Monday, June 29, 2009

Mobile news firm, Fluent Mobile, launches iPhone app

By Galen Moore

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Fluent Mobile Inc. has launched with a plan to become Google News for the mobile device. Today, Fluent News, the Boston-based company’s mobile application, is scheduled to go up for sale on Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: APPL) App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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

“We really believe that news is a killer app for mobile,” said founder Micah Adler, a former UMass professor who co-founded CourseAdvisor in 2005. “The transition (of news) from paper to desktop either has already happened or is on its way to happening — but what we’re starting to see is the transition from desktop to 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.

Adler is launching Fluent Mobile with product manager Carla Pellicano, formerly head of new product development at BNY ConvergEx, who joined the new company in March, and five other full-time employees. The company has headquarters in downtown Boston’s Post Office Square. 

Fluent plans to bring in revenue through selling advertising on its free app, and later through offering an ad-free version with more customizable capabilities for a paid monthly subscription. Adler declined to specify the rate for the premium subscription but said it would be in the single digits.

The company has developed its own search algorithms, which it will use to rank news results by relevance and interest, Adler said. It will not seek patents but will try to keep its algorithms as trade secrets instead.

Eventually, Adler acknowledged, increased sophistication among web publishers and better capabilities of mobile browsers will render apps like Fluent News unnecessary. “We’re certainly a long way from that,” he said. “The landscape of mobile devices is getting more complicated, not less complicated.”