As Internet news consumption continues to grow, the new mobile news app Inside promises to bring you web news in a whole new light.
So how is Inside any different from the plethora of news generating apps? According to developer Jason Calacanis, Inside will provide smart news curation, which will enable users to sort through the "best journalism" thanks to the summaries which are human-generated and not algorithms.
For the uninitiated, Calacanis is also responsible for media start-ups like Maholo and Weblogs Inc. Inside has also hired Gabriel Snyder, ex-editor of The Wire at The Atlantic, to be the chief content officer.
"When we researched the space we found a ton of great journalism in the world, but it was being drowned out by a lot of "other" stuff. Mainly link-baiting, reblogging and generally low-quality content. Readers need help navigating this new world filled with social media, blogging and stories breaking in real time - be it on Reddit, Twitter or blogs," says Calacanis.
The Inside app for iOS and BlackBerry and the Inside website will launch on Tuesday, January 28. Calacanis has been working on the ideas behind the Inside app for a while now and his e-mail newsletter Launch Ticker was a sort of alpha version of Inside. It was similar in the sense that it gave readers a summary of all the tech news.
"That was a test, a kind of minimum viable product to test the idea behind Inside. We wanted to look at what would be the atomic unit of content if you started doing news from scratch," said Calacanis.
So how does Inside work? Every day the site's "team of curators" will seek out 1,000 of the most prominent and interesting stories around the world, as well the journalists who "did the best job telling those stories." The team will then write a 300-character "update" or description of the story, a main image, and link directly to the source.
Moreover, the updates in question will have a short "embedded headline" and will generally include 10 facts categorized in up to three topics.
Users will also be able to vote any update "Up" or "Down" which will customize their feed. Swiping the page to left will reveal the next story listed in the same category.
Inside is now available for download on iOS and BlackBerry. The Android app is expected to launch later this year. In case you're wondering why BlackBerry has raced ahead of Android or Windows, it is because the former is an investor in Inside.
