‘Intelligent’ news aggregation, one Brooklyn project in Knight Prototype Fund

Of the 24 new projects welcomed this week by the Knight Foundation into its media-orientated Knight Prototype Fund at least two have Brooklyn ties. One is a smarter news aggregation tool and another is a youth-orientated data collection resource.

Argos exists only as a GitHub page at this point. Its team of one, Francis Tseng, a designer at IDEO, proposes to use design and code to make the news easier to digest. From the announcement: “To build a prototype of a news aggregation application, Argos (formerly Seer), which intelligently gathers the context of new stories and present news backgrounders in a concise, digestible form.”

Brooklyn’s HabitatMap has teamed up with California’s Sonoma Technology to build the next generation of handheld air monitors that kids in school can build and use to monitor air quality in their neighborhoods. Habitat Map specializes in mapping environmental data, so presumably monitoring data will be shared and used so that people can take action.

The Knight Foundation sketched out the basic outline of the next six months for awardees in its annoucement:

Prototype Fund investments allow people to experiment, learn and iterate before moving on to the more costly stage of building out a project. It represents the evolution of Knight’s process for the Prototype Fund, which the foundation launched in June 2012. Projects now go through a six-month prototyping period that begins with a crash course in human-centered design, facilitated by LUMA Institute. Using this design training as a basis to build out their ideas, teams come together after six months for a Knight-hosted Demo Day to share their discoveries and prototypes.