My Newspaper

GEEK’S 2010 ODYSSEY COULD BE ASTRONOMICAL

As US technology geeks across the globe excitedly acquaint themselves with Apple’s iPad following its release there on Saturday, Melbourne’s Jeff Bonnes is still champing at the bit to get his hands on one.

Along with admitting to being one of these geeks, Mr Bonnes has developed an app for the tablet PC which he is yet to use on the device itself. Called My News Pad, the app pulls a user’s RSS feeds together to create customised virtual newspapers.

The name is an unintended reference to Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic 2001:A Space Odyssey, and the subsequent Arthur C. Clarke novel where people use a hand-held electronic device, called a “newspad” to read all the latest updates.

Unlike typical RSS news readers, which supply information like a long list of emails, Mr Bonnes’ creation has the look and feel of a newspaper, with stories, pictures and headlines all laid out on virtual pages that users can “flick” through.

Stories are prioritised as they are in newspapers, with an analysis system called PostRank used to sort information based on its source and the number of internet users reading, tweeting and blogging about it.

And, like a newspaper, the editions will be “delivered” to subscribers’ iPads twice daily.

Readers will be able to easily click through to the original source, and Mr Bonnes is also working on other functions which will simplify the process for sharing the articles via Twitter or email.

With the recent News Corp announcement that the UK’s Times of London and Sunday Times will charge for online content, and more likely to follow, Mr Bonnes believes his app will have continued relevance, consolidating stories from paid subscriptions with free online content to best meet an individual’s needs.

“Say you subscribe to the New York Times: you’re paying for the whole thing, but might not be interested in the whole thing,” he explains.
“Being able to pull in all the sections you’re interested in, with all your other information, is attractive. More people don’t just want an editor in a news room deciding what they read every day, they want customised content.

“With the internet and this kind of delivery, that will happen.”

Mr Bonnes’ entry into the Telstra Small Business Awards follows that of his wife, Delia Timms, whose web-site www.findababysitter.com.au took out the micro-business category award in 2008.

Reading the papers with his wife on a Saturday morning was what inspired Mr Bonnes to come up with the idea, and the amount of recognition that came through her win prompted him to try his luck in the awards, too.

“She was flipping through the newspaper, and I was thinking that I would have loved to sit down and read my RSS reader feed when I saw a picture of the iPad in the newspaper she was reading,” he says. “I realised it would be the perfect delivery, to see my RSS feed as a custom delivered newspaper, so I started developing it. I’m hoping it will be a much more book-like experience. People are used to being able to flick through things. It’s more leisurely whereas going through an inbox is more like a job.”

Like more than 100,000 other IT entrepreneurs, Mr Bonnes applied to the Apple Developer Connection program to access the necessary software to create his app.

With up to four million iPads expected to be sold this year alone, Mr Bonnes’ potential market is huge.

His goal is to have his app on one per cent of all machines. With a yearly subscription fee of $US5, 70 per cent of which will go to his pocket under Apple’s developer scheme, he sums up.

He anticipates making My News Pad available at Apple’s App store in the coming weeks, once he has an opportunity to test it on the iPad.
“There’s a risk when you’re developing software for something you’ve never held in your hand, but thousands of other people have taken the same gamble,” he says.

All will be revealed tomorrow, however, after Mr Bonnes’ parents fly in from the US with his coveted iPad packed in their bags.