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Thursday 22 December 2011

Meet Circa, The Stealthy ‘News Experience’ Startup From Ben Huh And SimpleGeo Founder Matt Galligan

Circa.
As we heard in August, SimpleGeo founder Matt Galligan left the company to pursue other interests. SimpleGeo was then bought by UrbanAirship in November, and fellow co-founder Joe Stump left the newly acquired startup to launch new projects like Sprintly and (just today) Lens.ly. Galligan recently announced that he teamed up with Shervin Pishevar to launch their new organization 1% of Nothing, which is aimed at inspiring early-stage companies and entrepreneurs to donate 1% of their equity to a cause of their choice. And now it looks like Galligan also may have another startup up his sleeve—Circa.
According to this AngelList posting, Galligan is teaming up with Cheezburger founder and CEO,Ben Huh, to launch Circa. Huh will take a non-operational role, but will be an advisor and on the board of directors. Details on what Circa is are unclear but it appears that the startup will be focusing on disrupting the news and content space. From the posting, We want to create the best news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering the readers.
Galligan tells me that Huh came up with basic idea for Circa from his “Moby Dick Project,” whose goal is to create discussions about how and what can be done to solve the problems we face with news presentation. Galligan says the concept has evolved significantly from some of these early thoughts.
Galligan explains, “We’ve got a pretty massive vision for where this goes, but we’re starting out with changing the way that breaking news is written, distributed and read. This isn’t going to be another social news app, or aggregator. We’ve re-imagined the entire process of news from the ground up to produce the news experience that we would want to be a part of.”
Clearly Galligan has a proven record of creating valuable companies. He sold his first startup, Socialthing to AOL in August 2008. And SimpleGeo just had an exit.
News is an interesting area for Galligan to tackle. He addressed social life streaming with SocialThing, and SimpleGeo focused on location-based products. But Huh has been playing in the media space with his Cheezburger empire and holds a journalism degree from Northwestern. With both Huh and Galligan’s track record, Circa is sure to be worth a look. Stay tuned.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/21/meet-circa-the-stealthy-news-experience-startup-from-ben-huh-and-simplegeo-founder-matt-galligan/



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