The company, which describes itself as “a group of humanists and computer scientists,” is basically trying to fuse machine learning with human understanding. It’s backed by Skype co-founder and über-angel Janus Friis, who lent a glowing quote to the launch release:

“Futureful makes it fun to surf the web again. Everyone should try it. And this is only the beginning of what Futureful can become.”

So, how does that square up with the reality of using the app?

I’ve been playing around with it a bit pre-launch, and I have to say the simplicity of the interface appeals, particularly when you compare it with the iPad version of StumbleUpon. That said, it can be a bit confusing at first, and that’s partially a data issue.

What you’ll see is an in-app browser, much as you’d get with Twitter or StumbleUpon, but with two rows of tags at the top. The first row is what Futureful’s artificial intelligence engine is proposing, based on the personalized information it gleans when you sign in using Twitter or Facebook. The second row takes in the tags you’ve picked.

That’s where it gets confusing. If you have multiple tags, sometimes they will all light up — if two are activated, for example, that means the piece of content you’re looking at covers both subjects. Sometimes, though, only one will be activated at a time. The example where I saw this happen involved the tags “swarm” and “robots”. This should really produce something relating to swarm robotics, perhaps, but it doesn’t.

“If you do some queries, a lot of them will combine,” co-founder Marko Anderson explained to me. “That might lead to content that’s older or less relevant. The system makes a decision that an article is closely related to ‘swarming robots’, but we’re not including that in the query.”

Similarly, sometimes if you swipe down to check out a second page related to your chosen tag, it will default to a Google search results page. As Anderson noted, this is about populating Futureful, and that’s hard to do before it has a significant number of users.

“Certain topics are very well covered and certain aren’t,” he said. “The technology is in very good shape, but it’s always a data problem with search. Now that we’re getting it out there, we’re going to continually ramp up the index. Users can also add content. It’s not alive yet until many people are dynamically using it.”

But is it fun? Yes, in a curious way. I like that it doesn’t regurgitate the same content over and over, and Friis isn’t blowing hot air when he talks about getting a sense of things to come. It’s a very different kind of search from Google, to be sure – think serendipity rather than looking for something specific – but the mechanism is intriguing, and it may well evolve into something useful down the line.

Speaking of Futureful’s future, Anderson told me the immediate next steps will involve more countries and more platforms – iPhone first, as that version is pretty much developed, then Android. But the company is also playing around with various data visualization ideas, perhaps around trending topics and so forth.

Which sounds good, as this team is clearly pretty smart and imaginative, but I just hope the Futureful app retains its elegant simplicity, rather than going too far down the ‘what kind of search would you like?’ route. There’s a nugget of something powerful here, and it needs to develop in its own way.

Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it’s an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser – you can’t enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content.

However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top – click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a ‘Silicon Valley’ tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like ‘Moore’s Law’. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery.

What’s more – and here it really differs from StumbleUpon, in my experience – you never see the same content twice.

“It’s a new way to consume content,” co-founder Marko Anderson said. “We want the interface to be as simple and fluid as possible. Based on my usage of the service, I get very different things coming to me. If I choose ‘Silicon Valley’ and somebody else does too, the content might be different.”

I’ve not yet had a chance to play with the beta extensively, and of course it would take significant usage before it’s possible to evaluate how successful the algorithms are, but – if it works – Futureful could be a great way to kill time and learn new things. If you’re an iPad user, of course.

As Anderson pointed out, “mobile devices aren’t great for typing”. Add to that the need for enough space to show the tag row, and it makes sense that Futureful is launching as a tablet app.

“We started with web development, but the tablet is the ultimate consumption device, where the information finds you,” Anderson told me. “We haven’t ruled out a web version, but the smoothness in terms of the cleanness of the UI has just been better on the tablet.”

And Android? “We have no plans yet, but we have had some of the biggest players in the mobile industry ask us to build for them.” Same goes for the iPhone – maybe in the future, but first things first.

Also, there’s no business model yet. That said, if Futureful takes off I’d imagine there would be many options for making money off it.

Here’s a video:

The big-name hire comes two months after StumbleUpon raised $17 million in a new funding round, which it said it would use to expand to new platforms and grow its employee base. The company has said its user base has more than doubled since it was spun off from eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) two years ago and now totals 14 million.

Balogh joined Yahoo from Verisign in July 2008. Although he had been expected by some to leave soon after Carol Bartz took over as CEO, he stayed on until April 2010 and cited “personal reasons” for his departure, saying he had a “situation with my own family that is difficult and has driven me to make some changes in my life.”

The company tells us that the new money comes from DAG Ventures, First Round Capital, Accel Partners, August Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. The latter three VC firms put money in the company in April 2009, when eBay decided to spin it off, acknowledging that there were few synergies between the auction site and the content recommendation service, which lets users rate sites and suggests web pages for users to discover (or, “stumble upon”).

StumbleUpon says it will use this funding to “invest in the company’s core discovery technology, expand to new platforms and grow the employee base.” It says its user base has more than doubled since it was spun off from eBay and now totals more than 14 million.

Here’s a video describing how it works:

Contrast that with StumbleUpon’s statement when eBay bought the firm: “We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches