All posts tagged app

Social News Reader Taptu Launches Version 1.5 of Android App with Supercharged Search, a Sharp New Interface and Related Stories

Posted by on June 9, 2011

Free social newsreader app lets customer discover more content and resize and color code streams on Android phones and tablets

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND & DENVER— June 6, 2011 — Today Taptu, a social media and mobile technology company, is announcing the release of Taptu 1.5 for Android, the latest version of its free social news reader app for Android phones and tablets. Version 1.5 supercharges search, making it easy to discover even more content to read, while also adding the ability to customize the look and feel of the app on any Android device.

Taptu lets customers find all the news they really want to read. The search function now scans both for the topic of a stream and for keywords within streams to provide even more news to consume. Because a search engine powers Taptu, it does not depend solely on RSS and social media feeds like competitors. This gives customers the chance to search for streams by topic, not just a specific Website or blog name.

For example, users searching for ‘LeBron James’ most probably will get no streams that are exact match for the basketball player. Now Taptu will display suggested streams that include Taptu’s curated Basketball and Miami Heat streams as well as The Miami Herald’s Miami Heat blog and the Bleacher Report, since they both provide wide coverage of news related to James.

“Our promise has always been to ensure that no matter what you’re searching for, we’ve got a stream for it. We wanted to give Taptu fans even more ways to discover new content in our app. We wanted to bring even more serendipity to what the app can offer, aside of course, from giving them the ability to customize the app to get exactly the content they want,” said Mitch Lazar, CEO of Taptu.

Taptu is already known for the serious level of customization it gives customers, including letting anyone ‘DJ the News’ by mixing stories from different interests into their own streams. By popular demand Taptu 1.5 now brings even more customization to its Android app. Resize streams to make them larger or smaller and color code them to get organized. Additional stream settings let customers hide photos or to display different sized images. Article pages have also been given a layout makeover, delivering full-sized photos and bigger headlines. Individual streams can be quickly refreshed nows by scrolling them to the right.

Taptu 1.5 adds related article discovery to the Android app, which has quickly become one of the most popular features on Taptu for iPad. While reading a popular story on Android, customers are given a list of related stories from a similar source or similar topic.

Download Taptu now at the Android Market.

About Taptu:
Founded in 2006, Taptu is an award-winning social media and mobile technology company based in Cambridge, England and Denver, Colorado. We build innovative platforms, tools and applications that enable highly personalized creation, curation, recommendation, search, discovery, management, consumption and sharing of content across all personal screen-based devices. Wapedia, Taptu’s popular mobile Wikipedia with over 1 million downloads, is also available for download at the Apple App Store.
See www.taptu.com for more information.

Press Contact:
In the US:
Bob Patterson
VSCpr
bob [at] vscconsulting.com
415.302.9806

In the UK:
Dianne See Morrison
Dianne.Morrison [at] taptu.com
+44 7988 539 921

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Valentines 0 – Barcelona 1: Taptu Heading to Mobile World Congress

Posted by on February 11, 2011

In a vile excuse to get out of Valentine’s Day responsibilities, the male contingents of the Taptu management team are once again sneaking off next week to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mitch our CEO, Konstantinos our product head, and Bob, our commercial development head are the guilty trio. If you’re interested in getting in touch, I’m sure they’ll dig deep for a drink or two, but flowers are unlikely.

Just email… Mitch.Lazar (at) Taptu.com; Konstantinos.Papamiltiadis (at) taptu.com; bob.last (at) Taptu.com.

Mitch will also be speaking on a panel looking at the challenges that the media industry is going through as they get to grips with the digital world. Specifically, they’ll be discussing the business models behind mPublishing, the impact of advertising and the argument of paid versus free content. They will also be looking at the role of the apps and tablets within mobile media, and conclude with demonstrations of some of the latest start ups/ technologies in the space.

Mitch, who will be speaking on the business models part of the panel, will be joined by execs from Time Inc, France Telecom, and Pearson to name a few, in what should be an interesting session given the recent launch of News Corp’s The Daily, Ongo from a consortium of backers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Livestand from Yahoo (aka Mitch’s former bosses). Please join them on 16 February 2011, Wednesday, 2:00-3:30 in Hall 5.

Finally, we’ve also created a Mobile World Congress stream to keep you abreast of the latest news from the conference. You can add it by going to the Stream Store in My Taptu and adding Mobile World Congress located on the featured first page.

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Wapedia on Android – One Million Downloads and Counting!

Posted by on January 21, 2011

What runs in 136 countries, is lightning fast and has been watched by a million people?

Answer 1: Paula Radcliffe
Answer 2: The Porsche 911
Answer 3: Wapedia on Android

Yes, Wapedia has joined the exclusive club of mega apps. Our very own little app for accessing Wikipedia and other Wikis has made the magic one million number on Android. It may have not got there before it hit the milestone on the iPhone, but it hasn’t been around as long.

We are also really happy to see Wapedia reach this number since it has always been available as a web service  – so downloading the app is very much a user choice. A very big *thanks* to all our Android users for making this happen!

So what does Wapedia say about Paula Radcliffe*? She’s the woman’s marathon world record holder; BBC sports personality of the year; and she was awarded an MBE by our very own Queen in June 2002.

On the Porsche, it’s the rear engined 2-door sports car, was voted 1999 car of the century and has been with us since 1963.

And on Wapedia, it’s the brainchild and late night efforts of Florian Amrhein, our very own super developer! No, it doesn’t actually say that, but we are indebted to his work and we rarely get to say it!

If you’re one of our faithful users, thank you, and if you haven’t used it recently, do come back. It can settle arguments and win pub quizzes – so long as you don’t get caught. And, if you haven’t tried My Taptu, our latest app available on both the iPhone and Android phones, a social news reader that puts your Facebook, your Twitter and your favorite news streams all in one place, give it a whirl. We’d love to hit a million downloads with My Taptu as well…! Bob

* Well it’s from Wikipedia articles really!

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SURVEY SAYS… Taptu Needs Your Help!

Posted by on January 14, 2011

Thanks for all of your feedback after our first and second releases of My Taptu over the last 10 weeks. Based on everything you shared with us, we’ve brought you some pretty important improvements like Google Reader Import, full article views on stories when they are available from the publisher, and full article views in your Twitter and Facebook streams. We’ve also added some neat functionality on your Facebook stream by giving you the ability to ‘Like’, ‘View Comments’ and ‘Post Comments’ on your Facebook Stream from within My Taptu. We’ve added more intuitive ways to refresh your content and made some improvements for the Retina iPhone 4 display as well.

So all in all, we’ve taken some pretty big steps forward in just a few weeks, but we want to go even further and need your help and candid feedback.

Today, Taptu is launching our first customer survey for My Taptu. Please take just a few minutes to click this link and tell us what you like and what you’d like to see improved in My Taptu.

We take your feedback seriously and would love to implement your ideas and suggestions into the product to make My Taptu your indispensable and favorite app you check many times a day, every day.

So if you’re Into It, Taptu It and tell us why. We’ll even throw a few rewards into the mix. If you complete the survey by January 24, 2011, we’ll drop your name into the Taptu Towers hat for a chance to win some Amazon gift certificates. Winners will be announced on that same day (24 January) and contacted by email.

Thanks for taking our survey and thanks for your time,

Mitch

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My Taptu for Android: Latest Version 1.1 With Updates Now Live

Posted by on November 29, 2010

Here at Taptu, we’re excited today to release the first update of the Android version of our social news aggregator app My Taptu.

My Taptu 1.1 for Android comes with the following improvements:

1. Google Reader Support: That’s right, you can now download all of your RSS feeds from Google Reader into My Taptu. The new option can be found under “Settings” and will let you add up to 30 RSS feeds from Google Reader. Please note, if you have already added a stream to My Taptu that is in your Google Reader, this duplicate will not count toward your 30 feed limit.

2. User Interface Improvements to Twitter Streams: As you know, we’ve curated the Twitter feeds of a whole host of your favorite celebrities, politicians, musicians, business gurus, models, scientist and publishers. Now when you view their stream, any article link that they share with you will be previewed in the stream itself so you can quickly see what they are tweeting about.

3. 4G Network Support: My Taptu now works for devices (lucky enough) to be on a 4G network.

4. Improved Error and Notification Handling: A few noticeable improvements on error handling and notifications are now available

5. Faster and Speedier: Speed and loading time have been improved.

6. Bug Fixes: We’ve fixed some general bugs.

We hope you like these new updates. And, stay tuned—because we have more coming along very shortly.

For our Apple users who may be wondering what is this Android icon doing on my phone, please bear with us! We’ve got some cool new features coming at you shortly. My Taptu 1.1 for the iPhone/iPod is currently under review by Apple and hopefully will get to you very shortly. To get instant notification when the update goes live, follow us on Twitter.

Thank you for trying My Taptu! As always please let us know what you think on our community page, Hani and Florian

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