

Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding - plinkplonk
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/prismatic-gets-15m-from-jim-breyer-and-yuri-milner-to-attack-the-really-hard-problem-of-bringing-you-relevant-news/

======
briandoll
Great news! I've been using the Prismatic app daily since it came out. It
perfectly fits the job of "what's going on". I tend to skim on the iPhone and
save good articles to read later (or with Pocket, another favorite).

The tech is really interesting too. High Scalability had a post this summer on
how it all works: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/7/30/prismatic-
architec...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/7/30/prismatic-architecture-
using-machine-learning-on-social-netw.html)

~~~
bradfordcross
Jason is the man and we'll be prodding him into doing more posts and starting
to open source a bunch of our clojure stack.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The Graph library is intriguing to me, would love to see some of your stuff
open sourced.

~~~
bradfordcross
We're working on it. Hopefully we start to get some pieces out early next
year!

------
hpvic03
Congrats on the raise :)

I just tried Prismatic, and while it seems interesting I don't think I would
become a regular user. Though I may not the target audience.

I'm usually satisfied with Hacker News and The NY Times, though occasionally
I'll look at other mainstream news sites like CNN to make sure that I'm
getting a well rounded idea of what's going on in the world. I have Reddit
blocked on my computer, but I'll look at it on my phone for comedy &
interesting news.

After integrating with Facebook and Gmail, these are my current Prismatic
headlines:

* The Huffington Post: Release Of Cult Sandwich Slated For Dec. 17, McDonald's Announces (Bad)

* RollingStone: On the Charts: Alicia Keys' 'Girl on Fire' Leads Lukewarm Week (Bad)

* Webmonkey: A Look at the Future of CSS (Okay)

* Complex.com: Inside Johnny Depp's New $17.5 Million Home in Nashville, Tennessee (Really bad)

* Skysports: Graeme Smith determined South Africa maintain momentum against New Zealand (Really bad)

The problem I see is that (a) my Facebook likes aren't necessarily
representative of what I want to read about, and (b) even if they were, your
system doesn't know what priority to give each like.

The result looks to me like a page full of linkbait. My experience may not be
representative, but I thought I'd share it with you as it might be helpful in
fine tuning your product.

~~~
aero142
Agree, but let me ask you this. Do you want a personalized news feed of only
things you are interested in? They are working on making that and I'm not
aware of anyone else trying. It's not there yet but I like the idea.

~~~
hpvic03
I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's
just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories
ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do
that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm
interested in, and adding it to a feed reader.

Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the
system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I
have.

The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and
interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit
do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the
"Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on
the front page.

I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another
vertical, like the movie industry.

~~~
aero142
There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in.

I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like
Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity
between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they
are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build,
even if they aren't there yet.

~~~
hpvic03
I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or
interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's.

I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote
and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea.

Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm
assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the
codebase to an ambitious programmer.

------
filip01
Really love it when I stumble upon a new service that isn't only cool but also
really useful. It's not common for me to add an app that I'll actually use
daily or even weekly. It's also rare to see so many App Store reviews actually
being lyrical.

Some (UI/UX) thoughts for you Bradford:

\- Someone said that Flipboard looks better, I disagree. Flipboard (as well as
Summly and others) might be a bit more "sexy" but Prismatic has better
functionality + algorithm. Your funnel is really great.

\- The flashing Facebook/Twitter/Google buttons are really annoying. It also
makes me think that I'm accidentally hovering these buttons. Does this
dramatically increase conversion?

\- Someone mentioned here that your growth is not great (25K weekly). Do you
think that only traditional sharing options will be enough to achieve growth
corresponding to the goals this Series A indicates? I'm also thinking that
maybe it would be smarter to focus on only one platform (i.e Facebook only)
until you've figured out how to grow virally.

\- The iPhone experience was much better than the desktop one. This may be
because:

1\. Your visual design is very different on desktop compared to iPhone. It's
impossible to tell that it's the same service.

2\. The desktop layout is confusing:

\- The images are unnecessarily large (at least the really large ones)

\- There's something about the font that's not great (take a look at Scala
that the Stockholm/Berlin based Readmill is using)

\- Seeing zero stars and comments on almost each article is a bit boring, it's
not clear where the "home" button is (since it's located to the right)

\- I can't see why there's such a distinction between "home" and "world news"
- why not just get rid of "world news" and have a much more logical right menu

\- "Your suggestions" in the right menu are great but it doesn't make sense to
scroll horizontally.

Etc etc. (Should probably write you an email with screenshots + arrows
instead...)

\- The iPhone UI/UX has some flaws as well IMO. The menu is not always
logical:

1\. Since you've selected lots of topics in the funnel in order to add them to
your affinity algorithm it's confusing that touching the suggestions in the
menu takes me to a separate page instead of adding them. To add them, I
apparently need to click the plus icon to the right. I'd suggest you to add an
arrow to the left of each suggestion to solve this issue.

2\. There's not a clear way to my "home" screen. "Home" is located under "Your
activity" (why?!) and has some sub-categories; I'm still not sure why (in my
case) Programming, Startups and The New York Times are located below the home-
button.

3\. The headlines are not too pretty (too bold/too big) and "Search" is
slightly less bold which is not too nice (but obviously these are just
details).

Well, thanks a lot for building a great service. :)

EDIT: Just saw that your designer Mikael is also a ~22yo designer from
Stockholm, no wonder I'm a fan.

------
brador
25K weekly users...thats $600 a user, which pencils little
<http://skimfeed.com> at around $9 million :)

Any tips on how to score investment? Do you focus the pitch on the tech, the
idea/potential or the current product?

Any good reads for getting started with pitching?

------
toby
Congrats to Bradford! Prismatic really is great. Definitely one of the few
sites I use several times a day.

~~~
bradfordcross
Thanks Toby, hopefully we'll get good enough at hiring to take advantage of
the cash and make those several times a day a lot more enjoyable! :)

------
nhangen
So let me get this straight. TC only covers startups that have raised money,
and uses that as a metric for whether or not the story should be written?

~~~
bradfordcross
Actually, Alexia approached us months ago and had been converted into a
believer! It's a pretty common story for us. People are grumpy about news apps
because they've been frustrated in the past, then their friends share a bunch
of interesting stuff from prismatic, then they give us a chance.

~~~
nhangen
Well congrats, I'm glad to hear it. My co-founder uses your app every day and
loves it.

My beef is that it seems TC always ties news to funding cycles, which IMO puts
the focus on the wrong thing.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The author of this article injected herself into a good 30% of the story, so
you shouldn't be surprised that ego is a big part of what gets published over
there.

~~~
phil
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism>

------
salimmadjd
Great team, bad UX, unproven-approach and growing market. I love the brains
behind Prismatic, I'm unconvinced it's going to work. I've used it early on
and recommended to friends against lesser products (wavii, I only used once),
but I still come back to hacker news. For me the reason is simple and I have
given them the same feedback. I like to quickly glance over a simple list and
pick the stories that I want to read first. Prismatic is dictating and forcing
me to go through their order of content. Just put a fucking TOC or something
and let me jump to what I want to read. I have to mention, I'm one of those
guys who flips through a magazine finds something in the middle and don't read
it cover-to-cover which is what prismatic forces me to do. Is this problem
really that hard to solve, or are you guys are so stuck into solving
everything via just algorithms?

------
ampersandy
One thing that's tough to get right is timing email updates, and I think that
Prismatic's default is great. If I get too many emails from you, I'll filter
you out of my inbox (<cough>Quora</cough>).

I also enjoy that the updates selectively target a few of my interests, as
opposed to struggling to cram everything into a single email.

That aside, the profile page is very buggy. The interest bubbles doesn't seem
to be useful in any way, and the list view will keep stacking your interests
if you click it multiple times. Under my profile, where articles (apparently?)
should be, nothing is displayed. They only show up when I click 'Read.' I also
don't understand the point of having a clickable 'username', only to have it
change the text to 'Your Profile.'

~~~
bradfordcross
Yes, the profile is super broken and new. We're focusing a lot of energy on it
now. Please forward your bugs to feedback@getprismatic.com and they will be
fixed quickly.

------
mbesto
Great, another service trying to solve the signal to noise ratio. My thoughts
on this: [http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-
sol...](http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-solving-
signal-to-noise-problems-with-technology/)

~~~
bradfordcross
We are not solving the signal from noise problem. We think that's not the
right way to frame modern relevance.

~~~
mbesto
What problem would you say you're solving then?

------
simonw
I'd love to hook this up to my Twitter account, but they require read access
and I've already seen one person accidentally spam their Twitter stream
(<https://twitter.com/julien51> \- to be fair to Prismatic this looks like it
was a bug and they're actively reaching out to Julien to figure out what went
wrong).

Our startup used to ask people for write access (purely so we could implement
"follow" buttons - we never sent tweets on people's behalf) and it was a
frequent source of complaints, so we eventually switched to read-only with an
upgrade path to a write token later on: <http://lanyrd.com/2012/blog/twitter-
read-only/>

~~~
bradfordcross
Yes, please excuse this horrible issue. I think it is actually a UX fail, but
we are not quite sure yet and tracking it down!

------
james33
Why on earth do they default to sharing literally every action (meaning
everything I even just look at) to Twitter when I first connect. I just lost
followers because their app spammed about 50 messages in a few minutes. I
think I'll pass.

------
achompas
Congrats to the Prismatic team! I see Bradford is floating around answering
questions, so I'll shoot over two:

(1) Is an iPad app on your roadmap? Anything you'd like to announce? ;)

(2) You once had an excellent post on your personal blog called "Learning
About Machine Learning," with a list of excellent resources for learning about
ML and statistics from first principles. The original post seems to be gone;
are you hosting it somewhere else? I guess I could use the Wayback Machine if
anything, but I'm curious whether personal blog exists somewhere new.

~~~
bradfordcross
1) yes

2) i deleted my old blog

~~~
achompas
Thanks.

------
kia
There is a reason why I would never use such service like Prismatic. The main
problem for me here is that it creates a confined universe for you where you
are surrounded by only "relevant" information. For example I don't care much
about fashion, but once in a while reading NY Times I stumble upon a very
interesting articles about new trends in fashion or its history. It makes me
think out of the box and expands my knowledge. There is no way a service like
Prismatic would provide me with such articles based on my interests.

~~~
bradfordcross
You are bucketing Prismatic with "other services" without trying it or
understanding what it does. Give it a shot, I think you'll find that it is
designed to _increase_ those serendipitous finds, not to filter signal from
noise.

~~~
riffraff
I like prismatic, but it doesn't increase _that_ kind of serendipitous finds.

I follow mostly techie and economics topics, and I have never seen a fashion
article. Heck, I'd consider it a bug if I did :)

(I do not think that is the job prismatic should be doing either)

------
benbjohnson
Congratulations! The site is great. I use it every day. A few things I'd love
to see:

1\. API - I'd love to integrate with you guys.

2\. Daily e-mail - As much as I like to use the site sometimes I just want to
have stories pushed to me too.

3\. I would like to have a bar at the top of the list of stories that shows
what I have "saved for later". I usually save stories when I don't have time
to read them but I always forget to go back and read them because it's not in
front of my face.

Keep up the great work!

~~~
bradfordcross
thanks!

1\. look at the jobs page: <http://getprismatic.com/jobs> <\--- you will get
the platform soon if we have anything to say about it! :)

2\. see #1.

3\. Really interesting interaction idea. we're exploring "the many uses of
save" and this queuing behavior vs. longer term bookmarking is something we
think about a lot.

------
michelleclsun
Awesome, very useful product, definitely one of the most relevant news
aggregation services currently. The recent web redesign also enhanced desktop
use as well. Congratulations team!

~~~
bradfordcross
Great to hear you say that - the web app was such as disaster! now we have a
pretty good foundation to iterate fast on the web, which is super important
for some of the really finicky design problems like social interactions that
are so hard to iterate on mobile.

~~~
michelleclsun
Yeah, it's a visible improvement. And it's now my daily routine to go to
Hacker News and getPrismatic.com every morning! :)

One thing I missed was to navigate to topics from my home feed. Before I used
to be able to on the right menu I think, now I need to click into my profile
every time to go back to my subscribed interests.

It was useful to be able to view by topics because the home feed is a mashup
of all topics (which can range from work to personal interest). Would love to
hear your thoughts as well!

------
ivan_ah
Congratulations! Latent Dirichlet Allocation brings in the bacon.

------
jderick
I like the concept but when I tried it out it didn't bring up anything
interesting. It seems to have a heavy bias towards 'mainstream' news sites,
which I rarely like to read. It seems like it is totally missing out on the
'long tail' which IMHO is where most the value in a service like this lies.

The bubbles showing my 'interests' at the beginning looked quite promising, so
perhaps there is some tuning that could fix this (maybe even user
configuable?).

~~~
bradfordcross
you can search for and add just about anything you can think of. give it a
try. you'll quick branch out into totally new areas.

~~~
jderick
Where is the search box?

------
partisan
Very cool. I envision a future where everyone gets their media through an
"agent" that is truly tailor made for them. This looks like a step in that
direction.

How will Prismatic monetize? It would be a shame to see a service such as this
offer featured articles or some other form of influence for pay. In fact, it
would defeat the purpose of having something like this that would bring
smaller media companies to readers who want the content they provide.

~~~
bradfordcross
We have a really interesting revenue model based on driving transactions
rather than brand ads or promoted content. It'll take a while before we really
focus on it and cale it though.

~~~
partisan
Thanks for the response.

I look forward to seeing how you balance providing users the content they want
with driving transactions to meet your revenue targets. Sounds like an
interesting challenge.

------
curveship
I just tried Prismatic, and was perplexed when it started giving me lots of
news about central England. Huh?

Then it hit me: I live in Durham, NC. I hadn't told it that, but it probably
deduced it from my IP. And somewhere in its great NLP brain, Durham, NC and
Durham England are being mixed up.

Ah, the perils of AI.

------
dude_abides
Just tried out Prismatic and it seems to give suggestions much better than my
current favorite - Flipboard; on the other hand, Flipboard's UI is way way
better.

Something like Flipboard's UI + Prismatic's content would be a super awesome
product.

~~~
bradfordcross
We'd love to hear what you think stinks about our UI/UX. Reply here or ping us
at feedback@getprismatic.com

------
gallamine
For those that like this kinda of application, you might also like Zite (I use
both and am not affiliated with either): <http://www.zite.com/>

------
jazzychad
How does one log out of the iPhone app? I accidentally logged in w/ the wrong
Twitter account and now I can't figure out how to switch back to my normal
account...

------
ejp
Does anyone know why the app needs permission to manage Google Contacts? The
rest of the permissions make sense, I just don't get this one.

~~~
ampersandy
The Google Contacts OAuth authorization includes both read and write
permissions, though I'm sure the intent is just to get emails to invite
friends, share stories, etc.

[https://developers.google.com/google-
apps/contacts/v3/#autho...](https://developers.google.com/google-
apps/contacts/v3/#authorizing_requests_to_the_+wzxhzdk8+_service)

~~~
ejp
Thanks! I guess I was thinking of the Android permissions, which are separate
for read/write IIRC.

------
mountaineer
Is the "read" tab on my profile a privacy disaster waiting to happen? Is there
a way to clear that?

~~~
mountaineer
I see the setting now to not "publish" read articles to my profile, but no way
to clear that I can tell.

------
mikeklaas
Congrats to Bradford & his team. Good to see some real competition for Zite
for a change :)

------
nphrk
Great! I love the service, I miss only an app for my Android tablet. Keep up
the good work.

~~~
janaboruta
We're on it! We're planning on building a Prismatic app for all tablet and
mobile devices. An Android app is coming soon.

------
onetwothreefour
This is a huge waste of money, because they're going to be in the deadpool
within a year.

And I say that as someone who loves the tech behind it. But it's almost
pointless.

