Today I’m happy to announce the launch of StreamGlider, a new tablet app (initially on iPad) that provides the first live streaming dashboard for keeping up with your interests.

TechCrunch just broke the story.

The inspiration for StreamGlider was a product that launched in the early 1990’s called Pointcast. Pointcast streamed news, entertainment, ads and other updates to screensavers. Pointcast was great, and we, (myself and my co-founders, Bill McDaniel and John Breslin) wondered whether we could evolve that concept and update it for the tablet and mobile era.

We designed StreamGlider to be the ultimate live streaming newsreader. It does what you have come to expect, plus a lot more. And it does it live – it streams live updates to your tablet.

It also offers a lot of new functionality that supports new ways of using a reader.

• StreamGlider pulls live updates from content sources on the Web (RSS feeds, Google Reader, and Web API’s like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc.) onto mobile devices, and displays them in a variety of formats.
• It can function as a live digital picture frame for the Web, showing news articles, photos from friends, videos, etc. as full-screen slides that scroll past.
• It can also show streams as a live interactive filmstrips that function like tickers.
• And it can show streams in an interactive magazine format that is similar to a newspaper layout.
• You can also play and watch videos in StreamGlider.

Powerful Features

StreamGlider is fully gesture controlled – everything can be controlled by swiping, pinching, pointing, tapping, etc. You can easily customize the streams you want.

You can also create mashups of streams that pull from many different sources on a theme – for example you can pull from different news sources about sports, or different photo and video sources about a topic.

In addition to all this, you can make very personalized streams that pull from your social media accounts, and filtered streams that search for particular topics in content sources.

StreamGlider is also social. You can share individual items, or even entire streams of items, with your friends.

We designed StreamGlider to be brandable. Partners and customers can create their own private-labelled versions of StreamGlider, with their brand and their content, for their audiences. Brands can sell it or give it away free and run ads in it if they want. (Contact StreamGlider, if you’re interested in doing this for your brand).

This frees publishers, brands, and enterprises to create their own powerful readers for their audiences, with their brand, instead of having to live inside of other apps like FlipBoard or Pulse. They can have their own icon on the desktop and keep their direct relationship with their customers.

There are many use-cases for this – for example, you might want to distribute your own branded StreamGlider for your publication, or for a consumer product, or to your fans, or for a big event, or to your customers or employees. There are many reasons to do this – and you don’t have to be a software company to do it – you can almost instantly get your own branded StreamGlider.

We also designed StreamGlider to be open-source in the future. More news on that later. We hope we can become the Mozilla of newsreaders.

What’s next?

The team behind StreamGlider has a long history of making smart, semantic apps. You can expect that in future versions of StreamGlider, the app will begin to get smarter, more personalized, and even more social. This is just the beginning of our roadmap.

We will also be adding in support for more types of streams. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, you should check it out. Download it to your iPad and see what I’m talking about.