Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Read Offline: News.me Automatically Downloads Your News Whenever You Leave Home


TechCrunch reporting:
News.me, the newsreader app hatched in The New York Times’ R&D lab and incubated at betaworks, today added a nifty feature to its new iPhone app, which gives readers instant access to their news offline — whenever they leave the house. The new feature, called Paper Boy, allows users to set their home location using their iPhone’s GPS, and thereafter, every time they leave their digs with phone in tow, News.me automatically downloads their social news in the background so that it’s ready to read offline as they go about their day.
For anyone who uses public transit to get to work and is as as a result without WiFi, PaperBoy’s value proposition should be immediately apparent. While there are hundreds of ways to check news sources, many of them only offer their content when connected to the Web. News.me General Manager Jake Levine tells us that, since News.me is located in New York City, the team often uses the city’s subway system to get around, but found themselves without anything to read while in transit.
Paper Boy was designed to eliminate this pain point, and provide subway, bus, and train commuters instant access to their news while on-the-go. Outside of Newsstand apps, Levine says that News.me is the first app to offer this functionality — to support background downloading of news content whenever readers leave their home addresses.
In the beginning, News.me’s social newsreading experience was iPad-only, offering readers an aggregated list of news stories drawn from Facebook and Twitter, curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, viewable in the context of the original tweet or Facebook comment. The startup also offers a Summify-like email digest of news culled from users’ Twitter streams, which picked up quite a few users in the wake of Summify’s acquisition.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/read-offline-news-me-automatically-downloads-your-news-whenever-you-leave-home/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=4271441433-_nb_DB_04-25-2012&utm_medium=email

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