Brad Feld

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Publishers – Put Your News on the iPhone

Oct 24, 2008
Category Investments

I’m still loving my iPhone.  It’s been around two months now, so I think this thing is finally going to stick and I’ll use an Apple product regularly. 

My regular iPhone app usage is increasing to include the new version of Brightkite (wow – I’m bfeld if you want to follow me), NetNewsWire (double wow), and the NY Times app.  I’m fascinated with the NY Times app – I think it is an extremely well done specialized iPhone app.

The other day, NewsGator announced a private label version of NetNewsWire.  This is aimed at any media company that wants to do a customized app that carries their own content (via RSS of course).  NetNewsWire is battle tested – over 200,000 iPhone users and over 130 million marked items (each marked item is an "interaction effect from a user") since it was released.

When NetNewsWire for the iPhone came out, it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that it could be used / quickly repurposed by any major media company.  Instead of building a NY Times-like app from scratch, you can simply private label NetNewsWire and be up and running in days.

If you are interested in taking a look at this, drop me an email and I’ll get you connected with the right folks at NewsGator.