Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding | Hacker News Reader

Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

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78 pointsplinkplonk69 comments

Great news! I've been using the Prismatic app daily since it came out. It perfectly fits the job of "what's going on". I tend to skim on the iPhone and save good articles to read later (or with Pocket, another favorite).

The tech is really interesting too. High Scalability had a post this summer on how it all works: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/7/30/prismatic-architec...

Jason is the man and we'll be prodding him into doing more posts and starting to open source a bunch of our clojure stack.

not sure if this is the place for feedback, but i've been a hardcore user of prismatic since it came out (love it!), but one thing i've been getting is pretty bad repeated text. just sentences repeated over and over again.

Thanks for the kind words and feedback. The best way to let us know is to email feedback@getprismatic.com with details (iPhone/Web, Browser, any other details), and we'll do our best to fix it ASAP.

The Graph library is intriguing to me, would love to see some of your stuff open sourced.

We're working on it. Hopefully we start to get some pieces out early next year!

Congrats on the raise :)

I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience.

I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll look at it on my phone for comedy & interesting news.

After integrating with Facebook and Gmail, these are my current Prismatic headlines:

* The Huffington Post: Release Of Cult Sandwich Slated For Dec. 17, McDonald's Announces (Bad)

* RollingStone: On the Charts: Alicia Keys' 'Girl on Fire' Leads Lukewarm Week (Bad)

* Webmonkey: A Look at the Future of CSS (Okay)

* Complex.com: Inside Johnny Depp's New $17.5 Million Home in Nashville, Tennessee (Really bad)

* Skysports: Graeme Smith determined South Africa maintain momentum against New Zealand (Really bad)

The problem I see is that (a) my Facebook likes aren't necessarily representative of what I want to read about, and (b) even if they were, your system doesn't know what priority to give each like.

The result looks to me like a page full of linkbait. My experience may not be representative, but I thought I'd share it with you as it might be helpful in fine tuning your product.

Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader.

Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I have.

The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the "Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on the front page.

I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another vertical, like the movie industry.

There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in.

I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.

I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's.

I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea.

Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.

> Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying.

Over the years a lot of services have tried to do this exclusively, but Flipboard is the only one that has bridged the gap between "stuff I definitely want to read" and "stuff on the fringes I wouldn't have actively sought but am happy I found."

I seeded it off twitter, which I primarily use to keep tabs on developers and software projects I care about. I've been happily using it for 5 (?) months now and find it to generally be the highest signal to noise aggregator of tech news that I've used.

For comparison, my first few headlines:

* Opponents of Egypt's Morsy continue protests (CNN)

* Facebook snubs 'Subscribe' button in favor of Twitter-esque 'Follow' on all profile pages (Verge)

* Extra-terrestrial life: Closer to encounter (Economist)

* node-webkit « Another Word For It

* Rethinking Mobile First (avc)

That's interesting. So it seems that Twitter integration provides the best content. I'm don't use Twitter very much, so that's not an option for me.

If my experience is the same as every other non-twitter user's, then it's likely that Prismatic's user base will be limited only to twitter users, unless they can improve their product.

It's not the service you base it off of, it's what the people you're following on the service share. If you're friends with a bunch of people on facebook who share hollywood/pop culture stuff, that's what you get. If you follow a bunch of geeks on twitter, you get the topics that show up on HN.

That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind of article selection from my personal data.

But worse, after 15 minutes of mostly dismissing these kinds of articles (and clicking on anything even remotely interesting), it was still mostly giving results in these kinds of categories. Is this the wrong way to use the site? I have no idea, since there are no usage instructions anywhere.

Right now it needs to be way more aggressive about early negative signals, and introduce more variety rather than try yet another pro-sport article to check whether I'd be more interested in that than the previous 10. Because it's hard to believe that a lot of users are going to persist if the initial results are persistently bad, no matter how pretty the typography.

For those trying out the automatic start, I'd be curious to see how your experience compares with Zite's auto-twitter/google reader/fb startup, if you're willing to give it a shot.

Congrats to Bradford! Prismatic really is great. Definitely one of the few sites I use several times a day.

Thanks Toby, hopefully we'll get good enough at hiring to take advantage of the cash and make those several times a day a lot more enjoyable! :)

25K weekly users...thats $600 a user, which pencils little http://skimfeed.com at around $9 million :)

Any tips on how to score investment? Do you focus the pitch on the tech, the idea/potential or the current product?

Any good reads for getting started with pitching?

So let me get this straight. TC only covers startups that have raised money, and uses that as a metric for whether or not the story should be written?

Actually, Alexia approached us months ago and had been converted into a believer! It's a pretty common story for us. People are grumpy about news apps because they've been frustrated in the past, then their friends share a bunch of interesting stuff from prismatic, then they give us a chance.

Well congrats, I'm glad to hear it. My co-founder uses your app every day and loves it.

My beef is that it seems TC always ties news to funding cycles, which IMO puts the focus on the wrong thing.

The author of this article injected herself into a good 30% of the story, so you shouldn't be surprised that ego is a big part of what gets published over there.

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

Social proof is the most frequently used metric for everything in life.

Great team, bad UX, unproven-approach and growing market. I love the brains behind Prismatic, I'm unconvinced it's going to work. I've used it early on and recommended to friends against lesser products (wavii, I only used once), but I still come back to hacker news. For me the reason is simple and I have given them the same feedback. I like to quickly glance over a simple list and pick the stories that I want to read first. Prismatic is dictating and forcing me to go through their order of content. Just put a fucking TOC or something and let me jump to what I want to read. I have to mention, I'm one of those guys who flips through a magazine finds something in the middle and don't read it cover-to-cover which is what prismatic forces me to do. Is this problem really that hard to solve, or are you guys are so stuck into solving everything via just algorithms?

Great, another service trying to solve the signal to noise ratio. My thoughts on this: http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...

We are not solving the signal from noise problem. We think that's not the right way to frame modern relevance.

What problem would you say you're solving then?

I'd love to hook this up to my Twitter account, but they require read access and I've already seen one person accidentally spam their Twitter stream (https://twitter.com/julien51 - to be fair to Prismatic this looks like it was a bug and they're actively reaching out to Julien to figure out what went wrong).

Our startup used to ask people for write access (purely so we could implement "follow" buttons - we never sent tweets on people's behalf) and it was a frequent source of complaints, so we eventually switched to read-only with an upgrade path to a write token later on: http://lanyrd.com/2012/blog/twitter-read-only/

Yes, please excuse this horrible issue. I think it is actually a UX fail, but we are not quite sure yet and tracking it down!

One thing that's tough to get right is timing email updates, and I think that Prismatic's default is great. If I get too many emails from you, I'll filter you out of my inbox (<cough>Quora</cough>).

I also enjoy that the updates selectively target a few of my interests, as opposed to struggling to cram everything into a single email.

That aside, the profile page is very buggy. The interest bubbles doesn't seem to be useful in any way, and the list view will keep stacking your interests if you click it multiple times. Under my profile, where articles (apparently?) should be, nothing is displayed. They only show up when I click 'Read.' I also don't understand the point of having a clickable 'username', only to have it change the text to 'Your Profile.'

Yes, the profile is super broken and new. We're focusing a lot of energy on it now. Please forward your bugs to feedback@getprismatic.com and they will be fixed quickly.

Why on earth do they default to sharing literally every action (meaning everything I even just look at) to Twitter when I first connect. I just lost followers because their app spammed about 50 messages in a few minutes. I think I'll pass.

There is a reason why I would never use such service like Prismatic. The main problem for me here is that it creates a confined universe for you where you are surrounded by only "relevant" information. For example I don't care much about fashion, but once in a while reading NY Times I stumble upon a very interesting articles about new trends in fashion or its history. It makes me think out of the box and expands my knowledge. There is no way a service like Prismatic would provide me with such articles based on my interests.

Nobody confines you to reading only articles surfaced by Prismatic. (and it does a great job btw)

If you could choose between universe where you don't have Prismatic and another where you have the option of using it, you'd seriously prefer the former?

You are bucketing Prismatic with "other services" without trying it or understanding what it does. Give it a shot, I think you'll find that it is designed to increase those serendipitous finds, not to filter signal from noise.

I like prismatic, but it doesn't increase _that_ kind of serendipitous finds.

I follow mostly techie and economics topics, and I have never seen a fashion article. Heck, I'd consider it a bug if I did :)

(I do not think that is the job prismatic should be doing either)

Congrats to the Prismatic team! I see Bradford is floating around answering questions, so I'll shoot over two:

(1) Is an iPad app on your roadmap? Anything you'd like to announce? ;)

(2) You once had an excellent post on your personal blog called "Learning About Machine Learning," with a list of excellent resources for learning about ML and statistics from first principles. The original post seems to be gone; are you hosting it somewhere else? I guess I could use the Wayback Machine if anything, but I'm curious whether personal blog exists somewhere new.

1) yes

2) i deleted my old blog

Thanks.

Awesome, very useful product, definitely one of the most relevant news aggregation services currently. The recent web redesign also enhanced desktop use as well. Congratulations team!

Great to hear you say that - the web app was such as disaster! now we have a pretty good foundation to iterate fast on the web, which is super important for some of the really finicky design problems like social interactions that are so hard to iterate on mobile.

Yeah, it's a visible improvement. And it's now my daily routine to go to Hacker News and getPrismatic.com every morning! :)

One thing I missed was to navigate to topics from my home feed. Before I used to be able to on the right menu I think, now I need to click into my profile every time to go back to my subscribed interests.

It was useful to be able to view by topics because the home feed is a mashup of all topics (which can range from work to personal interest). Would love to hear your thoughts as well!

Congratulations! Latent Dirichlet Allocation brings in the bacon.

I like the concept but when I tried it out it didn't bring up anything interesting. It seems to have a heavy bias towards 'mainstream' news sites, which I rarely like to read. It seems like it is totally missing out on the 'long tail' which IMHO is where most the value in a service like this lies.

The bubbles showing my 'interests' at the beginning looked quite promising, so perhaps there is some tuning that could fix this (maybe even user configuable?).

you can search for and add just about anything you can think of. give it a try. you'll quick branch out into totally new areas.

Where is the search box?

Very cool. I envision a future where everyone gets their media through an "agent" that is truly tailor made for them. This looks like a step in that direction.

How will Prismatic monetize? It would be a shame to see a service such as this offer featured articles or some other form of influence for pay. In fact, it would defeat the purpose of having something like this that would bring smaller media companies to readers who want the content they provide.

We have a really interesting revenue model based on driving transactions rather than brand ads or promoted content. It'll take a while before we really focus on it and cale it though.

Thanks for the response.

I look forward to seeing how you balance providing users the content they want with driving transactions to meet your revenue targets. Sounds like an interesting challenge.

Congratulations! The site is great. I use it every day. A few things I'd love to see:

1. API - I'd love to integrate with you guys.

2. Daily e-mail - As much as I like to use the site sometimes I just want to have stories pushed to me too.

3. I would like to have a bar at the top of the list of stories that shows what I have "saved for later". I usually save stories when I don't have time to read them but I always forget to go back and read them because it's not in front of my face.

Keep up the great work!

thanks!

1. look at the jobs page: http://getprismatic.com/jobs <--- you will get the platform soon if we have anything to say about it! :)

2. see #1.

3. Really interesting interaction idea. we're exploring "the many uses of save" and this queuing behavior vs. longer term bookmarking is something we think about a lot.

I just tried Prismatic, and was perplexed when it started giving me lots of news about central England. Huh?

Then it hit me: I live in Durham, NC. I hadn't told it that, but it probably deduced it from my IP. And somewhere in its great NLP brain, Durham, NC and Durham England are being mixed up.

Ah, the perils of AI.

Just tried out Prismatic and it seems to give suggestions much better than my current favorite - Flipboard; on the other hand, Flipboard's UI is way way better.

Something like Flipboard's UI + Prismatic's content would be a super awesome product.

We'd love to hear what you think stinks about our UI/UX. Reply here or ping us at feedback@getprismatic.com

For those that like this kinda of application, you might also like Zite (I use both and am not affiliated with either): http://www.zite.com/

How does one log out of the iPhone app? I accidentally logged in w/ the wrong Twitter account and now I can't figure out how to switch back to my normal account...

Does anyone know why the app needs permission to manage Google Contacts? The rest of the permissions make sense, I just don't get this one.

The Google Contacts OAuth authorization includes both read and write permissions, though I'm sure the intent is just to get emails to invite friends, share stories, etc.

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/#autho...

Thanks! I guess I was thinking of the Android permissions, which are separate for read/write IIRC.

Is the "read" tab on my profile a privacy disaster waiting to happen? Is there a way to clear that?

I see the setting now to not "publish" read articles to my profile, but no way to clear that I can tell.

Congrats to Bradford & his team. Good to see some real competition for Zite for a change :)

Great! I love the service, I miss only an app for my Android tablet. Keep up the good work.

We're on it! We're planning on building a Prismatic app for all tablet and mobile devices. An Android app is coming soon.

This is a huge waste of money, because they're going to be in the deadpool within a year.

And I say that as someone who loves the tech behind it. But it's almost pointless.

Really love it when I stumble upon a new service that isn't only cool but also really useful. It's not common for me to add an app that I'll actually use daily or even weekly. It's also rare to see so many App Store reviews actually being lyrical.

Some (UI/UX) thoughts for you Bradford:

- Someone said that Flipboard looks better, I disagree. Flipboard (as well as Summly and others) might be a bit more "sexy" but Prismatic has better functionality + algorithm. Your funnel is really great.

- The flashing Facebook/Twitter/Google buttons are really annoying. It also makes me think that I'm accidentally hovering these buttons. Does this dramatically increase conversion?

- Someone mentioned here that your growth is not great (25K weekly). Do you think that only traditional sharing options will be enough to achieve growth corresponding to the goals this Series A indicates? I'm also thinking that maybe it would be smarter to focus on only one platform (i.e Facebook only) until you've figured out how to grow virally.

- The iPhone experience was much better than the desktop one. This may be because:

1. Your visual design is very different on desktop compared to iPhone. It's impossible to tell that it's the same service.

2. The desktop layout is confusing:

- The images are unnecessarily large (at least the really large ones)

- There's something about the font that's not great (take a look at Scala that the Stockholm/Berlin based Readmill is using)

- Seeing zero stars and comments on almost each article is a bit boring, it's not clear where the "home" button is (since it's located to the right)

- I can't see why there's such a distinction between "home" and "world news" - why not just get rid of "world news" and have a much more logical right menu

- "Your suggestions" in the right menu are great but it doesn't make sense to scroll horizontally.

Etc etc. (Should probably write you an email with screenshots + arrows instead...)

- The iPhone UI/UX has some flaws as well IMO. The menu is not always logical:

1. Since you've selected lots of topics in the funnel in order to add them to your affinity algorithm it's confusing that touching the suggestions in the menu takes me to a separate page instead of adding them. To add them, I apparently need to click the plus icon to the right. I'd suggest you to add an arrow to the left of each suggestion to solve this issue.

2. There's not a clear way to my "home" screen. "Home" is located under "Your activity" (why?!) and has some sub-categories; I'm still not sure why (in my case) Programming, Startups and The New York Times are located below the home-button.

3. The headlines are not too pretty (too bold/too big) and "Search" is slightly less bold which is not too nice (but obviously these are just details).

Well, thanks a lot for building a great service. :)

EDIT: Just saw that your designer Mikael is also a ~22yo designer from Stockholm, no wonder I'm a fan.

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