It’s common practice to save an article for later reading using services like Pocket and Instapaper but the convenience comes at a price – procrastination. My reading list has swelled to embarrassing proportions and I’m nowhere close to being done with them. Information is driving our economy and we have a glut of information sources available which makes keeping up to date an exhausting ordeal. I recently talked about FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and the future of news but while the future is coming soon, I need help reading all these articles gathering dust in my Pocket!
You can Speed Read or better, UseClark, but sometimes a simple motivation could serve you much better than learning new things to read your pending things! Short app for iOS, filters articles from your list based on estimated reading time and lets you clear your backlog one “5 Minute Read” article at a time.
A Short & Sweet Start
Alex Muench, the founder and designer of Short, is still in college and studying Communication Design from Nuremberg University, Germany. Whereas I just slept throughout my college days! Alex also works as freelancing graphic designer, illustrator and art director. Helping him with the app development is co-founder Enric Enrich (cool name!) who works as an iOS and Mac developer by the day and single handedly develops Short by the night.
Alex got the idea to create Short when he started reading articles on Medium, a blogging platform founded by the guys behind Twitter, which shows a simple time estimate under each article telling users how long it’ll take to read it. He found it very effective and wanted something like this for every article online.
“Imagine you are waiting for someone and want to spend the time with a short article you saved on Pocket that just takes 5 minutes to read? Short helps you filter articles like that.”
The team faces difficulty in fast-tracking development as they are the only two involved and live in different countries! Enric works on the app from Spain but the duo are confident of getting things done anyway – they are not Short on spirit and enthusiasm!
Launching Shortly
Short is currently in beta testing phase and is getting great response from its first batch of testers. If you want to try out the beta app on your iPhone than just send them an email at [email protected] and mention that you are a Startup Dope reader.
It’ll launch on Apple devices first but an Android version as well as a web app is on the way. They face competition from ReadTime app which offers similar features but Short is aiming for a more complete feature set by not only integrating with Pocket, Instapaper and Readability but also pulling articles directly from the RSS feed of any website. Social networking features and gamification of the service is also planned.
The app will be free and a premium version will be introduced at a later stage. Stay updated with the latest developments at:
