mblapps

Are mobile devices the newspapers of the future? Fluent Mobile Founder and CEO Michael Adler believes so, and his new iPhone app, Fluent News, debuted in the app store today. We asked him a few questions about mobile+media.

Why build an app built on news information?

Fluent Mobile has developed proprietary algorithms for organizing, aggregating, and delivering dynamic mobile content.  We chose to initially apply our technology to the news space for several reasons, but one of the key factors is the high volume of users that are already reading news over mobile devices.  A recent Comscore survey found that more than 22 million people in the U.S. access news each day using a mobile device. The same survey found that more than 60 million people in the U.S. access news over mobile on a monthly basis.  Furthermore, the penetration of news over mobile is even larger on “higher-end” mobile devices. Another survey found that nearly 85% of iPhone users read news on their phone.  Fluent Mobile believes that the number of mobile news readers is very likely to significantly increase as well.

How do you feel this app fits in with the future of media?

The numbers above actually speak to an important and exciting shift in how people get their news. We are in the middle of the transition from paper to desktop to mobile.  The transition from paper to desktop has already happened, and we are in the middle of the second step right now.  Fluent News is helping to define that transition. Specifically, Fluent News is the first and only iPhone application to aggregate exclusively made-for-mobile content from the most trusted news sources across the Web into a single, easy-to-read and up-to-the-minute mobile newspaper.

What do you think about the future of newspapers? Of media organizations? Of media?

It is both an exciting and scary time for the newspapers and media organizations.  People are increasingly expecting ubiquitous access to all information, and the dynamic nature of news creates significant such demand in the news industry specifically.  However, this does not mean that people do not care about the quality of the content that they read.  There will always be a place for high quality, professionally sourced and verified content.  As long as media organizations can keep pace with the changes in how news is  delivered, there will be a central role for them.   We think of Fluent Mobile as a partner to the media organizations as they navigate this challenge in response to people’s changing demands and needs for a better mobile experience.

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