Apps that help you keep up to date with the news are hardly a rarity. Alongside all the news organizations’ own native offerings, there are all sorts of aggregators and human-curated services promising to deliver content straight to your phone.
The problem with that is that there really are loads, and few manage to personalize the experience enough to make it a genuinely streamlined experience. Spotter, however, claims to be the one to fill that gap.
Created by two ex-Googlers who left their jobs to work full-time on Spotter in January, the app uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically identify people and companies mentioned in articles – that way, it has a better chance of finding content relevant to any topic or industry on any website, rather than the already large, well-known destinations. The algorithm automatically categorizes articles into different industries, too.
“Spotter is built on the premise that anyone can write the next big article on any topic. In the Spotter app, Medium posts often intersperse with New York Times articles and blog posts from venture capitalists. Users can find a collection of all the news on a topic in one place, without having to jump to different streams or pick content curators follow,” the company says.
Spotter says users will be “10x more informed” as a result of using the app and makes it clear that it’s aimed at professional people who benefit from staying closely in touch with their industry and competitors.
For now, the service is only available on iOS devices, but Spotter says it’ll be available on the Web and Android devices “soon.”
While in a straight-forward sense its rivals are services like Flipboard, Spotter’s real challenge is going to be trying to prove more useful than Twitter for staying abreast of industries or keeping up with specific authors.
➤ Spotter [iOS]
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