Pulse app goes free, gets $800,000 in VC | Hacker News Reader

Pulse app goes free, gets $800,000 in VC

nytimes.com

39 pointsadamjernst12 comments

"The company will also announce that it has raised $800,000 in venture capital, the first step in moving along the path from building an app to running a profitable business."

Funny, I would have thought the first step would be not to start giving away a successful app for free.

I'll be watching with interest to see what their plan for revenue is. I thought Pulse was kinda neat but rather an inefficient way to browse for news. I suspect anything advertising related will just accentuate that.

Am I getting my 2.99 back? Or is the free version ad supported? In the process of trying to get more users, the free move might alienate their paying customers

Meaning you will delete the app you paid $2.99 for in protest?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs

Yeah, you basically are screwed. You paid $2.99 to have no ads, now you are out $2.99 and will presumably see ads. Bait and switch, basically.

If I'd paid $2.99, I simply would not pay for anything else from Alphonso Labs. I'd just wait until they gave it away free - that is a shame, because that way any app is unlikely to be successful enough to be given away free.

If they give it away free, then I would expect that they do something for previous purchasers. If they don't, they risk building a lot of bad will from early adopters that could kill their next venture.

Then again, one could argue that you paid that premium for early use of the app, and for $2.99 it's not worth holding a grudge and refusing to purchase their next product.

when I read the title I thought it was talking about http://pulseapp.com/ which I could see raising $800k ... but a news reader? I don't find pulse to be THAT amazing.

They lost me at "Older entrepreneurs..." Not so much because of the blatant age discrimination, which is probably just the reporter's fault, as much as it was a reminder that what they're doing is kind of pedestrian, and will likely be eclipsed soonish by html 5.

As someone about to get into this space, I didn't realize that personalized reading was heating up so good. I suppose that competition is a good thing, and of all the apps listed in the article (Flipboard, Zinio, Pulse), I think that using the web as a platform is a competitive advantage for us, but damn. How is this the first I've heard of this?

If this is seen as too self-serving, feel free to mod down, but I have to ask, does anybody else use Pulse, or the apps mentioned? What do you like/dislike about them?

Flipboard is pretty good.

I've also used 'Early Edition' which fetches your RSS feed into a newspaper like view. Again, its a really nice option for reading RSS feeds. Now I just pick up my iPad and flip through the first few pages of news rather than always trying to bring the Unread count to 0 on Google Reader.

Seconded. Flipboard is directly responsible for me spending ~$20/month less on magazines. There's a local (motorcycle) magazine which I've bought every (2 weekly) issue for ~12 years, which I haven't bought a single copy of since I installed Flipboard. All the "I've got 10 or 15 minutes spare in a cafe lingering over a coffee or two" reading needs are better met by Flipboard (for me) than AMCN Two Wheels and New Scientist and various other magazines I'd occasionally buy to fill in time.

I don't think it's "the future of print media", but I think it's certainly indicative of one direction the future of print media might lie...

For me it's, like almost everything on the iPad, to distracting.

For reading rss feeds I like calibres news feature in conjunction with an eReader.

Zinio seems the odd-man-out in that trio. Unless they've made major changes recently, it's PDF for magazines, at least from the end-user perspective. Nothing so personalized about that.

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