News.Me’s Paper Boy Will Fetch You All The News – While Your Offline
News.Me‘s iPhone app just got some new features which will make your away-from-keyboard time less boring. Paper Boy, the name of the new feature, is actually a quite clever use of GPS abilities of your iPhone. What’s it all about?
We already introduced you to News.Me, a simple service which looks for the best links and articles shared by your friends and delivers you the most important ones, saving you the time and the hustle to get to the stuff that really is worth of your attention. The application is free so you can download it to your iPad or your iPhone from the App Store.
Paper Boy?!
How many times have you left your home, went on the bus or train and realized that you don’t have any reading or listening material on your smartphone? Wireless networks are practically non-existent in transport and you’d need an unlimited data subscription to use 3G without any worries.
Paper Boy will take care of that by giving you access to your news even offline. It’s really simple; you’ll set your home location in the app using iPhone’s GPS and that’s it. Actually, it’s even easier than that – you don’t have to enter some weird GPS coordinates, just tap the button when you’re at home and that’s it. Whenever you leave your home in the future, News.Me will quickly download all of your items in the background so you’ll be able to read it in the cab, subway or while walking down the street. OK, maybe you should be more careful on the street!
TechCrunch published an interview with Jake Levine, News.Me General Manager who explained :
since News.Me is located in New York City, the team often uses the city’s subway system to get around, but found themselves without anything to read while in transit.
Talk about scratching your own itch, right?
The History of News.Me
To refresh your memory, News.Me started as an iPad application; it’s actually a product of The New York Times and Betaworks technology incubator. Even back then, if you didn’t had an iOS device, you could have subscribed to their email digest based on your Twitter stream.
Several months later, in March 2012, News.Me released its iPhone app. Since News.me wants to be the Instagram for news, they moved to the iPhone to boost their service. It’s good reasoning, since the iPhone has far more users than the iPad does. However, in order to get even more users, the team recently released Expose, a bookmarklet for your browser which will tell you what news is popular on a site you’re visiting. The result is based on how much your friends are sharing some items from that site, of course.
Have you tried News.Me yet?
