Devindra Hardawar of Venture Beat reports, “Like one part Siri and one part morning news update, a new app called Winston could change the way you consume news online. Launching today on the iPhone for free, Winston reads aloud recent news and social media updates through a distinguished electronic English accent. The app summarizes news to highlight the juicy bits, and it also translates your Twitter and Facebook updates into easily absorbed nuggets (ignoring hashtags, abbreviations, and the usual social media mess).” Read more

Many semantic start-ups hoping to bring their platforms and APIs to wider public notice among the development community do so by crafting the first applications to leverage their technologies themselves. That’s the case with Kudos Knowledge, which has created Enliten, a personal newspaper using its Semantic Social Intelligence (SSI) technology to deliver news and information from hundreds of sources filtered according to user interests.

“The important thing for us was to show we had capacity,” explains Lee Sinclair, product director of the Australian-based company, which also has developed CelebTweety Social to connect users to information about their favorite celebrities, and Chat Search for Skype for mining conversation histories on that platform, based on its SSI technology. The basic concept behind Semantic Social Intelligence is something that the company internally calls the “.Me” to filter the world for the individual user.

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StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer,  and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

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