News360 recently launched a “reimagined edition of its popular free newsreading app to iPhones everywhere. First unveiled for iPads and Android tablets in July, the new edition of News360 boasts a completely redesigned interface that’s as beautiful as it is smart, revamped personalization technology that learns from your every move online and in the app, and deeper customization options that empower you to make the newsreading experience your own. These overhauls have earned high marks from users, reviewers and publishers alike and have delivered on the promise of keeping you well-informed about the most important, personally relevant news of the day.” Read more

News360 today launches a redesigned version of its semantically-enabled news discovery application for the iPad. In the works for some eight months, the company’s goal has been to further its vision of building an AI assistant that understands what someone is interested in and how he consumes different types of news, to make ever-more solid personalized recommendations of content.

Personalization capabilities in the update last August of the service (which we first discussed here) followed an approach that worked best for people who knew what they wanted, according to Roman Karachinsky, CEO, News360. “Most people don’t want to spend time switching between categories and configuring things,” he says. “They wanted something more simple, so we focused on that.”

Before personalizing things further with Facebook and Twitter analysis of profiles, likes, demographics and social graph activity for more suggestions, there now are a host of sections from which users can easily select their interests – more than 1 million different things they can follow, from companies to topics to people to brands. There’s a new Good News section for getting your optimism on, and one on zombies, too.

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Personalized news app News360 yesterday updated its Windows Phone application, which makes up one of what’s still a relatively few 50,000 apps for the platform in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Right now, the device platform has just under 2 percent of the smartphone OS market, but that could change: Analyst firm IDC, for example, reported in June that, “assuming that Nokia’s transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20 percent share in 2015.” Nokia, whose first Windows Phone 7 devices have been available in the U.S. since earlier this year, is expected to announce two Windows phones on Monday, according to Reuters: a cheaper Lumia 610 and a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone.

News360, which joined the Microsoft BizSpark One program in November, is tapping into the action with the update that now sports a user interface designed around the Metro UI concepts pioneered by Microsoft, according to CEO Roman Karachinsky. It’s marked by “simplicity, cleanliness and efficient flow, which is radically different from the design of our iOS and Android apps,” he says. “The app also uses several features unique to Windows Phone – like live tiles, which allow you to pin the categories that you want to follow more closely straight to your home screen.”

News360 worked closely with Microsoft on this release, he notes, as part of Microsoft’s Mobile Acceleration Week development, a program to get partner companies together with the designers and developers of Windows Phone “to yield amazing apps for the platform.” Other features News360 touts for the latest version also include connecting their social media accounts to tailor news to their interests and Fast App Switching support for a better user experience.

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News360 has received some good news of its own: the startup has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Skolkovo Foundation and has also been selected to join the prestigious Microsoft BizSpark One program. According to the article, the company “has been selected to join the Microsoft BizSpark One program, identifying a small number of high-potential startups from among more than 45,000 BizSpark program participants in 100 countries. BizSpark One participants demonstrate a strong potential to succeed, shape the industry’s future and enhance the overall value of Microsoft products and services for end users.” Read more

The popular news app, News360 has released a new version for iPhone and Android smartphones. The version 2.0 release “introduces News360′s sophisticated content personalization technology to the smartphone experience. With permission, News360 analyzes a user’s activity across social and Web services like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Evernote and Google Reader to build a unique interest graph and uncover persistent reading interests and underlying topic areas.” Read more

You’ve probably read a couple of hundred remembrances and memorials to Steve Jobs in the last day. Don’t worry – this little blog isn’t going to rehash each of his amazing achievements.

Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

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There’s a moment in the launch video explaining News360’s app update — now including a desktop product — where the narrator jokingly notes of the personalized news app category, “Yeah, like you haven’t heard that before.”

In the category of personalized news apps that run on mobile devices alone, where News360 got its start, a beginner list of products also includes services such as Flipboard, Zite and the new Editions by AOL, with more expected from the likes of Evri, StreamGlider and others. Sometimes semantics sits behind such apps, sometimes not – or maybe they’re just sort of semantic, depending on your views of what it is to be semantic.

Says Roman Karachinsky, News360’s chief business development officer, his company’s product (which we first covered here), “is unique because most apps aren’t using ‘true semantics,’ and instead are driven by algorithmic data (like Google News). News360 is linguistically based-semantic analysis, thereby gauging a more intelligent swathe of user interests and world headlines.

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Startup SemantiStar sees a place in the world of InfoApps for semantic technologies. InfoApps, as SemantiStar CEO Bill McDaniel explains them, present information to the user as needed, when, and in the manner in which they want it. They’re generally are associated with the world of mobile devices – think of many of the goodies you download from sources like Apple’s App Store or Amazon’s Appstore (trademark disputes aside) or the Android Market.

Add semantic technologies to the mix, and these apps can become more context-aware — recall the Siri virtual assistant, which was acquired by Apple last spring. More opportunities exist around the idea of mobile information presentation, leveraging the devices’ geographical coordinates, the user’s historical behavior, and other knowledge that might be pertinent to an initial information quest, McDaniel thinks.

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News360 recently launched a new native app for BlackBerry PlayBook: “The app is built on a deep semantic analysis and natural language processing that was developed for use by Russian corporations and government agencies for reputation management over the past 7 years. Last year, the team created an English language version, and has since been working on a consumer application of the technology, which became News360.” Read more