Friday Roundup: Wavii Launches iPhone App, Pinerly Becomes Reachli, Meograph Gets More Updates

Wavii’s iPhone app

Remember Wavii? It’s the instant news feed for any topic, letting you follow issues and people from news sources around the world. Newsroom use cases include reporters on a beat or a homepage producer wanted to stay up-to-date on the latest trending news. The company has just debuted its newest 2.0 app for iOS devices.

From Wavii’s announcement, new features of the app:

• Smoother navigation, commenting and social sharing: The new app has a streamlined look and feel, it also includes a new social bar that lets you see what stories your friends have interacted with and enables you to easily share your thoughts too. You can also quickly share stories via email, or over to Facebook and Twitter.
•  More updates for any topic: A wider range of the world’s events as short, simple status updates in your newsfeed.
•  Quick and easy discovery of new topics to follow: Provides quick access to category feeds like “Popular,” “Tech,” and “Entertainment”, making it easier to discover new and interesting topics that you can follow to personalize your experience.
•  More ways to get started: You can now use Twitter or an email address to sign up, in addition to Facebook.

Pinerly becomes Reachli

Last time we wrote about Pinerly, we framed it as a site for tracking Pinterest analytics. Well they’ve rebranded and changed direction. The all-new Reachli expands beyond Pinterest images to now help you market all kinds of visual content across the web.

How does it work? Reachli turns your content into ads for your content. Not those “nasty old ads” (Reachli’s words, though I agree that most ads on the web are indeed nasty), but pretty ads that are part of your content and unobtrusive promotions on hover. The ads are a simple piece of text over a contextually-relevant image, like in the examples below, which advertise furniture (top) and an event (bottom):

Meograph updates

Meograph, the four-dimensional storytelling tool, got yet another round of interface updates following their bigger design overhaul in October. The updates are simple, but the company is continually tweaking its tool, piece by piece. Updates include:

• Better-organized contextual info: The “When and Where” information for the maps and timelines are better positioned and there’s an added description field right below the player.
• Highlighting the most important content: The media is bigger and better proportioned to highlight the most visual elements of a Meograph.

On a related note, the company also published a recent example of how a news organization might want to use the tool to capture its top stories of the year. It’s worth checking out if you’re looking to try something new.