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Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

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Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#61

Post by jderick »

bradfordcross wrote: post #43
jderick wrote: post #32

I like the concept but when I tried it out it didn't bring up anything interesting. It seems to have a heavy bias towards 'mainstream' news sites, which I rarely like to read. It seems like it is totally missing out on the 'long tail' which IMHO is where most the value in a service like this lies. The bubbles showing my 'interests' at the beginning looked quite promising, so perhaps there is some tuning that could fi…

you can search for and add just about anything you can think of. give it a try. you'll quick branch out into totally new areas.

Where is the search box?

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#62

Post by filip01 »

Really love it when I stumble upon a new service that isn't only cool but also really useful. It's not common for me to add an app that I'll actually use daily or even weekly. It's also rare to see so many App Store reviews actually being lyrical.

Some (UI/UX) thoughts for you Bradford:

- Someone said that Flipboard looks better, I disagree. Flipboard (as well as Summly and others) might be a bit more "sexy" but Prismatic has better functionality + algorithm. Your funnel is really great.

- The flashing Facebook/Twitter/Google buttons are really annoying. It also makes me think that I'm accidentally hovering these buttons. Does this dramatically increase conversion?

- Someone mentioned here that your growth is not great (25K weekly). Do you think that only traditional sharing options will be enough to achieve growth corresponding to the goals this Series A indicates? I'm also thinking that maybe it would be smarter to focus on only one platform (i.e Facebook only) until you've figured out how to grow virally.

- The iPhone experience was much better than the desktop one. This may be because:

1. Your visual design is very different on desktop compared to iPhone. It's impossible to tell that it's the same service.

2. The desktop layout is confusing:

- The images are unnecessarily large (at least the really large ones)

- There's something about the font that's not great (take a look at Scala that the Stockholm/Berlin based Readmill is using)

- Seeing zero stars and comments on almost each article is a bit boring, it's not clear where the "home" button is (since it's located to the right)

- I can't see why there's such a distinction between "home" and "world news" - why not just get rid of "world news" and have a much more logical right menu

- "Your suggestions" in the right menu are great but it doesn't make sense to scroll horizontally.

Etc etc. (Should probably write you an email with screenshots + arrows instead...)

- The iPhone UI/UX has some flaws as well IMO. The menu is not always logical:

1. Since you've selected lots of topics in the funnel in order to add them to your affinity algorithm it's confusing that touching the suggestions in the menu takes me to a separate page instead of adding them. To add them, I apparently need to click the plus icon to the right. I'd suggest you to add an arrow to the left of each suggestion to solve this issue.

2. There's not a clear way to my "home" screen. "Home" is located under "Your activity" (why?!) and has some sub-categories; I'm still not sure why (in my case) Programming, Startups and The New York Times are located below the home-button.

3. The headlines are not too pretty (too bold/too big) and "Search" is slightly less bold which is not too nice (but obviously these are just details).

Well, thanks a lot for building a great service. :)

EDIT: Just saw that your designer Mikael is also a ~22yo designer from Stockholm, no wonder I'm a fan.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#65

Post by hpvic03 »

grayrest wrote: post #53
hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

I seeded it off twitter, which I primarily use to keep tabs on developers and software projects I care about. I've been happily using it for 5 (?) months now and find it to generally be the highest signal to noise aggregator of tech news that I've used. For comparison, my first few headlines: * Opponents of Egypt's Morsy continue protests (CNN) * Facebook snubs 'Subscribe' button in favor of Twitter-esque 'Follow' on…

That's interesting. So it seems that Twitter integration provides the best content. I'm don't use Twitter very much, so that's not an option for me.

If my experience is the same as every other non-twitter user's, then it's likely that Prismatic's user base will be limited only to twitter users, unless they can improve their product.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#66

Post by mnicole »

aero142 wrote: post #49
hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

> Do you want a personalized news feed of only things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not aware of anyone else trying.

Over the years a lot of services have tried to do this exclusively, but Flipboard is the only one that has bridged the gap between "stuff I definitely want to read" and "stuff on the fringes I wouldn't have actively sought but am happy I found."

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#67

Post by hpvic03 »

aero142 wrote: post #59
hpvic03 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader. Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-catego…

There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in. I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.

I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's.

I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea.

Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#68

Post by partisan »

bradfordcross wrote: post #44
partisan wrote: post #35

Very cool. I envision a future where everyone gets their media through an "agent" that is truly tailor made for them. This looks like a step in that direction. How will Prismatic monetize? It would be a shame to see a service such as this offer featured articles or some other form of influence for pay. In fact, it would defeat the purpose of having something like this that would bring smaller media companies to reade…

We have a really interesting revenue model based on driving transactions rather than brand ads or promoted content. It'll take a while before we really focus on it and cale it though.

Thanks for the response.

I look forward to seeing how you balance providing users the content they want with driving transactions to meet your revenue targets. Sounds like an interesting challenge.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#69

Post by mikeklaas »

jsnell wrote: post #56
hpvic03 wrote: post #48

Congrats on the raise :) I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience. I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit blocked on my computer, but I'll…

That matches my experience pretty well. The initial sets of results after seeding from my Google social graph / reader subscriptions were mostly about the petty internals of US politics, US professional and college-level sports, unimportant local news from different parts of the US, CSS, and random celebrities. That's about the least interesting thing I can think of, and I can't imagine how it ended up with that kind…

For those trying out the automatic start, I'd be curious to see how your experience compares with Zite's auto-twitter/google reader/fb startup, if you're willing to give it a shot.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#70

Post by mbesto »

bradfordcross wrote: post #28
mbesto wrote: post #14

Great, another service trying to solve the signal to noise ratio. My thoughts on this: http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...

We are not solving the signal from noise problem. We think that's not the right way to frame modern relevance.

What problem would you say you're solving then?
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