Created by ex-Googlers, Spotter searches and surfaces industry news that matters to you
If you want an app that’s designed to surface news about the industries, companies, and people that matter to you, you might want to consider Spotter.
Created by a duo of former Google employees (Jon Emerson and Tom Charytoniuk), Spotter crawls news and blog sites (such as The New York Times and Medium) to find posts and articles that are relevant to you, based on your specified industry news personalization preferences.
After logging in to Spotter (initially via Facebook only), you can see the latest from so-called “thought leaders” and keep abreast of important industry trends and company events, such as significant acquisitions and next-big-thing prognostications.
As touted by the Spotter team, the app works by harnessing artificial intelligence techniques including:
- Natural language processing (NLP) to detect companies and people in articles
- Topic modeling algorithms to classify articles into industries
- Novel deduping methods
- Heuristic-based feature detection
- A big neural network that pulls everything together to generate each user’s stream
Spotter
Spotter is available now on the App Store for free. It’s compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad running iOS 8.0 or later, but it’s not yet integrated with Apple Watch.
Unlike Flipboard, Feedly, and SmartNews, Spotter offers a way to quickly and easily get your preferred industry news fix away from the noise of other news categories, such as lifestyle and entertainment.
Spotter somewhat recalls LinkedIn Elevate, which was launched by LinkedIn just a month ago. However, Elevate is primarily designed to provide relevant content for employees to share to their social networks with the ultimate aim of “elevating” not only their professional brands but also those of their companies.
To a much lesser extent, Spotter’s app icon recalls the owl mascot of Zite, which is now owned by Flipboard.
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