We’ve cracked the nut and it’s not even close to 2015
Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup as well as many established Internet companies and publishers are desperately trying to crack.
That’s the way TechCrunch began an article this week about another company entering the personalized news arena. Earlier in the week, we learned that The Washington Post Co. had purchased personalized news venture iCurrent. A week or so earlier, Google News rolled out some modest customization features.
Clearly, the field of personalized news is getting hot. Which makes us glad that DailyMe and our Newstogram platform have a three-year headstart and a unique approach. We’re not desperately trying to crack the nut, we have the nut cracked and are rolling Newstogram out on a range of news and information sites.
Personalization of news has been kicked around for a while. MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte described a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual’s tastes in his 1995 book, “Being Digital.” He called it The Daily Me, a term we later adopted for our company, though he has nothing to do with DailyMe Inc.
In a commentary written for The Wall Street Journal last December, Google CEO Eric Schmidt described a device for news that knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. In his article, Schmidt imagined such a device being available in 2015.
In our view, 2015 is already here.
Newstogram already is serving up personalized news to users of sites like Variety.com and Impre.com and through several modules on DailyMe.com. Our approach of tracking and analyzing the content users consume and using the resulting individual interest profiles to make recommendations has outperformed other approaches in tests and we continue to improve and refine our algorithms.
We welcome the additional interest in news personalization, because it only serves to highlight our position as the leader in the field.
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