A startup called Meep is launching today with a new mobile app that reads news articles aloud so you can listen while you drive or do other activities. You can follow certain topics and thereby customize the stream of stories.
“The easiest way to explain it is that it’s like a Pandora for news,” Meep founder and chief executive Mark DiPaola, formerly chief executive of beacon company inMarket, told VentureBeat in an interview.
The free iOS app is live now in the App Store, and the Android app will appear in the Play Store in a few weeks.
Meep’s building on some interesting concepts.
Swell, an app that allowed people to discover podcasts based on their interests, got acquired by Apple last year. Umano, which hired voice artists to read certain news stories so that news organizations could present them to their audiences, got acquired and shut down by Dropbox.
Flipboard, an app you can use to flip through news articles and blog posts on subjects you like, recently took on a $50 million funding round following reports of a possible acquisition by Twitter. Meanwhile, news app Circa recently shut down.
Meep, for its part, intends to provide you with the information you need to know in an interesting way.
Above: Meep on iOS.
Stories are three to five minutes each, and you’ll hear a variety of them if you’re listening for a while. Articles are either read by voice artists or an automated text-to-speech system.
“If there’s one you’d don’t like, swipe down,” DiPaola said. “If something’s wrong with the voice artist or the story, we’ll play less of those in future.”
You can subscribe to specific news outlets if you so choose. Or you can just listen to “popular” stations. But the story selection gets especially customized when you type in a subject to follow.
Between news stories, Meep plays short 30-second clips of music from the genres you have selected. It also throws in brief local weather forecasts, stock price updates, and even horoscopes, if you want.
The app also comes with a neat sharing mechanism. You can record a “meep” of yourself — a voice recording — talking about a story you like and then send it to a friend.
DiPaola loves the idea of Meep so much that he’s put $1 million of his own money into the Venice, California-based startup, which now has four employees and a growing number of voice artists who record as many stories as they want.
“There’s literally — not figuratively, literally — 1 million different stations you can create,” DiPaola said.
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