News360 was a
personalized
Personalization (broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. A wide variety of organizations use personalization to improv ...
news aggregation
In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, podc ...
app for
smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s,
tablets and the
web. It attempted to learn a user's interests by analyzing their interaction with news stories on the app and using
semantic analysis and
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
to create an
Interest Graph and construct a unique feed of relevant content for each user.
The app claims an audience of more than 4 million users.
Initially released for iPhone in late 2010, News360 was eventually available for all major mobile platforms, with versions for the
iPad
The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...
,
iPhone,
Android,
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
,
Windows Phone
Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design la ...
,
BlackBerry
The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy of ...
and the web.
In August 2019, News360 was acquired by
PressReader
PressReader is a digital newspaper distribution and technology company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada and offices in Dublin, Ireland and Manila, Philippines.
PressReader distributes digital versions of over 7,000 newspapers and magazines ...
.
As of August 2022, News360 ceased operations.
History
News360 was founded in July, 2010. In October 2010, the first News360 Windows Phone 7 app was released. In November 2010, the first News360 iPhone app was released,
followed by an iPad version in March 2011.
In May, 2011 the company released News360 for Android tablets,
and in July - for Android phones.
News360 2.0 was released in November, 2011,
adding an ability to create custom feeds. The next version, News360 3.0, was launched in July, 2012,
introducing the News360 personalization engine and the "Home" feed, which merges all of the user's interests, custom feeds and sources into a single feed that uses behavioral analysis to get better at selecting the most relevant content the more the user uses the app. The release was generally well-received, with a
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
reviewer saying "For a great news experience, the free app News360 has to be one of the better news-aggregating
ppsI’ve seen on any platform".
In September, 2012 News360 announced the Publisher Partnership Program together with 30 brands, including the
Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...
,
CNBC
CNBC (formerly Consumer News and Business Channel) is an American basic cable business news channel. It provides business news programming on weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Eastern Time, while broadcasting talk sho ...
,
Fox Sports
Fox Sports is the brand name for a number of sports channels, broadcast divisions, programming, and other media around the world.
The ''Fox Sports'' name has since been used for other sports media assets. These assets are held mainly by the Fo ...
,
Business Insider
''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publ ...
,
Gigaom
Gigaom is a technology focused analyst firm and media company. The company evolved from a blog which offered news, analysis, and opinions on startup companies, emerging technologies, and other technology related topics. It was started by Om Malik ...
and others.
In March 2019, News360 announced the launch of Audio Briefings and an ad-free version as features available in a paid subscription plan called News360 Premium.
Technology
News360 uses a semantic analysis engine, developed in-house by the company, to analyze content aggregated from over 100,000 sources around the web. After performing
named-entity recognition
Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre ...
,
classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood.
Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes.
It may also refer to:
Business, organizat ...
, and
cluster analysis
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of ...
, News360 uses a complex formula to rank stories, taking in the influence of the source, author, text quality and complexity, size and velocity of the story cluster and many other metrics.
The system then takes the clustered and ranked set of stories and identifies a personalized selection for each user, based on their
interest graph.
The Interest Graph is initially constructed by collecting, with permission, user data from
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
,
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
or
Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking and task management application. It is developed by the Evernote Corporation, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It is intended for archiving and creating notes in which photos, audio and saved web content can ...
.
As the user uses News360, additional data is collected from their behavior - as they read stories and give feedback, the interest graph becomes more and more accurate and attuned to their real interests, making the personalization more effective.
In 2016, News360 launched NativeAI, an audience
analytics
Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...
tool for publishers and content marketers. NativeAI tracks over a million unique audience interests based on reader behavior on publishers' websites and provides publishers with a cloud-based analytics & content monetization service.
The content monetization works through sponsored content
while the analytics uses machine learning to give insights on audience engagement.
See also
*
Flipboard
Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates conten ...
*
Pulse
In medicine, a pulse represents the tactile arterial palpation of the cardiac cycle (heartbeat) by trained fingertips. The pulse may be palpated in any place that allows an artery to be compressed near the surface of the body, such as at the nec ...
References
External links
news360.com Official website
*
News360 personalized newson
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
News360 news appon Android
PlaystoreNative.AI publisher analytics Official website
{{Aggregators, state=collapsed
English-language mass media
News aggregators
IOS software
IPod software
Mobile social software
Computer-related introductions in 2010
Android (operating system) software
2019 mergers and acquisitions