VareseNews Apps: a gift for Epiphany

A little before the arrival of the kind old witch, you’ll be able to find VareseNews Apps in your Epiphany stocking. The application for iPhones has actually been active for almost six months, and we’ve now got to version 1.1. On the other hand, the application for the Android operating system is brand-new.

Never fear for the people who read our website from their PCs or tablets. Everything is as it was (or almost, because in 2013, you’ll see a lot of innovations), and you’ll be able to keep on surfing as you’ve always done.

This “gift” is for the people who use a smartphone a lot. It has clearly been a “necessary” step for VareseNews, if we consider that, in just four years, connections to our website from mobile phones have increased from 2% to 20%, which means that there are 15-20,000 reading sessions of our newspaper, on mobile phones, every day.

What you will find is not just a simple re-presentation of the VareseNews you can read from your computer. The applications have four distinct areas: news, community, multimedia and VN reporter, the latter of which, in particular, allows you easily to send material to the newspaper.

There is also the opportunity to share news, photos and videos easily with social networks, or using email.

The Android application has been designed and developed by Lab#ID, of the LIUC University, in Castellanza, by the senior researcher Giuseppe Catalfamo.

In addition to the developer, the people involved in the project are Mauro Mezzenzana, Samuele Astuti and Giacomo Buonanno.

“In a technological era,” they explained, “when online contents are increasingly accessed using mobile phones, we believe it’s necessary to change the mentality of trying to “adapt” contents to the mobile devices, to designing and distributing them to work as best they can on these new communication platforms. With this technology, we believe not only that we can approach new users, but also that we can foster the creation and sharing of information created by readers themselves, distributed throughout the country, in such a way that they can be real time reporters of what is happening around them.”

The VareseNews application, which is already available on Google Play, the marketplace of Android applications, has been created, and will continue to evolve, with the aim of bringing information to those are looking for it.

With the same logic, the project with Gino Sarnieri of Sviluppo 4 Mobile began about a year ago. The result was the creation of the application for the Apple world. Without any advertising, over 1500 readers have already downloaded and use this app; we currently have one thousand visits a day from iPhones alone.