Mobile content discovery engine, Evri, has seen a steady uptick in users since its late September launch. They offer a personalized, topic-based approach to news discovery in an effort to give users what marketplaces are lacking. Their iPad app is a big hit, and they’re unleashing some new features for users this week.

Going up against apps like Flipboard, Evri differentiates itself with the level of customization it offers for aggregated content.  The update to Evri’s iPad app gives users more control to discover the news that matters to them most. Evri decided to gather 60 of their most popular topics such as Movies, Personal Finance, Graphic Design, Venture Capital, etc. to form a colorful, easy-to-browse collection to jump-start your channels, and allow users to pin topics directly into their navigation experience along the way.

Evri’s core technology is its semantic capabilities, which it uses to analyze thousands of Web sources, categorizing them to deliver the most relevant searches to consumers via a suite of topic-based applications.

“We presented this list when Evri is launched for the first time, both to help new users get started, and to demonstrate that Evri lets them identify even very specific interests – e.g. it doesn’t have to just be about “Sports” in general, anything from “Basketball” to “Roller Derby” is also fair game!”

Evri’s efforts in content analysis and aggregation’s paid off.  Their iPad app saw 150k downloads in its first two months, and users quickly took to the personalization options, following over 50k topics.  Evri’s also reporting heavy repeat use, claiming over 60 percent of weekly users as repeat visitors.  This all translates into pretty high engagement, with the average user session lasting approximately 15 minutes.  That engagement translates into serendipitous content discovery throughout Evri’s app, as well as heightened sharing behavior for content within the app as well.

Evri has certainly found a niche in appealing to niche audiences, and the mobile sector’s been good for business.  While Evri’s iPad app has done well, the company is quite popular on Android too.  With a string of content-specific apps for sports, tech and entertainment news, Evri’s iPad app was actually an opportunity to take its semantic platform to the next level.

Which begs the question, will Evri’s inclusive news reader ever come to Android tablets? The answer is yes, and Evri’s currently looking at the Kindle Fire as its entry point into the Android tablet market.

“We want to be on any tablet provider with significant traction and for us that means the Kindle Fire first,” says Evri CEO Will Hunsinger.  “We want to provide an image-heavy experience and Amazon’s gotten around some of their hardware issues with Silk to deliver an experience nearly comparable to iOS without having to compromise our content.”

It certainly would be a smart move, naturally progressing to an Android tablet that’s centered around the e-reading industry.  Amazon’s made a big appeal to digital publishers with its online catalog and Kindle Fire, providing a target audience for Evri moving forward.  We could also see Evri’s app show up on Windows Phone in the near future, greatly expanding its aggregated news reader across the major mobile platforms.

Contributors: Kristina Farrah