FLUD – The Sexiest News Reader on the iPad & iPhone

Four months ago Bobby Ghoshal was living in Southern California with a couple very talented designers and was inspired to start working on a secret project with Matthew Ausonio.  It wasn’t long before his living room was covered with whitewashed paper, black and red ink, design books, and crushed up red bull cans.  They worked only during the night to create FLUD – a constant controlled flood of relevant news for each iPad user.  A month later, they released FLUD to the app store for approval that immediately sprung into one of the top three spots of iPad news reader apps accompanied by Pulse and Flipboard.  At four developers strong and currently not benefiting from any investors, they have tripled their user base and continue to push the envelope of relevant news delivery by releasing an iPhone version.

FLUD aggregates content from various news sources into a beautiful Windows Phone 7 like interface.  The iPhone version is slightly different than the iPad because each feed has its own dedicated screen real estate.  You’ll notice on the iPad that there are multiple feeds cluttered together on the same screen, but Ghoshal said that they are working on a complete overhaul of the iPad’s interface and will be pushing it out in early January.

Unlike Flipboard, which depends on your social networks to generate content, FLUD gives you the option to select feeds from their featured list, search the internet to find feeds, or even add them from your Google Reader account.  Currently there isn’t any Google Reader integration on the iPhone, but this is going to be pushed out along with some bug fixes in the update set for next week.

FLUD also gives you the ability to share interesting articles with others via Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.  It comes equipped with a heart icon that allows users to “Love It” which is similar to Facebook’s “Like” and lets other Fluders know that the article is worth a read.  This feature also allows you to read an article later – even if you’re offline.

Overall, FLUD is an excellent way to catch up on your latest news and discover new articles and feeds.  The FLUD team does have a few bugs to fix with the iPhone including some crazy text that shows up in the feed, but i’m sure those minor glitches will be worked out in the next update.  The iPad and iPhone apps are available in the app store for free right now and you can stay up to date by following the FLUD on twitter.