Give your Blog a Voice

Blogs are the lion's share of information sources for many people when it comes to finding news. For those same blog readers, using the mobile web to view those blogs on the go isn't always the ideal experience. In my own case, as pretty as the iPhone interface is, sometimes my eyes are just too tired to read a lot of text while I'm travelling. That being the case, I was very excited to learn about an application that gives blogs a voice (now including Constructive Grumpiness). CEO and Founder of PimpMyNews John Atkinson was kind enough to answer a few questions about the service.

CG: What is Pimp My News? Who is the team behind it?

JA: PimpMyNews is a mobile application collects the news and blog posts you wish you had time to read and converts them to audio, so you can listen to them, while you do other things like drive, work out, ride the train, and more. It works on iPhones, iPod touch devices, MP3 players and computers (we're rolling out the service for Blackberry soon). With PimpMyNews, you can also view text, images and video, and share content on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other social sites. My Co-founder Roy Georgia and I created the service after years of struggling to keep up with news and blogs. We used to spend hours and hours on the Internet tied to our computers, searching for news we cared about, and reading news stories. We thought there had to be a way to take the pain out of staying current on news and blogs, so we set out to design a "news engine" that would do all of the searching, sifting, and even the reading for you. Roy's technical expertise in building analytics applications was a good fit with my background in software product management and marketing.

CG: The launch of the iPhone application got a lot of press. How does the mobile experience tie into the web experience?

JA: We rolled out PimpMyNews on mulitple platforms so it would be ubiquitous. Since our service runs on mobile devices, MP3 players and computers, our users have access to the news they care about, just about everywhere. While the functionality on our web platform is similar to our mobile application, we're finding that our mobile application gets a lot more usage. This makes sense to us, since thekey benefit of our service is "multitasking," meaning that while you're out doing other things, you can "tune into" PimpMyNews on your mobile device and increase your productivity. Mobile users can also log into our web application from their computersto fine tune their playlists, by choosing content from over 1,300 of the web's top news and blogs.

CG: How does your technology process text so that it most replicates natural speech? Do you see this tech expanding into other categories?

JA: Text-to-voice technology has come a long way since the movie "War Games" came out in 1983. Even today, not all text-to-voice technology is created equal, some of it still sounds stilted and robotic, but when people first hear PimpMyNews, they're usually surprised at how natural sounding it is. Our proprietary news engine is the "underlying magic" that generates our natural sounding audio on the fly. There are a series of processes that happen rapidly behind the scenes, from the time a PimpMyNews user selects a story, to the time they hear it. First, our news engine strips out "unfriendly characters" (like html, and other erroneous characters), then we cross-reference each word with our pronunciation dictionary. Next, we "build" each word by producing the sound of each letter (this is called "concatenative" technology, for the techies). Finally, the engine creates an MP3 audio file of the story, which is streamed to your mobile device. The whole process only takes a second or two. I definitely see this technology expanding into other categories due to the unique multitasking benefit that good text-to-voice technology brings to mobile applications. In fact, some of the web's biggest players are releasing talking mobile applications to exploit this benefit for other product categories. To name a couple of examples, Apple recently launched the talking iPod Shuffle, andAmazon's new Kindle 2 allows people to listen to text books on the go. I recently blogged about voicebeing "the next killer app for mobile" on The PimpMyNews Blog here: http://pimpmynews.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-voice-new-killer-app-for-mobile.html

CG: What are your plans to market PMN to both consumers and advertisers?

JA: The majority of the consumers who use PimpMyNews have found out about us in the press and the blogosphere. Apple and FastCompany choosing us as "Staff Picks" has helped as well. We built a pretty unique application that people seem to like to talk about, and we're extremely grateful for all the press we're receiving. To date, we've mainly focused our outbound efforts on social media channels. On our blog, we talk about the benefits of our application, and we use Twitter, Facebook and other social sites to communicate with our users. We believe that if we're successful in building a large, satisfied userbase, the advertisers will come.

CG: Can you share the number app downloads so far? Sales?

JA: Since we launched about 15 months ago, over 250,000 people from 160 countries have used the service.

CG: Future Plans?

JA: Our plan is to expand our footprint on mobile devices and roll out enhancements to our service. We'll berolling out PimpMyNews in Blackberry App World later this spring, then we'll focus on other smartphone platforms. We're also planning on rolling out some tools for bloggers and publishers to use on their sites to increase engagement with their audiences.

If you're interested in using PimpMyNews:

Download the iPhone/ iPod touch App On The App Store here: http://bit.ly/PMNiPhone

Signup for PimpMyNews on Your Computer here: http://PimpMyNews.com/Signup.aspx