Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital introduced an Android app called EvriThing Tech back in May, taking advantage of the startup’s semantic search technology to help on-the-go tech news addicts track the latest developments on subtopics from gadgets to venture capital. But at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco this week, the company is expected to introduce a fleet of other mobile apps for multiple platforms that round up news in additional areas such as sports, celebrity gossip, and music.
EvriThing Tech will now be available on the iPhone as well as Android (as soon as Apple approves the app, that is), with channels covering smartphones and tablet devices, social media, venture capital, and the like. On top of that, the startup is introducing EvriThing Gossip, covering celebrities from J Lo to Lady Gaga; EvriThing Baseball and EvriThing Pro Football, with live game scores and news channels for every team; and EvriThing Rock, with news about new music, festivals, and channels for specific rock music genres.
All of the apps draw on Evri’s information discovery engine, which automatically parses news and other Web content in near real time into “feeds” tied together by common subjects—people, places, companies, sports teams, and the like. The apps funnel millions of such feeds into specific categories relevant to users’ interests, sparing them from having to sift through the noise inevitably included in traditional search results.
In addition to news stories, the categories include images, recent Twitter posts, real-time stats such as sports scores, and videos. The videos in the EvriThing apps are the one element that Evri doesn’t discover or aggregate on its own—instead, they’re provided by San Francisco-based Blinkx, a video search startup that announced a partnership with Evri today.
At a dinner for journalists hosted by Blinkx last night, Evri CEO Will Hunsinger showed me the iPhone versions of the EvriThing apps, which have clean interfaces dominated by news stories from sources that Evri’s discovery engine judges to be both popular and reputable. In the baseball app, for example, news about the San Francisco Giants is drawn from sources such as Bleacher Report, ESPN, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Giants’ own website.
Hunsinger told me part of the goal of the Evri apps is to make conducting a specialized news search as simple as opening a specific app on your smartphone. “EvriThings are our first step in eliminating the need for tedious searching, instead enabling content to intuitively find us wherever we are,” Hunsinger says in an announcement scheduled to be released tomorrow.
The baseball, gossip, and rock apps are already available from iTunes App Store, but Evri is still awaiting Apple’s approval of the technology and football apps. All of the apps will be available from the Android Marketplace starting Thursday.
