Ah, the beauties and the pitfalls of the new mobile-software ecosystem. With ready-made distribution platforms like Apple’s iTunes App Store, it’s possible for a couple of entrepreneurs to launch a company on the cheap around a single application. But if you go that route, you’re entirely at the mercy of Apple, where the App Store administrators are famously arbitrary, unpredictable, and close-mouthed about which apps get approved for the store, and when they’ll actually go live.
Fluent Mobile, a Boston startup that emerged from stealth mode today, has been sweating the App Store kingmaker process all month. Its new news-reader application for the iPhone, called Fluent News, was originally expected to show up in the App Store on June 16. Then it was June 17. Then there was long period of limbo. Fluent’s public-relations folks were forced to send journalists such as myself—who’d received an embargoed press release and a preview version of the app in early June—a string of e-mail updates about the latest delays.
Now the suspense is finally over, and iPhone and iPod Touch users can finally download the free app. Fluent News is basically a mobile multi-source newspaper—like a gussied-up RSS reader. The interface is reminiscent of dedicated iPhone apps published by individual news organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but the app combines stories from a range of major news feeds, all pre-optimized for viewing on mobile devices. So far I’ve seen stories on Fluent News from CNN, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, the Washington Post, Fox News, Reuters, ABC News, and USA Today.
When you start up Fluent, you see the Top News page, which shows the day’s hottest stories, as judged by Fluent’s content relevancy algorithms. You can also explore stories in specialized sections, including U.S. news, business, world news, entertainment, sports, technology, politics, science, health, lifestyle, and opinion. There’s also a “Most Popular” page that shows you the stories that other Fluent News users are reading most avidly. (See the video demo on the next page. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still access all of this content from any mobile browser by going to www.fluentnews.com.)
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Fluent itself is free to consumers.Fluent Mobile makes money on the clickable interstitial ads that occasionally appear mixed into story lists (they’re prominently set apart inside black bars). Many of the ads relate to other iPhone apps, and are provided by AdMob, a San Mateo, CA-based mobile advertising network.
Fluent Mobile CEO Micah Adler, a former professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says the company developed Fluent News in order to
