iPad News Apps FLUD the Market
Looking around at how developers have started to use the iPad for content delivery, it seems like some are just porting what they offered on the iPhone to the bigger screen. Which made me wonder:had the innovation for mobile apps dried up?
But David Coallier of CloudSplit emailed me a week or two ago with a sneak peak of a new side project called FLUDapp that he's been working on with Matthew Ausonio & Bobby Ghoshal. We talked about their app's unique and ground breaking features, and about using a platform like FRAPI to build it and all within a month.
Q1. WTF (What the FLUD) is it?
A. Download FLUD right now (August 5) and you are going to see an intuitive and beautiful RSS news reader with social sharing controls, video playback, no limit on feeds, bookmarking etc.
Our vision, however, is to create an ecosystem that converts readers into influencers. What is an “influencer?” you might ask… Internally we have our own ideas of what that means, but that is really up to the community to decide. We have purposely left things open-ended for v1.0 because the community is going to give us some powerful ideas and they already have. For now our goal is to focus on building controls and tools that users WANT to use and not get caught up in the features game.
Q2. From the preview images, it looks like it's well suited for the iPad. Does that rule out iPhone or iTouch users?
A, Our iPhone design is catered to a much smaller piece of screen real estate. What you see on the iPad and what you will see on the iPhone will not be a full on 1:1 design. All we are going to say is that we want to maintain our position as the “sexy” news reader and we will make sure we keep things intuitive and beautiful no matter what device you use FLUD on!
Q3. What was the initial business model for the FLUD App, and how did you come to a final decision?
A. We initially talked about building a community on the iPad where users could pull in and track all their social network activity from the major social networks and then cross-connect with their friends in the app but we decided that not only would the app become a headache to build and maintain, but that the actual business model would be flawed because users hate information overload.
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