SPUN: local news discovery app launches in Philly

Brooklyn-based local news discovery app SPUN recently launched in Philadelphia, and here’s one of the reasons founder Scott Lindenbaum gave us to explain the business decision (it’s something we can all relate to): He had one crazy night in Philly.

It involved a house party (of course), swimming in the fountain outside the Art Museum, bicycles (of course) and some other stuff, which we probably shouldn’t write here.

Kidding aside, Lindenbaum said that when his team was deciding what cities to expand to, he immediately thought of Philly. SPUN, an app that culls what Lindenbaum calls “lifestyle news” from different local sources, works best in cities where there’s plenty of local content.

“Trust me,” he said he told his team, “Philly has a lot going on.”

Get SPUN for iPhone here.

Now in 11 cities, SPUN was built to solve the problem of news discovery, Lindenbaum said. Everyone wants to know what’s going on but no one wants to painstakingly go through dozens of sources every day.

After Los Angeles and San Francisco, Philadelphia is one of SPUN’s most successful markets so far, Lindenbaum said. He was also impressed by the volume of Philly’s local publishers as compared to that of other cities. For example, Philly had way more locally-produced content than Boston, Lindenbaum said.

“Honestly,” he said, “in Boston, there’s no content.”

SPUN only pulls content from news sites that have RSS feeds or mobile websites. In the case of pulling from a news site’s mobile site, SPUN will format the stories’ the way the home site does (if there are ads, the ads appear on SPUN, too).

The challenge that SPUN, and other news discovery tools, faces is balancing usability with content producer needs. The app is sleek and fast-moving because it houses full-text RSS feeds for most of its content producers. That means when a user reads a Geekadelphia article on SPUN, she isn’t visiting or driving traffic to Geekadelphia.com. It’s a chance to discover Geekadelphia, though, says the SPUN team, and any links that a user shares on social media go directly to Geekadelphia.com.

The survival and ultimate success of SPUN will be whether it can balance those needs: speed and experience for the user and value for the partners that are creating all the content.

Full Disclosure: Technically Philly’s content appears/ on SPUN.