Markets

Fluent Adds Premium "Filtering" Features for its News App

By David Weir

Updated on: November 30, 2009 / 5:58 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Fluent News first caught our attention at Bnet Media over the summer when it launched the first iPhone/iPod Touch app that aggregated mobile-optimized news content from dozens of major media brands in what it called an "up-to-the-minute mobile newspaper."

Tomorrow, Fluent Mobile is releasing two premium features for "in-app purchase" for its iPod Touch/iPhone customers that essentially allow them to "filter and favor" news sources, and therefore further customize the mobile news experience.

(Users who chose not to purchase the premium access will get very limited use of this feature; they can promote only one source and disable one source.)

When I interviewed Fluent CEO Micah Adler in September, he had told me that a premium model was under development at that time.

In a statement accompanying tomorrow's release, Adler states: "We saw an overwhelmingly positive response from consumers and industry leaders to the first version of Fluent News back in June. We know that news consumption is inherently personal and varies by individual.

"Fluent News empowers readers to hone in on what's news to them using the fastest, most convenient app for reading news from multiple sources on the iPhone. We're essentially letting people build their own custom mobile newspaper by defining their own sections and favorite news sources."

The Fluent team's basic approach to improving the mobile news consumption experience relies on two technological advances. The first pulls together media content much as any other aggregator (such as Google News) does, but only that content that has been optimized for mobile platforms.
The second technological advance is a mobile content delivery system that evens out all of the transitions mobile devices have to make between higher-bandwith and lower-bandwith zones as they move around with their owners on foot, in cars, buses or trains, or within large office buildings.

The Fluent app has the ability to "pre-fetch" content and hold it in a ready state for you to view when you want to, even if you've lost all Internet connectivity by that point in time and space.

Besides enabling customized content, the new premium features allow users to create their own custom content sections, for groups of articles on one topic of interest. They also can filter out banner ads, rather like a mobile Tivo, if you will.

The media brands available currently via Fluent News include The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, ESPN, CNN, Fox Sports, BBC, TMZ, USA Today and many others.