SmartNews launches in over 150 countries to battle Flipboard

SmartNews might be headquartered in Tokyo, but the news curation service is quickly distancing itself from its Japan-only beginnings. From today, the app can be accessed in over 150 countries worldwide.

The startup has gained 1 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the United States in its first three months of operation there. A Flipboard competitor, SmartNews tries to distinguish itself by using a proprietary algorithm to supply users with the top news stories directly pertinent to them as well as generally trending pieces.

A source of strength for SmartNews is that it can rely on experienced media hands like Rich Jarolowsky, former managing editor of the online Wall Street Journal, to closely observe the algorithm’s results and make adjustments as necessary. Though he has been a key team member for the American launch, the company does not intend to hire a host of editors going forward. Instead, it wants to hire the best natural language processing engineers.

“SmartNews is unique in that we are powered 100 percent by machine learning algorithms. From day one, we decided to build SmartNews as a machine learning company […] This is a massive undertaking, to evaluate the quality, language, importance and relevance of each article and deliver it to the audience in real-time, and it requires a very strong data science team,” co-founder Kaisei Hamamoto tells Tech in Asia.

The international launch comes as the firm’s growth has been accelerating in its home market. Since it first released a television commercial (always a good way to get users in Japan) last August, the apps download numbers have nearly doubled to 10 million. The firm declined to disclose the latest monthly and daily active user figures, but Hamamoto did note that the company has been growing at a substantially faster pace than it was in December, when it announced 4 million MAU in Japan.

The downloading trend for SmartNews