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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
iPhone App Relies on Aggregating Your ContentMonday, July 6, 2009 Want to get your content onto the deliciously high-profile, well-hyped Apple iPhone? It may already be  there. A new iPhone app Fluent Mobile, released late last week, is designed to aggregate branded mobile media from countless sources into a nicely designed interface and news-reading experience that circumvents the usual mobile browser bookmarking or brand-specific iPhone apps. NY Times, Bloomberg, E! Online, Washington Post, Reuters and many more all will find their latest news items across a dozen typical categories (U.S. News, Entertainment, Health, Tech, etc.) collected here. Arguably, mobile apps and sites like Yahoo and iGoogle already aggregate content. Unlike other RSS feed readers and the like, Fluent only curates content from a provider’s mobile Web site, so all of the stories are formatted for the mobile browser that Fluent has embedded into the app. Fluent eliminates the need to pop open new windows and browsers. There is no pinching, tapping or zooming necessary to read the brand’s content from a full-size Web site squeezed into a mobile browser. Fluent also integrates content pre-fetching techniques that pull data into the app before a user calls for it. This keeps the experience more fluid than most other applications or mobile Web experiences. “It is one-handed browsing,” says CEO Micah Adler. “It is going to change the way people read their news.” The experience is much like a Google News for mobile, in that the app also provides links to related content on many stories. The user can drill into other sources and angles on the same item. Fleunt Mobile was founded by a team of computer scientists who had also developed CourseAdvisor (sold to Washington Post in 2007) and Adverplex. Some brands may eye an application like Fluent dubiously. In one sense it works on phones the way online aggregators like Newser work online. While Fluent may not have direct partnerships with the 32 publishers it aggregates, it is respectful of the brands involved and gives their logo prominent placement before each story. Fluent does preserve the experience and business model for the news brands because its embedded browser pulls in the mobile Web page of the destination site, including its advertising. Fluent only advertises and monetizes the headline aggregation pages. It doesn’t intrude on the destination site’s advertising. And yet, like all such aggregators, Fluent may provide the user with enough information on the initial portal page so that click throughs are not necessary. Such is the dilemma of digital syndication. Aggregators can at once proliferate content brands and at the same time cut users off from the business models that support them. Fluent is available now for free on the iPhone but the company is planning to launch on other application platforms and to craft fee-based versions that provide greater personalization and article saving functions. Within days of its release last week, Fluent Mobile had climbed into the top 10 most popular news apps in the iPhone App Store. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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