Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

Occasionally, however, a news reader app will find its own happy ending.

Mediafed, the European company focused on RSS and news feed monetization, announced Thursday it had acquired Taptu — a news aggregation app along the lines of Pulse, Prismatic, Feedly and the like — bringing the smaller outfit into the fold to scale up Mediafed’s mobile news aggregation efforts.

It’s a proper exit for the five-year-old Taptu, one of many applications in an increasingly crowded field that — as far as mobile news reading applications go — hasn’t proven to be immediately lucrative. It also comes about a year after CNN’s acquisition of then-competitor Zite, an iPad-based news reader app that the media company aims to use in implementing its long-term mobile strategy.

But unlike the CNN deal, Mediafed isn’t a publisher — it’s an ad network focused on placement inside of RSS streams. In picking up Taptu, a news aggregation app that makes heavy use of RSS in its algorithmic news aggregation, Mediafed has a better shot at angling in on all the unclaimed RSS ad deals across mobile devices. And as we all know, the future of computing is so very, very mobile.

I’m not sure exactly how happy of an ending it was for Taptu, however; terms of the deal — namely the price — were not disclosed, and Taptu raised upward of $22 million over its five-year run. Still, now that the founders have the backing of Mediafed’s 1,000-plus advertiser network and well-placed publisher connections, at the very least, Taptu doesn’t need to worry about monetizing anymore (that’s Mediafed’s deal).

Pulse for the Web has a tiled, full-screen, image-heavy layout. When a user resizes the window, the story tiles automatically resize and snap into place — with a JavaScript technique that Pulse is so proud of creating, it plans to open source it so other people can use it, too.

The Web app also got some help under the hood from Microsoft; when used on a Windows Tablet, it speedily responds to multitouch gestures to expand stories and swipe through them.

In the test version I used and the screenshots I’ve seen, the Pulse site now displays an Internet Explorer icon up in the top-right corner, even when used in other browsers.

As part of its move to the Web, Pulse will be encouraging users to start accounts, so that they can sync their state between their browsers and iOS and Android devices. “A good portion of the Pulse audience” has never created an account, except maybe to connect their Twitter and Facebook for sharing articles, said Pulse CEO Akshay Kothari.

Prior to this launch, Pulse’s Web presence was woefully thin — it just asked potential users to submit their cellphone numbers so they could more easily download one of the Pulse mobile apps.

Pulse has more than 15 million users — counted as people who’ve used the app more than once — and they read more than 250 million stories each month. Pulse either takes public publisher feeds or works through partnerships to get fuller content. Publishers join the platform because its users like to share — more than 60,000 stories are shared per day, and each share leads to six to seven reads, Kothari said.

(For what it’s worth, as a fanatic and frequent news consumer, I personally prefer a text-based RSS reader to a more visual approach like Pulse. For those of you who are like-minded, I find the Pulse approach is helpful for giving a more-scannable display than some of the aggregators I frequent, like Hacker News and Techmeme.)

The shift from native mobile apps to Web apps “is not going to happen later this year or next year, but it’s going to happen soon,” Kothari contended. He said he used to be even more skeptical, but the partnership with Microsoft showed him the potential of HTML5.

Plus, it would be nice to unite his 25-person company around one product, rather than the three platforms — iOS, Android and Web — that it is currently divided into.

(By the way, that team just up and moved itself from a garage-style office in downtown Palo Alto to a top-floor office in downtown San Francisco, which is where 70 percent of Pulse’s employees already lived.)

Now that Pulse is on all the platforms it wants to be, the company will focus on extending its product around topics like discussion and curation, Kothari said.

Two quick snapshots, via Cristina Cordova, using stats from AppData. Here’s the usage data for the Washington Post’s Social Reader. Note the second steep drop, in the middle of this month:

And the Guardian’s, which has the same pattern and the same mid-May drop:

Note that Cordova runs biz dev for Pulse, the iOS/Android news reader app, so she’s presumably not unhappy about this trend.

But I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I’m delighted with it myself. I’ve always thought the “social reader” apps were bad ideas, executed poorly: I don’t need to automatically know what my friends are reading — I only want to know about the articles they want me to read, and they’re pretty good about telling me that. And I don’t want to have to use an app to read them — the Web works just fine.

The new digerati consensus is that the drops don’t indicate a sudden revulsion by Facebook users, but that they’re the result of Facebook engineers twisting the dials, and ensuring that Facebook users don’t see the apps in their feeds anymore.

There’s an important lesson there for any Facebook partner or would-be partner (hello, Socialcam!). But as a Facebook user, I don’t really care — I’m just glad I don’t have to see these things anymore.

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

Bouchard has been on the job since last month, but Livescribe is just now announcing that he has taken the helm from Jim Marggraff. Marggraff will remain on the company’s board and will be a part-time adviser, Bouchard said.

Among his goals, Bouchard said, are strengthening the company’s partnerships and building wireless connectivity into future pens. All of its current products have to be docked with a computer to share data.

“We have to be a step function from where we are in terms of cross-device support,” Bouchard told AllThingsD. In addition, he said that the product is still too hard to explain to consumers.

By writing on special paper, Livescribe’s “smartpens” are able to capture all of the data written, as well as syncing that data with recorded audio notes. This “paper replay” feature allows students, reporters and others to move easily between different parts of a class or meeting.

The pens have found something of a niche, big enough to find their way onto shelves of Best Buy and Staples, but not yet enough to get the five-year-old company out of “investment mode.”

The company had said last year that it expected to sell its millionth digital pen before the end of 2011. A Livescribe representative said the company fell “just shy” of that goal, and expects to hit the mark early this year.

As part of taking the job, Bouchard said he knew the company would need more resources than it is generating from its current digital pen business. Bouchard said the company has raised a further $10 million in commitments from existing investors — payments that will be made over the course of 2012.

“I ended up voting with my feet and they ended up voting with their wallets,” Bouchard said in an interview.

After promises to get it out midyear, Flipboard is finally releasing its much-anticipated mobile app for the Apple iPhone.

The popular social reader is perhaps the most high-profile available on the iPad, in an ever-crowded field that includes such offerings as Yahoo’s recently launched Livestand; another one code-named Propeller, still upcoming from Google; AOL’s Editions; as well as existing news readers like CNN-owned Zite and Pulse. (Katie Boehret takes a look at the new Flipboard app along with some of those competitors in The Digital Solution this week.)

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Flipboard, which has raised a pile of money from prominent funders at a big valuation, has been beefing up its advertising business, and a move into mobile was critical.

The new iPhone app, said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, was built from the ground up, and is different than the iPad version.

For example — don’t get all excited — it flips up rather than side to side. Wheeeeee!

It also introduces “Cover Stories,” which gives you a curated-for-you look at news and social updates.

In related news, after being banned, Flipboard announced earlier this week that its iPad app was now available in China.

Oh, why hear all about it from me? Here’s McCue in a video interview, at the end of which he also dismisses my offer for him to be CEO of Yahoo (apparently, life is too short!):

(You can read a review by The Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret of the Flipboard app here.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111206/mike-mccue-talks-flipboard-finally-launches-app-for-apple-iphone-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111028/news-reader-traffic-jam-yahoos-livestand-and-googles-propeller-set-to-launch-aiming-at-flipboard/ http://allthingsd.com/20111028/news-reader-traffic-jam-yahoos-livestand-and-googles-propeller-set-to-launch-aiming-at-flipboard/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:35:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=137646

Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company.

Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand.

And perhaps as early as next week or in the weeks soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre — code-named Propeller — which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents.

As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android — essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping users better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies on tablet devices.

Flipboard, the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, is now available only on the Apple iPad.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

According to sources, Propeller will launch with a plethora of media partners, as well as integration into the Google+ social network. The aim of the search giant is to offer media companies easy tools for publishing content on these devices, as well as a better path to monetization.

That is essentially the same plan at Yahoo, which has been working on Livestand with hopes of it being a product that will woo publishers into tight collaboration with the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Livestand was announced by Yahoo’s now-fired CEO Carol Bartz in February, at a speech at the World Mobile Congress in Spain.

At the time, Bartz demoed a magazinelike platform that would allow publishers to put up content easily and give users the ability to personalize their selections based on search history and interests.

Bartz called it “content in context.” (You can see the demo video below.)

But while Bartz promised the product within three months, development has been slowed by its complex technologies, bugs and the need to sign on publishers.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is pushing the product hard as a way for the company to reinvigorate its media products.

It’s not clear how many publishers Yahoo will have at launch, and neither are the distribution plans, beyond flacking it from the Web site and being present in app stores.

Google, on the other hand, has its Android platform to push out Propeller, although it all must work as well on Apple’s iPad, which is the dominant tablet on the market.

But just because both Yahoo and Google are big companies is by no means a guarantee of success — think Yahoo 360 or Google Wave or Buzz — and their lateness might be a hindrance.

And, in fact, other news reader apps are much further along. The leader, Flipboard, has already had four million downloads and 50 partnerships with leading publishers.

It also has started to introduce rich advertising products and, perhaps most importantly, has tight social integration with Twitter and Facebook.

There will be social elements on both Yahoo’s Livestand and Google’s Propeller. But news reading will be stressed more, making them more like Pulse, a tiny but highly innovative start-up.

Each of the existing apps will presumably compete by adding on more features. Pulse recently added cross-platform, cross-device syncing, while Flipboard is close to unveiling an iPhone version it has said it was working on.

Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.

Here is the Livestand demo video from February:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111028/news-reader-traffic-jam-yahoos-livestand-and-googles-propeller-set-to-launch-aiming-at-flipboard/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110915/its-called-google-propeller-and-its-aimed-at-flipboard-and-facebook-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20110915/its-called-google-propeller-and-its-aimed-at-flipboard-and-facebook-too/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:25:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=121348 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Earlier today, well-known digerati dude Robert Scoble posted on his social feed on Google+ that the search giant was working on a social and news reader.

“I heard from someone working with Google that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor for both Android and iPad,” posted Scoble. “My source says that the versions he’s seen so far are mind-blowing good.”

If blowing the minds of hot Silicon Valley start-up Flipboard and Facebook is the goal, then Scooby-Don’t's rumor is pretty spot-on.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Google is indeed working on rolling out the new product, which is currently called Propeller.

Sources said Propeller is apparently one of a number of new socially focused announcements Google is prepping, including new apps. But the timing for their launch is unclear.

Here’s what is: Propeller is a souped-up version of similar reader apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Yahoo’s Livestand, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

Facebook is also making social versions of publications available within its site. So, instead of just seeing a sidebar on a news site of what stories your friends liked, you’ll get a personalized and reformatted version of the latest news when you visit that publication’s page within Facebook.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping them better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies.

Flipboard is the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, available only on the Apple iPad. The company is working on an iPhone version, too.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

Propeller is probably a better name, I will admit.

It’s not clear what Google’s Propeller will include in the product, such as Facebook integration, since the pair of Silicon Valley behemoths have not been able to partner over data exchange.

Which is an understatement, I know.

But sources said it would be available on both Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android tablets.

In any case, stay tuned and thanks to Scoobs for the tip!

[Photo credit: This Noogler Propeller Hat -- which is given to all new Googlers -- is in the collection at the Computer History Museum, the gift of Marcin Wichary; the image is by Mark Richards.]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110915/its-called-google-propeller-and-its-aimed-at-flipboard-and-facebook-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:06:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=115291 Zite, the magazine-style reading app for the Apple iPad, has been sold to news giant CNN for $20 million to $25 million.

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110810/our-algorithms-are-better-than-yours-news360-app-personalizes/ http://allthingsd.com/20110810/our-algorithms-are-better-than-yours-news360-app-personalizes/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:00:14 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=108127 News360, a well-loved news reading app for various devices, is relaunching today for iPad, Honeycomb and Web, having updated its apps to include more personalization features. There are many other personalized news readers — Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, etc. — but News360′s pitch is that it delivers deeper and more relevant content based on its semantic analysis technology.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110810/our-algorithms-are-better-than-yours-news360-app-personalizes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110802/aol-finally-ready-with-editions-its-ipad-magazine/ http://allthingsd.com/20110802/aol-finally-ready-with-editions-its-ipad-magazine/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:34:24 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=105380 After a nine-month gestation, AOL says its online iPad magazine is ready to meet the world.

Editions by AOL, as the app is known, should hit the iTunes store later today or by Wednesday morning at the latest. The app, as we have previously noted, is designed to be AOL’s entrant in the increasingly crowded field of personalized publications designed exclusively for Apple’s tablet.

Rather than passing out cigars or sending out birth announcements, AOL has been marking the app’s impending arrival in a less savory way. Inside company offices, AOL has replaced its standard toilet paper with specially marked rolls touting the product’s launch. The unusual marketing is due to the product’s internal nickname — The App For When You Crap.

In an interview, AOL mobile head David Temkin attempts to paint a more glowing picture of Editions, calling it more of a daily briefing giving you a mix of the news you want with the news you didn’t even know you wanted. Like a newspaper, Editions is organized into sections, such as local news, business, sports, entertainment and technology. Unlike a traditional fish wrap, however, users can elect which sections they wish to receive and which can be skipped.

The product will compete with a range of other products, including personalized readers like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse as well as the iPad-only Daily from News Corp. (which owns this site) and other iPad variants of traditional newspapers and magazines.

For now there are no ads inside Editions, but that is expected to change over the next couple of months, Temkin said.

Temkin said he is convinced there will be a niche for Editions.

“We’re not trying to be the be-all and end-all,” he said in an interview at AOL’s offices last week. Rather, Temkin said the team worked to create a publication that works well for one particular use — a good quick read of the news in the morning (hence the unfortunate and, I’m afraid, now permanent nickname.)

Unlike feed readers, Temkin said that Editions is a once-daily affair and features a set number of pages, allowing one to finish reading.

“This is huge,” Temkin said. “We want to give people a sense of ‘I did something, I finished this.’”

Indeed, the last page contains a horoscope and a note letting the reader know they have reached the end. Meanwhile, Temkin said that Editions is also unlike The Daily in that the AOL app is highly personalized based on one’s interests, with users able to vote up or down the sources and topics they want to see more or less of, similar to the way users can rate artists in the Pandora music service.

One of the challenges is that the app really needs continuous Internet service to be fully enjoyed, making it somewhat impractical for subway and train commuters whose Web access is inconsistent. Although headlines and some AOL-produced content are downloaded with the full magazine, users have to connect to the Internet each time they want to read a full article from another source, as the application loads a full Web page.

That move makes it more publisher friendly, given that Editions is scraping less content than some rivals, but could prove irksome to those on the go, or who have poor Wi-Fi reception in their restroom.

Editions also has some nice touches. It’s initial page features localized weather as well as a list of upcoming appointments taken from the iPad’s calendar and the week’s birthdays, taken from Facebook if a user chooses to link to Facebook. Although Editions doesn’t pull stories from Facebook or Twitter, it does let users link those accounts and uses the feeds for other information. If a user follows a particular publication on Twitter, for example, Editions will automatically make that a preferred source in Editions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110802/aol-finally-ready-with-editions-its-ipad-magazine/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110616/pulse-gets-quicker-with-9m-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20110616/pulse-gets-quicker-with-9m-in-funding/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:00:37 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=87632 The news reader app maker Pulse has raised $9 million in Series A funding from NEA, Greycroft Partners and Lerer Ventures. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pulse says it now has 4 million users across its iPad, iPhone and Android apps, and it was recently recognized with an Apple Design Award.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110616/pulse-gets-quicker-with-9m-in-funding/feed/ 0