Evri, a leading innovator in news discovery, announced the launch of Evri for iPad. This is the first iPad app that lets users build their own news experience from millions of topic choices, each with an individual news channel.

Evri’s known for its news filtering capabilities, launching the personalized news reader after years of successful launches of categorical news apps on iOS and Android.  This new application represents the next step in improving the way users find and follow the news they care about, and uses Evri’s breakthrough content filtering technology to constantly and automatically index more than 2.5 million popular topics from over 15 thousand of the Web’s best sources. It also includes advanced content recommendations – suggesting related topics for every article in every topic.  The app is free and can be downloaded here.

“Evri pioneered personalization of the news experience by allowing a user to follow specific topics rather than individual sources,” says Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. “While others have attempted to replicate the concept, none can deliver on the promise because they lack the technological platform that makes Evri topical streams relevant and timely, with a depth and breadth unmatched by simpler aggregators and RSS readers.”

This is the latest in a series of products by Evri to advance the way users discover new content about their favorite topics, with successful apps like EvriThing Baseball propelling the company’s core technology across various categories.  The new app empowers users to identify what they are passionate about, while delivering the top news from across the web.  Evri strikes a balance between personalized news feeds and serendipitous discovery. Evri also distills the latest trending media into intelligent, intuitive topical streams and makes it easy for users to discover the great content they love. The scope of Evri’s massive index enables a level of granularity that runs from top-level subjects and themes to feeds for individual stories and people.

Evri’s unique, topic-based approach is a new category of news readers in a space dominated by apps that use only social feeds and RSS-based aggregation.  On the immersive interface of the iPad, Evri pulls in material from both the traditional and social web to create a rich blend of media content. Evri for iPad also integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later and a number of other complementary apps to provide a comprehensive, “one-stop-shop” experience for users.

The semantic “serendipitous” discovery feature was probably the most challenging for Evri, taking it from a topic-specific app to a full-featured, inclusive iPad app that spans several categories and is highly personalized for each user.  “The sheer volume of content we’re sifting through, as well as understanding it and making coherent recommendations…that’s probably one of the biggest challenges in developing this app,” says Will Hunsinger, Evri’s CEO.

“Step one is to apply our NLP to extract and categorize topics,” Hunsinger explains.  “We do it well on the backend, but displaying that on a mobile device is no trivial task.  We have our own indexing system to take sources and organize into topics.  Step two: popularity signals within the content.  What’s credible and how frequently is it being discussed across sources and in what context?”

Evri’s launching its new app in an era of rising interest and demand for personalized content delivery services, leveraging data and creating new methods of analysis to take its news reader beyond socially generated feeds and mainstream sources.  Hunsinger recognizes the power in data, and plans on creating more contextualized analysis around relational data, looking at location and more user data for future updates to the app.  An Android version is on the way, and we’re likely to see RSS feed support in the future as well.

It’s a highly competitive space for Evri, and it has to go up against the likes of Flipboard. It is the most popular in its market, spurring a number of Flipboard wannabes in the app store these days, including  Zite for iPad, which CNN acquired last month. It is a personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it.

Not surprisingly, AOL has a mobile news reader called Editions for iPad last August, and Yahoo! will soon be launching their news app Livestand, which presumably will be for most available tablet out in the market today.  Both AOL and Yahoo are looking to personalized news delivery as a way to regain traction in a shifting era where content is king.

Google is also rumored to be making their very own Flipboard competitor called Google Propeller, which Robert Scoble describes as “mind-blowing good.”

Contributors: Mellisa Tolentino