It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off.
When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobile apps gained a new way of sending information directly to users.
One of the categories where push notifications are most used and overused is news —every day, all the time. Suddenly, you can get breaking news updates pushed straight to your phone every hour of the day.
For this episode, James talked with Matt Galligan. Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of Circa, which was the first mainstream news app to approach news delivery in a fundamentally mobile-first way. They talked about what being mobile-first means, some of their highest-leveraged design decisions within Circa, how it was received among mainstream media, as well as its legacy in online journalism.
Matt Galligan is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco and is the CEO and Co-founder of Circa. He co-founded the company alongside Ben Huh in 2011.
A native of central Illinois, Galligan has worked at Monster Commerce and AOL Inc., and at Socialthing!, SimpleGEO, and TechStars, a seed-venture capital pool.
Matt Galligan
James Evans
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