News.Me is Free, Both as an iPad App and Startup
News.me, the iPad application that lets you read content based on the people you follow on Twitter, is free! if you remember, we wrote about News.me in June when it was still “just” a a Bit.ly project. Now the project has been spun out as a independent Betaworks company leaving much of its Bit.ly heritage behind, including the $0.99 weekly fee.
While Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber writes that News.me is adopting a typical startup approach in its evolution, Appadvice’s Bryan M. Wolfe asks if the move was a way of desparation. His argument: the app wanted to price something others were mostly giving away for free. News.me was actually created in the research lab of the New York Times, later becoming a part of Betaworks’ company Bit.ly. News.me has a very interesting interface that could gather even more users if it was free of charge.
From Project to Startup
As Betaworks’ CEO John Borthwick notes in his own blogpost, the News.me team is doing everything possible to grow, including getting more people on board to help its development:
Michael Young, who has been with News.me since its inception at the New York Times R&D lab, will continue to lead the development efforts as Chief Technology Officer. He’ll be joined by Rob Haining (of Epicurious, GQ, and Idea Flight app fame) who is leading iOS development, and Justin Van Slembrouck (from Adobe, where he designed the Times Reader application) overseeing User Experience and Design. Jake Levine, formerly Entrepreneur in Residence at betaworks, is joining News.me as General Manager. We’re looking for a few more developers to round out the team, so if you’re passionate about news and the social web and are eager to explore the boundaries of emergent devices, drop us a line.
How to Get News.me for Free
Exising News.me users will have to download the new version of the News.me iPad application, while subscribers will have to manually discontinue their subscriptions. You can find out how to cancel on the News.me website. Everyone else, just download the app.
While the application was pretty interesting, the Betaworks team has obviously made the decision that it has to be free to compete with similar solutions. They obviously got a great domain name to use for the project 😉 It will be pretty interesting to see how this pivot will let News.me evolve both its interface and its business model.
