New Google Magazine Newsstand Evrything You Want At One Place

Image: Google

Google released a new magazine and news-reading app for Android today designed to bring all your daily reads together into one piece of software. The new app, called Newsstand, features both magazines and newspapers, and you can add feeds from blogs and other websites as well. Google says as you use the app, it will learn what kinds of sources and stories you prefer and begin presenting a tailored experience.

The app is launching with full length (rather than summary or preview) content from newspapers likeThe New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, and magazines such as Vanity Fairand WIRED. Although stories from various publications will be presented side by side with each other, you can also import your existing magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

It’s not Google’s first effort at something like this, but it brings together many of the features of Play Magazines and Currents, Google’s previous reading apps, into a single interface. (The former was essentially a magazine store and reading experience, while the latter was a Flipboard-style app that also gave a curated news experience from a variety of sources.) But unlike Currents, Newsstand has quite a few tools designed to let publishers better control their content. It supports paywalls, for example. Read a story from The New York Times, and it will count as one of your 15 free stories for the month, but also give you the opportunity to subscribe from within the app. Meanwhile, magazines show up when a new issue comes out, not on a story-by-story basis, and clicking on the cover image that comes up in the Newsstand feed will take you to a fully designed version of the magazine’s app (if it has one) that runs inside Newsstand.

It also has features designed to help you drill down onto stories you care about. Google calls these topic tags. A story on the senate’s hearing on Bitcoin, for example, might have a Bitcoin tag in the lower right corner. Click on it, and you’ll get more Bitcoin-related stories. The more you dive into these, the more you will see over time. Google says it’s also pulling in signals from outside of Newsstand, such as search queries and presumably what you’re looking at if you’re logged into the Chrome browser. Although it makes some use of location, the company says that’s not a main focus for news delivery yet.

It’s available today in the Play store.

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Supporting entrepreneurship in France at Le Camping

Entrepreneurs all around the world are building technologies that empower their communities and address both local and global audiences. Last week, a team of Googlers from 10 countries gathered in Paris to spend time with entrepreneurs and startups at Le Camping, an accelerator program that’s part of Silicon Sentier, an association focused on supporting promising digital projects in the Ile de France region. We celebrated the results of the first two seasons of the program and welcomed the new startups for season three.

Le Camping’s program selects 12 new startups each season (one season lasts six months). They “camp” in what used to be the facilities of the French Stock Exchange, symbolizing the bridge between the old and the new economy. During this time, the “campers” are coached by 60 mentors, mostly entrepreneurs but also engineers. We’ve been working in partnership with Le Camping for the last two seasons to provide hands-on training and mentorship to the 12 companies in each class.

We’ve already seen great success from the program. Out of the 24 teams from first two seasons, 40 percent of the startups have raised funds, 60 percent have paying clients and all of the startups belong to a strong and reliable community. The program does not take equity in the startups or charge them to take part; all that’s required is vision, passion and the desire to address a global audience.



This is just one of our efforts to support entrepreneurs in France. Last year we also launched Startup Cafe, an online platform which provides access to educational video content from several business schools designed for entrepreneurs, tools to help start a business and, with the help of the Agency for the Creation of Entrepreneurs, a map of public organizations that can help entrepreneurs.

We believe that the Internet and entrepreneurship are key drivers of economic development. A study from the European Commission highlighted that small enterprises are the driver for growth and employment: they generate nearly 70 percent of jobs in Europe and 60 percent of economic value added. McKinsey’s "Impact of Internet on the French economy" reported that when French SMEs use more web technologies, their growth is faster, their operating revenues are higher and their profitability is stronger.

We look forward to continuing to support entrepreneurship in France and are excited to follow the progress of the teams in season three of Le Camping: Home’n’go, Explee, Sketchfab, ForgetBox, Stormz, Fleex, Veezio, JellyNote, Augment, Webshell, Poutsch, Whale Street. Stay tuned!

Posted by Elisabeth Bargès, Public Policy Manager, Google France 

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