Two former Google staffers and a Bing engineer have formed the start-up Hawthorne Labs and launched Apollo for the iPad (and soon perhaps the iPhone) to personalize news. Apollo uses an algorithm that includes “factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes” to help filter and deliver news to its users the way Pandora Radio does with music. While it sounds like it could definitely take off, its founders, perhaps as a joke or just for attention, claim the app can “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense if it relies on newspapers and news sites to exist in the first place. [TechCrunch]
Updated: In a blog post, Apollo founder Evan Reas said, “To be clear, we definitely do not want to destroy content providers (and are very aware that if they didn’t exist, neither would Apollo). We also are relying on user-created content from many of the newer social media sites. What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying.”
