As we reported last fall, NowThis provides “a combination of original and third-party news videos” aimed at mobile users. There are about 1,500 videos available so far, and the company plans to add more.

NowThis is also launching an updated version of its iPad app soon. Among other things, the app will allow users to save up to 100 videos to their iPads for offline viewing.

I downloaded the app, which quietly went live on Friday, and browsed through the selection. Currently, there’s categories for Top stories, Obama vs. Romney, Awesome debates, Malala, Tech and Fun. Users can swipe through a selection of video clips for each category. The opening video right now is an original clip that sums up some of the complicated math that Obama and Romney need to pull off to win enough electoral votes.

Most of the clips are introduced by a NowThis News host. Some clips from users or outside sources, like a wordless video of post-Sandy gas lines, are just launched with NowThis News branding. Eason Jordan, a former chief news executive at CNN who is now general manager for NowThis News, told me Monday that the app will get eight to 10 original clips added through the day, which is supplemented by an additional 10 to 15 clips. The goal is to get people watching video news again using the tools they turn to most frequently.

“We feel like younger people are not watching traditional TV news, they’re getting video news from mobile and social, and we’re building for that audience,” Jordan said.

The company, which launched in stealth mode in April under the name Planet Daily and has $5 million in funding, will also be releasing an Android app in the coming weeks. Users can also access NowThis News videos through the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages and through a dedicated vertical on BuzzFeed.

Jordan said NowThis News is trying to escape the trap of being boring by encouraging feedback and interactivity. That means users can submit their own videos, comment on current clips and suggest future stories.

I pointed out to Jordan that some of the content is getting a little stale, including old footage from the presidential debates and a look at the fall from space by Felix Baumgartner. He said the content pipeline is just getting cranked up and will produce even more pieces as NowThis News builds out its team, which is currently at 25 people. He believes a diet of 20 to 25 videos a day will satisfy most users.

NowThis News’ focus on news and interactivity may pit it against HuffPost Live, the Huffington Post’s streaming video network that tries to elicit user participation through webcams, smartphones and tablets. Jordan said that he respects HuffPost Live, but the service is a stream of “talking heads,” while NowThis News lets people choose which videos they want to view.

Election day will be an interesting test of whether watching NowThis News is better than just flipping channels, picking off videos from a user’s social stream or turning to any of the social video apps available.

Berry left the Huffington Post in February and got to work on a new incubator called SoHo Tech Labs, which reunites some of the top former executives of the Huffington Post. Along with Berry, there’s HuffPo co-founders Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti, former CEO Eric Hippeau, Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer and Eric Ashman, the former CFO. Others from HuffPo’s tech group including Ben Regenspan, CTO of the lab, have migrated over as well.

Channeling the HuffPo spirit

Berry isn’t just assembling a cast of familiar faces. He’s conjuring up the same spirit that helped the Huffington Post become a top online publisher. The idea is to channel the same virality, fast iteration, worldwide development and emphasis on analytics and apply it to a handful of startups that can get up and running with head-spinning speed.

“Our thesis is the social and mobile infrastructure we have today didn’t exist at this scale a year ago. That’s why we’re seeing the rise of Instagrams and Draw Somethings. The speed at which disruption can happen is unprecedented,” said Berry, in a sit-down interview at his office in the former Huffington Post space.

SoHo Tech Labs has already gotten two startups off the ground: CasaHop, a house exchange service that soft-launched last month and Rebel Mouse, a social publishing platform that is still shrouded in secrecy. Two more are in the works with the company prepared to push out up to eight companies this year. It’s not a factory, insists Berry, CasaHop’s CEO, but the pieces are in place to help manufacture startups with almost machine-like efficiency.

Working as a team

When ideas come in, Berry can turn to Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed, to shape it with an eye toward virality. Hippeau helps with business strategy while Lerer, general partner at Lerer Ventures, works on lining up funding and lends a hand with design and branding. Ashman is responsible for setting up the equity structure on the projects while Berry ensures that the technology evolves in a straightforward manner. All of the projects out of SoHo Tech Labs will be built off the same platform, based on Python, NoSQL, MySQL, JQuery and other technologies. The benefit is that all the companies in the lab can avoid duplicating their work by sharing code easily, plugging in the necessary components needed to build a viable product.

As a project spins up, Berry can tap a team of more than 20 developers along with three designers spread around the world to help get it up to speed. That was one of the key lessons from HuffPo’s growth: it relied on an international tech team that was constantly handing off projects to each other, ensuring that improvements and updates happened quickly. Under this entire arrangement, startups should be able to get an minimum viable product for $50,000 to $80,000.

The key for any SoHo Tech Labs startup is a viral kick, something that can spread quickly via social channels without paid marketing. Berry said the startups out of the lab will also offer an easy entry for newcomers but should also include deeper functionality for people willing to invest. And the companies will be very mobile, either at launch or soon thereafter.

Not a HuffPo competitor

So what kind of startups is SoHo Tech Labs building and will any of them eventually challenge the Huffington Post? Berry said the plan is to build platforms, tools and social sites, not to compete with HuffPo. Berry is sensitive about this subject and knows that the issue is valid, especially considering many of his team came over from HuffPo. Berry, for his part, took his time with his exit, making sure HuffPo was able to prepare for his departure.

“I understand there might be some nervousness (at the Huffington Post) but this is a new space. This is a small group of core people who were not happy at AOL. It’s different working for a small company,” Berry said.

With Berry, it’s all about getting up to 60 miles per hour as fast you can. That also presents a problem for Berry, whose projects are moving along at a nice pace, but aren’t ready to hit the road. Few things irk him more than not being able to gauge how an idea can fare on its own. But it’s good to be back with the old team, trying to see if a small group of people can create some magic again, Berry said.

“The emphasis is on scrappy,” Berry said. “It’s about doing something fun and scrappy and hoping it goes crazy.”

Planet Daily is reportedly aiming at bringing TV-style news to the web, luring in people who normally watch Jon Stewart, said AllThingsD. The start-up is partnering with Bedol’s Bedrocket, a Lerer-backed media company that creates and invests in video programming.

AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka previously reported that the content will be a mix of livestreamed and taped reports, made up of professionally-produced segments and video from amateur contributors. The idea is to rely on social media channels to promote and distribute content to viewers. Planet Daily is still in the midst of hiring workers and will look to be up and running by this summer to start covering the presidential election.

Lerer and Hippeau are part of a group of former Huffington Post execs who are moving on to new projects. Jonah Peretti started Buzzfeed and Paul Berry, former CTO, recently left AOL to start a company called Rebel Mouse. The group has also teamed up on Soho Tech Labs, an incubator where they will be seeding and founding start-ups.

Brian Bedol, founder and CEO of Bedrocket Media Ventures, which was launched with Huffington Post Co-Founder Ken Lerer, will be appearing at paidContent 2012, May 23 in New York City. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Walt Jabsco.

Among all adults who use the web, 82 percent identify themselves as regular online news readers, while 45 percent are “social news sharers.” About 24 percent are “social informants.”

In conjuring an image of a social informant, Hippeau told the audience at the Huffington Post’s Ad Week conference to start with the picture a 34-year-old professional earning over $100,000 a year. “That

Why was Adaptive Semantics the first one? “We know them well. We’ve been using their technology; it’s been completely successful for us and we haven’t found anything that worked as well.” HuffPo wasn’t anywhere close to 2.8 million comments a month — the May total — when it began using the company’s technology to manage its discussion areas. “We didn’t know how big it would get, how engaged,” said Hippeau. The acquisition and addition of Adaptive’s founders to the HuffPo staff (what we usually call an acq-hire) underscore the value of the comment technology, called sentiment analysis, to its current and future plans.

“We have built a whole road map for continuing to develop capability.” That road map doesn’t include offering Adaptive’s technology commercially, although Hippeau said commitments to current clients will be fulfilled.

Internally, the potential value isn’t limited to managing a high volume of comments. “We believe there are going to be applications in social marketing,” Hippeau said, declining to provide details. He also wouldn’t put a number on the acquisition. HuffPo has raised more than $37 million and execs like to remind people much of that is still in the bank.

As for adding Adaptive’s technology to the editing process, a la Demand Media or Associated Content, Hippeau said firmly, “One thing I do know is our site will always be curated. Technology makes our editors hyper-efficient so we will continue to introduce tools for our editors to do that.” It’s not a stretch, though, to see using semantic analysis to help ideas bubble up or other potential applications.

When Pearlstine was asked whether his views surrounding pay walls were “ideological” — simply a matter of right and wrong, that companies should get paid for their content, no matter the outcome — he said for him, it was a practical matter. “It’s supply and demand. If you can suspend those laws, you might as well try. But our own experience is that you can charge a lot of money from an audience that has a special need for your content. The report on where all the best football players are going to college is important to some people. But most general news is not sufficiently distinct. There are some smart people who are betting on it. It seems to me more out of desperation than from an actual business plan.”

Harris added that Politico has no plans whatsoever to charge for “anything we currently do.” The current revenue goal includes getting half of the revenues to come from online, with the other half from the print product. They’ve just about reached that goal, he says. “Most of the revenue was always coming more print, but not overwhelmingly so.” He also expects to get a lot of the digital revenues from the e-mail newsletter, which he said is sent to 25,000 readers daily. On the issue of paywalls, though, he did say that Politico would like to come up with premium products that “We can and should be paid directly for.”

Hippeau also stated his commitment to keeping HuffPo free and ad supported, while getting additional revenue elsewhere. He pointed to the non-profit investigative project it and and backers fund in Washington DC. “Everybody’s heard about Newsday and with the addition of only 35 paying customers, it’s simply not viable. We’re experimenting. That includes the non-profit model and sponsorships. When you have two million comments, our stuff has a tendency to go viral. We’re trying to find ways to monitor that activity and engage on a real-time basis. As we deliver more tools, we’ll have more self-serve ad tools. For example, we had HSBC sponsor our Davos Twitter feed and we’ll do the a similar sponsorship with others for the Olympics this month.”

– 6 minutes in: Mayer responds to Thomson’s concerns about Google’s affect on journalism. Thomson: “Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity.” (This includes some back-and-forth about font size. Seriously.)

– 11:30 in: Battelle brings up the “essential rub” with Google and HuffPo: aggregation. Nisenholtz doesn’t have a problem with linking but stresses: “I’m not comfortable with theft of copyright and I think the Huffington Post is guilty of that on way too many occasions. … But I am cool with Google indexing our stuff and Google sending us free traffic.” (Hippeau didn’t really get the chance to respond in real time but issued a strong denial later.) Nisenholtz then tries to move conversation away from distractions.

– 22:00 in: Hippeau says Craigslist was more of a destroyer of newspapers than anything else. “It’s not Craig Newmark’s fault,” Nisenholtz replies. “Nobody has the right to exist in business. It’s that simple.”

– 30:30 in: Making it pay.

I kicked off the lengthy interview by explaining my take on the “beat WaPo” meme: an online site beating traditional media for attention isn’t really news anymore — and HuffPo is no longer only a news-and-politics site going head-to-head with WashingtonPost.com in its own backyard. Ever the diplomat, Hippeau said he could see my points but quickly added: “It wasn’t so much the Washington Post — by the way, it

Huffington, like the board members I interviewed, spoke of Morgan’s accomplishments growing traffic and the organization during her 18 months as CEO. Morgan represented the transition from Huffington and Cofounder Ken Lerer as first-stage startup execs. But, she said, “what is needed here is really monetizing the traffic. That is the primary responsibility of our CEO at this stage in our growth.” She said Morgan knew the change was imminent.

It’s a key part of what she sees as HuffPo’s next phase: “In our space, staying still doesn