Evri Releases Its IPad App for News Discovery
by Bill Ives
Evri is a news aggregator and discovery app that allows users build their own news experience from millions of topic choices, while also including top news, social feeds and a number of complementary features. I recently spoke with Evri CEO, Will Hunsinger about this release. Will explained that Evri provides this new discovery capability through a semantic technology engine that constantly indexes over 15,000 of the Web’s best content sources into 2.5 million (and growing) topic channels.
By organizing around topics rather than sources, Evri allows users to explore the depth and breadth of content in an immersive and personal way that is a useful app for the capabilities of the iPad. It incorporates content from traditional media sources, the Web’s top blogs, and social channels like Twitter, delivering all content on any of several million topics in one package.
Evri works off of RSS feeds to gather its content. Then it reformats it to better fit the iPad screen and provide more interesting visualizations. Evri looks for the popularity of a topic, its velocity, and the popularity of people connected with the topic. You can drill down into more extensive coverage on the topic and see related topics and people. The iPad app is free and is available through the iTunes store. Below is a sample screen, the Sports Canvas, showing the main view of trending topics in sports.
Evri for iPad also integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later and a number of other complementary apps to provide a comprehensive, single source for users. For example, you can also use Evri to look at Twitter and unpack articles that are linked to within tweets as shown below. You can also use Evri to filter your Twitter feed to just get news or tweets with a content link.
You can also follow topics to stay current on your areas of interest. By enabling users to identify what they individually are passionate about, while also delivering the top news from across the web, Evri strikes a balance between personalized news feeds and serendipitous discovery. See a sample view of followed topics below.
Users can search over 2.5 million topics in Evri’s index and follow any topic to get the latest news on their favorite things in the app’s personalized ‘Now Following’ section. See a sample search screen below.
Will said they had 100,000 down loads in the first three weeks of the release. Evri’s app technology approach is hybrid, utilizing a native iOS framework while also leveraging HTML5 for content presentation – and ease of future portability to other devices. They are continuously building a knowledge base to disambiguate topics and entities (people, places, things) in content such as which is the correct Will Smith, the actor or the sports star, or someone else as shown in the topic search screen above.
This is an exciting app and another reason to get an iPad. Will said that they have thousands of active daily users. Their audience tends to double on the weekends. I can see how it can become addictive.
