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Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio unveils News Digest mobile app for UK market

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By Jessica Davies, News Editor

February 24, 2014 | 3 min read

Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio has unveiled the next generation of Yahoo’s mobile news service News Digest for the UK market, designed to curate and summarise the biggest news stories from multiple sources in one place.

D’Aloisio, who revealed the first demonstration of the UK app at a Mobile World Congress press briefing in Barcelona this morning, said the product is aimed at helping mainstream readers cut through the fragmented online news landscape, curating a “finite” summary of news stories, curated from multiple publishing sources.

The UK version features entirely localised content, drawing from publishers with which it has licensing agreements including Sky News, Reuters and Euro Sport.

D'Aloisio said: “We’ve not copied and pasted the US edition – which some products would do – this is completely from the ground up – all the news stories and features are UK centric.

"Newspapers used to provide comprehensive summaries – if you read a newspaper from front to back page you would get that sense of ‘I'm in the know – I’ve been informed.' There is a definitiveness to it, but that has been lost, particularly in digital because of the fragmentation.

"If you look at the news landscape, there is no loyalty, Consumers will jump from one aggregator to another...no one has come up with this definitive summary of all the content.

The app, which has been available in the US for six weeks, is algorithmically produced from multiple sources, editorially curated and then summarised with “bits and pieces” of information which D’Aloisio called “atoms”.

These atoms include text, images, maps, infographics, stock tickers, Wikipedia extracts, videos, pull-out quotes and from today the UK app features weather and statistics atoms, depending on whether they are contextually relevant to the story.

"The great thing about these digests are that they are finite. In two minutes I can go through the top stories and be done – it doesn’t feel like endless. And although there is a use case for infinite streams of information – this product is the antithesis of that – it’s about informing the users in a very quick, summarised way," he said.

Each story summary can be shared via Twitter or Facebook, while there are plans to extend this to other social networks later on. "No news products have nailed social media because news in its traditional form is not inherently viral - that's a major opportunity for us with this product."

The app is updated twice a day to coincide with typical peak news consumption times - at 8am and 6pm. Although it is currently free, D'Aloisio said there could be some very interesting native advertising opportunities which would help monetise the app in future. "Native advertising experiences are definitely something we are open to further down the line," he added.

The current version is not customisable, although this is a potential, future line of development along with its launch into additional markets and on Android devices. UK and US users can also flit between each version of the app.

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