Print and broadcast news outlets have long been the world’s gatekeepers of information. Now, Facebook introduced a long-awaited mobile app, called Paper, that offers users a personalized stream of news

February 1, 2014 Leave a comment

Jan 30, 2014

Born Online, Facebook Now Wants to Be Your ‘Paper’

REED ALBERGOTTI

Print and broadcast news outlets have long been the world’s gatekeepers of information. Now,FacebookFB +14.10%

wants a turn.

On Thursday, Facebookintroduced a long-awaited mobile app, called Paper, that offers users a personalized stream of news. Facebook said it will be available Feb. 3 for the iPhone; there is no date yet for Android.

Instead of editors and reporters, Facebook’s publication is staffed by a computer algorithm and human “curators.” The content comes from outside sources, based on links shared by the social network’s 1.2 billion users. During a recent demonstration, the curated content featured articles from The New York TimesNYT +1.25%, TheWashington PostGHC +1.97% and Time Magazine, among others.

The move is part of Facebook’s long-term strategy to be more than just a popular app, or a destination on the Internet. Facebook wants to be the global hub of human communication, essential in the lives of its users.

It’s also part of a Facebook push to develop a suite of apps that will co-exist alongside the main Facebook app. So far, the effort has had mixed results: CEO Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday said use of Facebook’s Messenger app had increased 70% during the past three months. Facebook’s instant-message Poke app has been less successful. Zuckerberg Wednesday hinted at more apps to come.

Paper, which was demonstrated to The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, is smooth and sleek, performing most of the functions in Facebook’s existing mobile app. But Paper has some important new features, including an interactive way of looking at photos that utilizes gyroscopic and other sensors inside mobile phones. The feature allows users to pan back and forth across a photo simply by moving the phone from side to side.

Paper displays information in segments — such as Headlines, Pop Life, Score, Enterprise and Home – similar to the sections of a newspaper. Clicking on a section opens a preview of articles. Users can open an article by swiping their fingers across it, causing an animation of a piece of paper being peeled back.

The animation and articles in Paper are constantly being loaded in the background, so that swiping through the app happens lightning fast – a feature that works best on newer phones and won’t work on iPhones older than the iPhone 4.

The app, under development since the middle of 2012, was developed by a roughly 15-person unit led by product manager Michael Reckhow and designer Mike Matas, who worked on the Nest thermostat, among other things, before moving to Facebook in 2011.

The app includes a message feature and allows users to browse their news feeds and look at their friends’ profiles. Reckhow said the app gives users an alternate way to use Facebook on their mobile phones, without disrupting people who have gotten used to the old app.

Paper isn’t available on desktop or tablets.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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