Forget Twitter and your highly-educated high school friend’s posts on Facebook, Lumi News is here using data science technology to curate a personalized news app just for you. Created by Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller, the app — which is compatible with iOS and Android devices — uses the concept utilized by Stiksel and Miller’s last project: Last.fm.
“Last.fm looked at what people listened to on their iPod, Laptop etc and then recommend them new music they would enjoy,” Stiksel told iDigitalTimes. “With Lumi News, we want to apply this concept to journalism, another area where there is lots of great content available, but an area very difficult to navigate. We want to make sure that the good, relevant content finds the right readers, rather than them having to do all the work. You should be able to feel like a pro, tapping into all the best journalism out there and having it all filtered down to what is interesting for you.”
To use Lumi News, simply connect to Twitter or Facebook after downloading. The app will then provide news content, which the user can like or reject. Based on the feedback and learning your interests from Twitter and Facebook, the app will learn what you want to read and offer curated content. The personalization process does not require selecting news outlets or following topics. Once content has been liked, the user can access it online and offline.
“We think that there are too many great articles out there that are going undiscovered,” Lumi News says on its site. “Millions of websites and blogs and online publishers that churn out well researched, original or funny stories every day, but how do you keep on top of this amazing offering? Lumi aims to take the pain out of reading interesting, relevant things on your phone.”
There is also a social component, as users can follow their friends and see what content they post or like. The interface of the Lumi News app offers entire articles for readers to swipe on, instead of multiple options with headlines and a summary. This approach is an intentional one, as the team finds it to be more engaging.
“We found scrolling through timelines of lots of articles a bit stressful and not very engaging,” said Stiksel. “Our one-article-at-a-time approach seemed more relaxed and closer to how you would engage with a newspaper or magazine: You see the whole article, can start reading straight away instead of clicking and waiting or you move on to the next article. Swiping to get to the next article is quick and intuitive.”
In a world of social media and Pocket, what could make Lumi News different is its goal of recommending content to its users.
“Other news apps focus on making content available and have a recommendation piece as an add-on, but we wanted to go beyond this straight away and focus on getting the right content in front of people,” said Stiksel. “For us, this is the most important problem to solve and if this is done right, it helps readers as much as publishers and journalists by bringing the right audience to the articles they are writing, no matter how specialist these articles might be. And they don't have to resort to racy pictures and headlines to get those readers to engage.”
For the news consumer that doesn’t want to manually curate their readings or rely on mysterious social media algorithms, the Lumi News app just might be the solution.
