Peekster, another recent graduate from the Wayra U.K. startup bootcamp, wants to help smartphone users connect their offline reading habits with their online social networks.
Yes, this startup is banking on dead tree media being around for a while yet. Long enough for it to build a business that bridges the gap between paper-based media and the digital world, anyway.
How does Peekster work? It’s built an app that lets smartphone users scan the headline (or a paragraph of text) of an article they are reading in a paper publication and match it to a database of digital articles from the same publication.
The app then retrieves the digital version of the article — enabling the Peekster user to share it with their social networks, or save the article to a read-later service like Pocket, or carry on reading it then and there on their phone.
It also recommends related content from multiple publications to help users discover more stuff they’re interested in reading about.
Peekster’s scanning system isn’t flawless; clearly if an online sub-editor has changed a print headline for SEO-boosting purposes (for instance) the app is not necessarily going to be able to locate the right story. But the algorithm does try to find close/similar matches as well as exact matches, to spread its net a little wider:
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