We pulled together some of the most interesting articles we’ve read recently – and included the quotes that got us talking the most.
The Instagram of News Is Here, And It’s Way Smarter Than You Think
From Fast Company
“People don’t want an algorithm telling them what to read, they want to get a peek at the reading lists of people they find interesting,” Trond Werner Hansen, the creator of the app ‘Kite’, claims. “We’ve had algorithms that can tell you what to read for 20 years. No one’s interested. I want to know what interesting people like President Obama and Stephen Fry are reading every day. Right now, that’s not really possible—there’s nothing dedicated to that. I want Kite to be able to unlock that value.”
New App Tracks the Flu and Allergies Coming for You Only Blocks Away
From Mashable
“Eric Weisberg, executive creative director at ad agency JWT New York, has lofty goals for the app — he makes comparisons to navigation app Waze and Google maps in terms of its mobile-friendliness and location-targeting. He said a simple Google search for symptoms can leave people bogged down with too much information.
‘We’re looking to transform what’s sort of a search-and-confusion mentality to discovering what’s going on with your sniffles to really getting a content-first, actionable information second,’ he said.”
How Snapchat’s CEO Plans to Conquer the Advertising World
From AdWeek
“Spiegel will be coming at the ad industry with a whole new perspective—literally. The CEO will be talking at Cannes about one of the key changes Snapchat has inspired in digital video: to think vertically. He and many other social, mobile and video players are beginning to detect that ‘people just don’t rotate their phones,’ he says. That’s why advertisers that have been first to test-drive marketing on the app see a reported nine times more engagement when their ads are vertically oriented.”
Sleep Like A Baby (Minus The Night Terrors) With Good Vibrations
From NPR
“A new device wants to fend off night terrors by rousing a child into a lighter sleep stage. The Lully Sleep Guardian is a Bluetooth-enabled pod that pairs with an iPhone app. To prevent a child from entering an ‘unhealthy state of sleep,’ when night terrors typically occur, the pod uses gentle, timed vibrations.”