As rumors swirl that Apple is considering subscription-only content for its News app, Microsoft is also looking to get in on the iOS news game. On Tuesday, they released a new app called News Pro, which boasts the tagline “hyper-relevant news for your work.”
Coming out of Microsoft’s experimental project group Microsoft Garage, the whole idea of News Pro is that it’s different from the other news apps on your device because it’s for work, not play. Microsoft calls it “your work news brief” and claim it will help you find the latest stories that apply to your profession across a million topics.
Think of it like Flipboard meets LinkedIn: you log-in with your work account (or Facebook), then pick the professional news trends that apply to you. Here’s the official description:
Find articles and topics you didn’t know you needed. News Pro allows you to extend the scope of your daily news updates by suggesting new topics to search based off your current interests and by helping you discover websites where you can read articles that are interesting to you. You can also search for news related to any topic right in the app so you can always be fully informed.
Personally, I don’t need another News app, but News Pro at least sounds like it’s trying to smartly differentiate itself from the pack.
You can download it for free from the iOS App Store here.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
