Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh is making good on his journalism degree by helping create a mobile news startup called Circa with Matt Galligan, co-founder of location startup SimpleGeo, which was bought by Urban Airship (see disclosure below). The startup has already pulled in $ 750,000 in seed funding and is expected to debut this fall.
Details about Circa have been vague, but the company said it is trying to re-imagine news for a mobile, online generation that grew up on smartphones and tablets. The idea is to create a news app that is enjoyable to use for short periods of time in a way that feels organic to mobile devices. That means rethinking the basic way news is formatted and packaged and how to keep things fresh and forward-looking.
I caught up with Huh at the Unity journalism conference in Las Vegas last week. He shared a bit about the vision that went into Circa and how news needs to evolve to fit a mobile audience.
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Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
