It’s 7 a.m. You want to catch up with the news on your iPad, but you don’t want to jump from one app to another — tap here, tap there. You just want to discover the best and latest news videos in a snap.
Meet Watchup. Available in Apple’s App Store, Watchup lets you create your newscast in seconds with a unique tap-and-play interface. We pull up a lineup of your favorite news channels, and all you have to do is tap the clips you want to watch. They get all queued up in a beautiful playlist column, you get the total duration, and you’re done! You can now enjoy your breakfast or morning exercise or prepare your dinner while learning what’s up in the world!
the lasagna design
We’ve built Watchup with a comprehensive design philosophy in mind. We call it “Lasagna Design,” a new way to conceive app design by layers of information — just like in my grandma’s lasagna! While designing websites has been all about what to show, designing tablet apps, according to lasagna design, is all about what to hide — and how to hide it.
And we think that this clean, elegant design approach is perfect to serve our goal — to become the Hulu for news of the post-PC era, a discovery platform for high-quality news videos.
Incubated at StartX, the Stanford startup accelerator, and inspired by my research during my Knight Fellowship year at Stanford, Watchup was launched a few weeks ago, and it has already been featured in the AppStore News category, got a Knight News Challenge award at the MIT Media Lab, and came in second at the MobileBeat mobile innovation contest.
We’re partnering with top news organizations. The first premier partner we announced is the Wall Street Journal, which has been very aggressive with their video strategy. We are proud to partner with such a respected and forward-thinking organization.
Watchup lets you discover what’s up in the world through a curated lineup of high-quality news channels. Download it now, and let me know what you think!