In 2010, as part of their coursework, two Stanford graduate students (Anik Gupta and Akshay Kothari) launched Pulse—a mobile app for reading the news. Today, Pulse has 13 million users and is one of 50 apps in the Apple App Store Hall of Fame.
Pulse is free and available for the iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire and Nook. It’s admired for allowing readers to aggregate favorite social media, news, technology and political sites with a clean and elegant, mosaic presentation. You can save stories for later or sync with Instapaper, Read it Later and Evernote. You can share any of it via Facebook and Twitter with two taps of your finger.
Over 250 publishers deliver news through Pulse, and there are about to be more. Alphonso Labs—Pulse’s parent company—is in the process of taking it local, so readers can access their local news sources, while they continue to grow internationally. Long story short? Pulse appears to be everyone’s favorite for reading the news on the move, even with competitors like Google, Yahoo and Flipboard.
With growth like this, it’s easy to see that this app could have significant sway over the direction of publishing. What does it mean for you? Publishers that make their content available through Pulse can reap the benefits of increased traffic and new audience engagement. Make sure your Content Management Platform has the ability to integrate with the mobile world. Your website should benefit from mobile delivery, not be stunted by it.
