is actually called a Firehose. It is fantastic for business news: http://www.rake...n.com/firehose/
For NFL Football news, try “Realtime Pro Football ‘09″ – it’s a twitter aggregator that displays the tweets of the players themselves, as well as the NFL reporters and bloggers. http://realtime...ns.com/football
I’m a news junkie too – I should go to rehab for it. newsy.com if my fav of all of these….
I had to read this twice before I understood what the iBone app was (see last entry):
http://www.appl...make-the-grade/
Your mileage may vary!
I liked it. So much useful material. I read with great interest.
Every review for ZenNews in the app store is 1 star saying it will not load a single story and does not work.
Thanks for the recommendation, but i’m not going to download an app with those kind of reviews.
I could not get ZenNews to work, even after multiple reboots and installs, and I have an iPhone 3GS with the latest OS. If you look at the reviews in the app store, this seems to be the typical experience by a lot of frustrated users.
Why would you recommend an app that obviously isn’t working? Are the developers friends of yours or something? It seriously damages your credibility.
Hi Robin, there’s an exciting new iPhone news and info app on its way from the Mippin team (it includes tech news!) Should be live in approx 10 days, hopefully you’ll still be looking for great news apps then.