Staff writer Galen Moore breaks the news that Post Office Square-based Fluent Mobile, founded by a former UMass professor, has launched  its news aggregating iPhone app. 

The application is a news search engine and aggregator designed to find only news content that is optimized for reading on mobile devices …

Adler said he started Fluent to apply some of the search capabilities developers discovered while building CourseAdvisor, an online course catalog tool for students. Adverplex, a second company Adler helped found, is still a going concern, he said.

Meanwhile, one cube over, staff writer Rodney Brown breaks the news that Hungarian chip-maker Semilab has merged its three US subsidiaries into one company called Semilab USA.

Semilab USA has 57 employees, with about 21 in Massachusetts, according to [CEO Chris] Moore. Semilab, founded in 1990, makes technology used to measure primarily materials used in the manufacturing of chips. It serves three major customer areas — academic and institutional research, semiconductor manufacturers and photovoltaic and solar cell manufacturers.

TechCrunch, citing an unnamed customer, has the news that Yahoo has shut down Maven Networks, which it acquired less than a year and a half ago.