Seattle Based Startup Wavii: Finally An Easy To Use News Feed

When you look at Facebook you see the latest news from all your friends carefully curated over time and managed by your friends. Your friends post what they want you to see and you can keep up with them. It’s really great when you think about it.

I connected over the weekend with a friend that I hadn’t seen in person in over a decade. We had been friends on Facebook for two years and we were both pretty caught up on the small talk when we met up. Imagine if something as simplistic as your Facebook feed could be utilized for the news that you get off your RSS reader.

We’ve looked at a lot of news aggregation programs and Wavii, a Seattle-based startup may be the easiest to absorb to date. You login to Wavii via your Facebook account and it immediately populates sources that the system thinks may be of interest to you. You can then click on those sources to add them to your feed.

In about five minutes I created a Wavii feed based on articles I need to keep up with for Nibletz. Naturally every other news reader I’ve got has Android stories and I’ve been looking for something more effective than Google Alerts. I created my account with Facebook and was quickly adding topics that interested me like, Venture Beat, TechCrunch and even Anderssen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, yes Wavii allows you to get that specific.

More after the break

The only thing I didn’t like was I didn’t see a search box for content until the next screen after I added my news feed. I actually bailed out of sign up, went back to my Facebook profile, added startups, re-logged into Wavii and then more startup sources came to my feed. I assure you it’s a lot easier, for now the startup box is on the next page.

There are other news aggregators out there like Evri, Zite and Summify however after seeing what’s available Wavii feels more natural and intuitive. Wavii should also resonate well with average internet users whose main experience on the internet is logging into Facebook.

Wavii was founded by former Micorosoftie Adrian Aoun and has been in stealth mode for two years. It has attracted investment from some of the biggest venture capital names out there, like Ron Conway, Shawn Fanning, Dave Morin, and more, possibly because the platform is so easy to use.

One of our favorite tech sites Geekwire.com talked to Oren Etzoni, an expert in natural language processing technologies who said that Wavii’s technology is simply better than Evri’s.

“They are using their technology to create a feed and build a conversation around it. The way I think about it is: In Twitter you follow ‘who’ and on Wavii you follow ‘what.’” Etzoni told Geekwire

source: Geekwire