Last week, one of the hot topics was that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor, which is reportedly called Propeller. AOL launched one in Editions last month.
Well, you may recall that Yahoo announced one earlier this year called Livestand. It appears that may be launching pretty soon.
Arif Durrani at MediaWeek spoke with Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, who said that Livestand will be out this Autumn. Here are some quotes from Irving Durrani shares:
“Think of it as a tablet version of Yahoo. In addition it’s a magazine stand, where you can get different types of content, and it’s also HTML 5 based.”
“What we’re trying to do is create a container that says we have a visual experience that allows us to take graphics, videos and text into a consumption that allows us to display it in the same way across IoS or [An] Driod. That’s what every publisher on the planet’s trying to do.”
“[With Livestand] You don’t have to publish more than once… If you’re either Google or Apple, you want guys writing to your platform. But if I’m a publisher, I don’t want to have to write to those things two times.”
One can only assume that as tablets continue to grow in popularity, we can expect to see more and more of these types of apps to emerge. Considering the never-ending problem of too much info available and not enough time to read it, companies and developers will continue to try and crack the nut to solve it.
I’m not sure it’s completely solvable, but we should see some interesting products come out nevertheless.