Admit it, the main use of your iPhone or iPad is to kill time. So get on the forefront of timekilling technology by downloading Futureful, a Helsinki-based ‘topic browser’ that employs a lot of cool tech to serve interesting content tailored to you. Futureful has globally released their app on iPhone and iPad today.
The way the app works is by selecting topics that you’re interested in, like ‘startups’ for example. Once that’s selected, other bubbles pop up, such as ‘quantified self’, which you can combine to your bubble to help you find content combining the two topics, or by leaving the bubbles alone.
Futureful learns more about your interests through every interaction, such as how far you scroll down in an article, what topics you click on, and so on. After collecting all this data they can build a dynamic profile of your interests to always be sure it can connect you to new content.
“There’s always something waiting for you,” Jarno Koponen of Futureful tells us. “It never takes you to the same place twice.”
Koponen gets philosophical with the concept, pointing out how Futureful brings the user’s tastes into forefront instead of making you follow someone else’s tastes.
“We have from the very beginnings wanted to understand how to understand the uniqueness of every individual. When you think about serendipity you can either follow people to get new content, or you have these newsreaders where you select some categories. We want to bring freedom back to web surfing.”
Futureful will be available on other mobile platforms later this year, and will add features like an integration with Pocket to help you save links. Currently they’re all focused purely on discovery, with bookmarking as an afterthought.
”The best moments in life happen when your own choices mix with the random and unknown. Futureful brings that magic to the web”, says Marko Anderson, Co-founder of Futureful.
I’m always looking for a new article to read right before bed or with my morning coffee, and Futureful is leading me to some nice content. It’s going to be interesting to see what they do with the platform, considering they’re collecting so much data on people’s interests.
Futureful is backed by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. The app can be found in the App Store here.
