Pulse, the News reading app is reportedly being bought by LinkedIn

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Pulse has indeed come a long way, and the amount of growth it has seen in past few years is commendable to say the least. Hence it isn’t the acquisition that comes as a surprise, rather the company involved in the acquisition. If the reports by AllThingsD are to be believed, the deal will be over by this week.

LinkedIn is all set to buy one of the most used New Reading app, Pulse for about $50 – $100 million. Pulse makers claim that 10 million stories are read per day on their app by the 20 million users.  The stories are shared on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and interesting stories being saved on services like Evernote, Pocket and Instapaper. Also involved in the talks were Microsoft and Yahoo. Other rumored companies interested in the acquisition were Amazon, Facebook and Gannett. The deal is almost final and will most likely be announced this week. Pulse was developed by two Stanford University graduates, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta. The app was a hit among the users, especially techies as soon as it had launched in 2010. Steve Jobs had praised the app too, at a developer’s conference and Pulse later won the Apple Design Award in 2011. Pulse raised around 10 million from various investors such as Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, Lightspeed Investment Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Lerer Ventures. Here are Some Apps similar to Pulse

Flipboard

Flipboard is probably one of the most widely used applications in its category. It is available on Apple and was made available for Android users a while ago. It has a completely different and rather interesting interface. As the name suggests, you actually “Flip” through the pages to see the news. It connects with the social accounts and displays the most interesting stories available. Like all other news reading app, you can read news in different categories like Technology, Business, Sports, Photography and Travel to name a few. And you can connect almost all famous social networks. Apple named its iPad version the Apple iPad app of the year for 2010.

Google Currents

Google Currents got off to a slow start initially. But the update to the version 2.0 gave the app a design makeover. Unlike Pulse or Flipboard, it doesn’t give a quick view and if you have added a lot of publishers in different categories, it might take a while for the news feed to completely load. App speed might be an issue if you are using an older device. The issues mentioned above are the main reason why the app has not been able to garner favorable reviews. if you have the patience required, the app has a really long list of publishers available in the app.

Circa

Circa is another app worth mentioning. The app also makes the news available for offline reading. It offers a quick view and even the story itself is short, without missing out the key points. It has a neat user interface, almost looks and feels like a news paper. It allws us to “follow” a particular story so we are informed as soon as a new or updated story related to the followed article is out. These are some apps which provide news across various news publishers. If you only wish to read news from a specific website or publisher, most of them now have an app available.

Photo Credit – Johan Larsson/Flickr

Darshik is an IT Professional who in his leisure time loves writing Blogs, Reading, quite a movie buff, and most of all having hanging out with friends.

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