Nowadays, the word curate is bandied about quite freely. According to the Oxford dictionary, it means to ‘Select, organise, and present (online content, merchandise, information, etc.), typically using professional or expert knowledge’. As it happens, nobody these days seems to have the time or inclination to hunt through various magazines or newspapers for articles that they may be interested in. And since almost all of life’s functions now seem to be automated, personalised news/data curation too is part of the offerings of the mobile app mart.
Google Play Newsstand
The Google Play Newsstand replaces Google Currents, which was a favourite among Android loyalists. While Currents was quite a hit, Newsstand lacks the easy functionality of Currents and also has slightly messy navigation and confused category indexing. That being said, it feels like the poor man’s Flipboard — in that it lets you follow topics, apart from newspapers, to curate the kind of articles that would interest you. Of course, a few of the newspapers require you to subscribe first.
Easily one of the most beautiful and efficient smartphone apps, Flipboard lets you follow news by topic and connect it to upto 12 social networks – including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, 500px, SoundCloud — allowing you to really streamline and personalise your reading experience. You can then flip through the magazine and read at leisure. The concept of Cover Stories updates your news in real-time based on your priorities and the app even lets you create your own ‘magazine’ by allowing you to manually curate content, stories and videos.
LinkedIn Pulse
Pulse is a great offering by LinkedIn that specifically curates professional news and content from publications such as HarvardBusiness Review, Forbes, Time, The Verge, Gizmodo, Al Jazeera . Of course, the list does not stop here. You can indicate your areas of interest and Pulse brings together a series of brilliant articles tailored perfectly for you. You can sync your LinkedIn account to Pulse and take advantage of the enhanced experience.
NASA
You think this one is for the Science geeks, don’t you? Guess again. The app is brilliantly put together — it contains a whole host of images, videos, mission data, programmes, tweets, an alternative radio station — that it entices even the most uninterested of folks. The app also includes live streaming of NASA TV and ISS and Earth orbiting satellite trackers. Pretty neat, huh?
Formerly Read It Later, Pocket is a great way to manually curate stories you are interested in and store them to read at a more convenient time. According to its official description, you can ‘save articles, news stories, blog posts, videos, recipes, and any web links that you find online or from your favourite apps’. Pocket syncs all your data across devices so you can access whatever you want to read at any time from anywhere. Clean layouts and ad-free screens make for easy viewing. And the best part? The app lets you read stored articles even when you’re offline.
