Best Newsreaders for the Information Hungry

The news business has always been a hot one, and while there may be changes in the landscape and medium over the centuries, there is no doubt that people will always be wanting to get their hands on the news. From word of mouth to print newspapers to web sites to personalized digital content – news is a commodity, and it is up to those who make it available to cater to the needs, preferences, and whims of the consumer.

And in this day, which many have dubbed as the Information Age, there is just too much info to process. With the countless web sites and apps providing any and all sorts of news, the average person easily gets swamped; hence the need for ways to curate information so that time is well spent and heads don’t explode with too much data.

It is thus not a surprise that we’ve been hearing some interesting deals going on in the tech space, especially with regard to newsreaders.

Google Reader was killed off, but in the meantime, smaller entities dealing with news – aggregation, etc. – have been, and probably are being, snatched up by bigger players of the game. That only goes to show that indeed, news is a hot business.

Remember Summly?

Yahoo has not been idle, especially under the reign Marissa Meyers. For $30 million, the giant bought off an app which made reading news on mobile screens easy peasy – an app made by a teenager.

Google’s been busy, too.

Have you ever heard of Wavii? Maybe not, if you’re not particularly vested in the startup scene, but this little-known natural language processing startup (which also developed its own aggregation technology) has been bought by Google, who came off as the winner in a battle with Apple. And guess how much Google reportedly paid? More than the $30 million Yahoo paid for Summly.

It’s just beginning.

There are many other apps and services that play in the same news arena – Zite, Pulse, Flipboard, News 360, and SNATZ, to name a few. At the end of the day, users will decide based on a handful of factors, relevancy of news delivered and user experience being the top two.

Of these mentioned apps, Zite and Flipboard have established a foothold, to be sure; new players such as SNATZ cannot be ignored, however, as new technologies and algorithms are being implemented, upping the game of bringing the freshest and most relevant news items to individual readers.

[Images via moz and SNATZ]