Newspaper of the Future, Ex-Googler Style

Calling itself “The World’s First Personalized Newspaper,” Hawthorne Labs has released Apollo on iPad only ($2.99 and going to $4.99). Founded by Google ex-coders for the most part, Apollo offers a cleaner, more laid-out version of NetVibes, Google News, AllTop, Newser, Yahoo!, HuffPo/Drudge – basically any of the news aggregators but with related clustering and more social modularity.

We’re looking forward to testing out, but check out the well-designed layouts below and the YouTube video (after the jump with its bumpy classical/techno, engineer-produced beat). These kind of news tech builds are somewhat generic in structure – an Apple, Facebook, Google, NYT or Demand Media should be able to duplicate, as it’s UI/UX with a good web crawler/recommendation engine.

However, what we still find missing, is who is aggregating the feeds? What is the POV that makes it interesting. If the recommendation engines and content clusters are dead-on for high-level, online readers then the results will be good…for that reader, but what about others with less disciplined RSS/news browsing. Who are the leaders or tastemakers of online content consumption that, frankly, are worth following.

Who is the voice of the NYT – we know the voice of Dealbook? Who is the voice of the LAT – we know the voice of Company Town?

At New Medici, we’re building out our content network with an eye firmly focused on POV from great online editors, guest editors and pulling from the smashing-est(!) email lists, online news/blognets and social media freebasers. You know those links and articles that you only find because you’re connected to the right .

We want sitback-and-forward programming that doesn’t feel like generic personalization or worse, mindless aggregation built around verticals. We want themes, opinion pieces based on the aggregated articles that receive the most traffic, sharing and feedback.

That said, Hawthorne Lab’s Apollo moves readers closer to personalized programming, now to fine-tune it to the voices we care about, i.e., “all the news that’s fit to personalize.”

Via Techcrunch: Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”.

The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together. The user interface reminds me a lot of Pulse, another great news consumption app for the iPad. Hawthorne Labs plans to expand Apollo to the iPhone, the Android platform and in the form of a general Web application at a later stage.