Update for every day: Springer and Samsung launch Upday

Mathias Döpfner, CEO at media group Springer, is not exactly what you'd call a humble man. With this in mind, the statement Döpfner made about Jan-Eric Peters last year seems even more impressive. According to Döpfner, Peters was the best editor-in-chief the world had ever seen. This is no less than an accolade for Peters, considering that Döpfner himself used to be editor-in-chief at Springer once. Jan-Eric Peters will become product manager at Upday.

According to Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the executive board of Axel Springer SE: "With Peter Würtenberger and Jan-Eric Peters two genuine digital innovators will take over the general management of UPDAY. I'm very pleased that our new international product will benefit from their excellent marketing knowledge, innovative strength in journalism and their substantial track records as digital managers."

Upday is a strategic partnership between Springer and the South Korean technology group Samsung. In an initial communication released last autumn, Springer called Upday a "platform for aggregated news content". From this month on, Upday will be pre-installed on all new Samsung smartphones. A simple sweep to the right will open the application. Upday is not the first news aggregator on the market, however, what distinguishes the application from competing products such as News360 or Nuzzle is the fact that is fed by its own editorial department. Upday's editorial team provides users with "top news" teasers which link to external offers when clicked on. At the same time users can select topics that are of interest to them. Upday will summarise all articles that could be of interest to the user in the app's "my news" area. The more you use the app the better the algorithm that the system is based on will function. As it is directly integrated in the smartphone this type of adaptive content or personalised interaction has the potential to revolutionise reading behaviour.

Springer once again demonstrates that they are at the vanguard of digitisation. This is also evident in a new brochure entitled "<link http://www.berlin.de/projektzukunft/uploads/tx_news/PZU_Verlagsbroschuere_210x297_ICv2_RZ03_lowRES.pdf>Berlin – Stadt der Verlage</link>" (Berlin - City of Publishers). The brochure reveals that digital contents accounted for more than half of the total revenue recorded in the last quarter of 2014. At the time, Springer chairman Mathias Döpfner said that this was a "symbolic milestone". Döpfner wants to see Upday installed on ten million smartphones as soon as possible. And this is only supposed to the beginning.