Evri Launches Topic Focused Personalized News iPad App

Frank Gruber Sep 27, 2011 Tweet

Seattle-based Evri just launched its iPad app, which lets users build their own news experience from millions of topic choices, each with an individual news channel. This unique approach is key to differentiating from the handful of iPad applications like Flipboard, FLUD, Editions by Aol, News360, Zite and others that are all looking to be that first point of contact when it comes to news consumption and discovery.

Evri offers a visual but interesting user experience. It’s unlike other iPad news readers, so it took me a little time to get used to it. Evri pulls in content from both the traditional and social web to create a rich blend of media content. It bubbles up the trending topics into stacks of stories, and it allows users to follow these topics or browse by section (i.e. business, technology, top news, etc).

When viewing a story, Evri offers related content topics as images rather than text-based tags. Evri for iPad also integrates with Twitter and Facebook so you can view your social news feeds through the app. Items can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later and a number of other complementary apps.

According to Evri CEO Will Hunsinger:

“Evri pioneered personalization of the news experience by allowing a user to follow specific topics rather than individual sources.”

While similar apps use only social feeds and RSS-based aggregation, I disagree with the above statement, as Evri was not the first-to-market to organize and deliver content by topic. Zite, which was acquired by CNN, allows users to follow specific topics rather than news sources. It delivers relevant content to users on those topics regularly. Editions by Aol does something similar as well, allowing users to type in topics like company names, teams, etc. to follow.

Despite not being the first-to-market, Evri is a nice app that could compete with the others in this category. The app has a lot going on, so I for one will be spending a bit more time testing out the details to see if it will make it into my regular morning routine, which is becoming a bit crowded with the other apps I use.