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Smart News is a news aggregation service with a unique take on news filtering. that allows users to receive filtered news based on location or topic. Primarily, Smart News is an app, a whole suite of apps in fact, 26 in total, each dedicated to a specific country, region or topic. So if you want to stay update on Egypt, you download Smart News Egypt, if you like to keep an eye on business news, you download the Business Smart News app. The idea was to reduce clutter, even remove it completely, and offer users a clean way to access news specific to where they are, a region of interest, or topics they wish to follow. The service is being developed by Mohamed Samy and Ahmed Al-Husseiny - the guys behind the location aware retail marketing platform Zimoro.

The plan for Smart News is to provide its service over a variety of platforms: mobile apps, a web page, and a Facebook app. For now, all the apps are available on iOS, compatible for both iPhone and iPad, and a Smart News Egypt is available on the Google Play Store. In the near future, all the version will be available on all platforms, that includes often forgotten Windows Phone as well.

The 26 apps can be classified under three categories: country based filtering, region based and topic based. You’ll find 15 of the first kind - including the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt from the region, dedicated apps for Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Benelux (a union entity of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Europe, the Gulf, Oceania and Latin America. Each of these will provide you with a variety of feeds covering general news, sports, business, entertainment, and so on. Finally, there are three themed apps, one for business, one for entertainment, and one for science and technology.

All apps are practically clones of one another in terms of functionality. In each app, news is gathered from local newspapers. In Egypt for example, you will be able to access Dostor, El Masry El Youm, El Wafd, El Shorouk, and El Watan to name a few. You also can also access live stream channels, Al Arabia, Aljazeera, BBC Arabic, CNN and such. You have the ability to manage news sources and pick your favorite ones, set notifications and alarms, and search by keyword. You can customize the look of the app as well, change colors and skins, for a better reading experience. You get a selection of 10 different languages for both the interface and the news feeds. Those include Arabic, English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Naturally, all the social, and non social - sharing features are there: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, email & SMS.

Additionally, in about 6 months time,t he apps will be open to citizen journalism whereby anyone will be able to add articles, photos and even videos. This content will be unfiltered, there will be no restrictions, any users will be able to add content and report on anything they like.

To get a better idea on the concept behind Smart News, I had a chat with co creator Mohamed Samy. Mohamed graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 97. He has worked in Egypt, the KSA, Sweden and Dubai across a variety of field: business development, petrochemicals, construction and IT, before he came back 4 years ago and started to develop apps on Facebook. But it wasn't until after the Egyptian revolution, when social media exploded, that they decided to shift their focus to mobile. Along with Ahmed, they conceived of Smart News as a portal built around three types of feeds: written press from local publications, live streams of local channels, and the upcoming citizen journalist feature. Those three pillars, as Mohamed describes them, "are everything you need."

This is a unique take on news aggregation services. Conventional wisdom is to centralize all and every possible source, in order to maximize choice for consumers, into one app and then give the user the ability to chose their own filters because maximizing choice also means maximizing the number of users. Smart News isn't that different though, the effort to give users a lot of choice is there, but you’ll need to download a significant number of apps to get the same result. So does this decentralized approach make sense? Yes, if what you are looking for is a clean, uncluttered portal, and my guess is that there are a lot of people out there that are looking for this type of experience. That logic is also echoed in the pricing strategy. The developers have decided to ditch ads - aka clutter - and sell the app for 2 dollars.

It’s a smart bet as well from the developers, especially when you consider that the cost to develop all those additional apps is practically negligible, so infinitesimally small since it’s the same app.