“Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’”

Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on).

The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together. […]

The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19.

I’m sure the algorithm is worthy, but the interface is pretty unpleasant and I doubt it can succeed with the iPad crowd unless it’s fixed — the graphics as well as the way it works. Have to tap ‘more’ before I can scroll down ‘more,’ really? Have you ever used a Twitter client on iPhone?

Actually, the whole interface does scream of never having used even an iPhone (they did develop the app before the iPad was available), and jumping on the bandwagon because that’s where the money is.