other content-rich apps such as ShowYou, Flipboard, Pulse, and Pinterest. Clearly, NextGuide also draws inspiration from personalized news-aggregator apps such as Zite, which uses sophisticated algorithms to gauge the interestingness of incoming news articles to each user.
But in other ways, NextGuide itself is a 1.0 effort: it offers so many different ways to slice and dice show listings that it can be confusing at times, and it doesn’t yet connect with major sources of on-demand video such as Amazon Prime, or with Internet sources like YouTube and Vimeo. In comments to Toeman, I said I thought the app could use some work on the information architecture side, to make the sorting and browsing options even clearer. “We’ll constantly be working to improve the experience,” he responded. “I think you’re right that we can make everything a bit simpler.”
The Dijit universal remote app and the Beacon device are still available and the company has no plans to wind down those products, Toeman says. But the last six months at Dijit have been all about building the new app.
“Controlling a device in the home is a huge thing to own, but the reality is that controlling discovery is possibly an even bigger thing to own,” he says. “Of all the things I’ve built in my career, this is up on a par with Slingbox. I’m so proud of what we’ve done in a limited amount of time. This is a whole new paradigm, and for some people it will probably be a ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ moment. But hopefully other people will try it out and give it a shot.”
