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Sayonara iCurrent

iCurrent Logo.png

I confess to being one of those beta testers that startups hate. One of those that begs for an early invite, then doesn’t use the system, and doesn’t even provide any feedback. In the case of iCurrent, I’m guilty as charged.

I was seduced by Ramana Rao, who’s research, companies, and blog I’ve been following for a long time. The iCurrent vision was definitely simpatico with some thoughts I’ve long had about personalized news. As soon as Rao announced the product, I immediately asked for an invite.

So what caused me to recently turn off my iCurrent e-mail subscription, with a whole bunch of unread messages? The reasons probably start with this quote from Rao:

We spent the first 6 months building a conceptually complete architecture. Not architecture in the sense of a scalable Internet architecture, but as in a framework with places for the ideas. We implemented enough at coarse 90% levels so that we could assess proceeding. Beyond the airflow simulation, it was wind tunnel tests, and then enough of an airplane to test in real world conditions.

Throughout we interviewed people all over the US (Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida), a typical qualifier being not knowing what “TechCrunch” was.

That should have disqualified me instantly. In addition, I observed the following:

  • I read news in my RSS aggregators: Google Reader and NetNewsWire. I don’t want to add any other “locations” such as another website or e-mail.

  • Rating is work. I know iCurrent demands people in the loop, but for me I didn’t want to put in the work.

  • The channels that seemed closest to my interests weren’t close enough. For example, the house music channel pulled in too many false positives of articles that include the words “house” and “music” or that were simply event announcements.

  • The majority of sources were mainstream media, which I’ve mostly given up on for the news I care about.

  • Channels only presented small numbers (< 10) of articles. I’m just wired for much higher rates of information flow.

I wish iCurrent the best of luck. If they can pull off aggregation for the average non-techie it’ll be a big winner. I remember Daylife trying to hoe this row and changing course to become a smart content provider for publishers. If there’s one suggestion I had for iCurrent, it might be to provide an API to allow others to experiment with human in the loop in those places they can’t service, like feed readers.

Flash Update. Turns out iCurrent was purchased by the Washington Post Company back in July. If MediaBeat is right, and the purchase price was in the neighborhood of $5 million, that’s not encouraging for personalized news as a business. iCurrent’s only investor, Crosslink Capital, put in $3 million over about 3 years. That’s probably not an acceptable rate of return for a venture capital firm.

And I don’t have a lot of confidence that WaPo can make something significant out of the acquisition. Besides, iCurrent limited to one source doesn’t seem all that useful.

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