TECHNICK

Sometimes it feels like local news has disappeared, or is at least undergoing a massive transformation. With the consolidation of “old media” and the advent of “new media” (a.k.a. some guy in his underpants sitting in a 1-bedroom apartment blogging about what he sees out his window), it’s difficult to get quality location-based news from one single source. A few startups are working on solving this problem, and Fwix is among them. Fwix automatically curates real-time local news and delivers them to you via their website, Fwix.com. has raised over $2.5M so far led by BlueRun Ventures.

Today, Fwix announces their “City Apps” which are local news applications for the iPhone and WebOS platforms. Much like Fwix’s online service, each application is specific to a city or general area, such as SF Bay Area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Los Angeles. Though Fwix.com is available for 150+ cities, Fwix only offers 6 city apps for mobile. Sorry Louisville and Oklahoma City: better luck next time. Fwix already has an application for the iPhone, but these are city-specific and offer new features. Available cities are San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle.

According to CEO Darian Shirazi, who started Fwix at just 22 years old, Fwix.com differentiates itself from the plethora of local news competitors by providing both professional/mainstream content and blog or “indie” content. They index a large set of sources and focus on real-time news, which as we all know, is a hot topic these days. Fwix’s biggest competitor, Topix.com, is the heavyweight in the local news aggregation market, and has been in business since 2002. Other competitors include content companies such as CBS, ABC and NBC, which have various mobile and web properties related to providing professionally-created local news.

Darian told me that Fwix.com has seen significant growth since it’s inception a year ago, with over 500K unique visitors per month to their website and over 9 million visitors to sites that have the Fwix widget installed. They only get 30% of their traffic through SEO, which is a shockingly low percentage for a site like Fwix.

The mobile applications offer a slick user interface and a near real-time flow of news stories. One cool feature is the ability to view the stories on a map of the area – with the location of each story being denoted by a pushpin on the map. You can download the apps on iTunes.

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