Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

Prepare to further isolate yourself in a world containing only the news and information you care about. A new mobile application called Pipes has just launched a simple tool to help you find and follow any topic, from Apple or Google to the FIFA World Cup, or whatever else you want.

The app is similar in some ways to short-form news reading apps like Circa or Yahoo's News Digest, or alerting tools like recent TechCrunch Disrupt participant Notivo, as it's also designed to offer mobile-friendly access to news and information. But in Pipes’ case, the app isn’t about offering you bite-sized summaries, but instead provides feeds of popular articles on the subject matter at hand, as well as tweets, and even the item's Wikipedia page, for reference.

According to co-founder Vinay Anand, who built Pipes along with Siddarth Goliya and a small team of mainly 20-year-old engineers, Pipes' backend today crawls data from over 10,000 sources every hour, allowing you to track just about anything.

"The two of us really felt the need to personalize news," explains Anand. "We really feel that people have specific things they want to track and want to be alerted on it and that's exactly what Pipes allows you to do," he says.


How It Works

Pipes is well-designed and straightforward to set up and use. From the main screen, you just click a plus ("+") button to add a new pipe (aka, topic). You then enter your search term or keyword, and tap to add it to your homepage. You can also shake your phone for a suggestion of trending pipes to add, which is fun, if a bit less practical.

After adding your topics, each appears in its own section on the main page, waiting to be explored. You tap into these for lists of links to news articles, which pull in the full article's text in most cases via RSS feeds. From here, you can also bookmark items as well as share them via text, WhatsApp, Email, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

You can also customize push notifications for your pipes, while controlling their frequency.

Separate sections point you to the topic's Wikipedia page and related tweets. I don't care for the decision to only pull in hashtagged tweets here, however, as I find there’s a lot more content discussed on Twitter than the tweets from those devoted to hashtagging everything they say. Plus, Pipes' selection of tweets feels curated and stale, as it didn't update with a pull-to-refresh gesture during testing. The tweets aren't time-stamped either, so their only purpose now it seems is to give you a sense of the conversation, or to point you to other articles that may have been missed in the "News" section.

Meanwhile, a "Top Stories" section on the Pipes main screen lets you break out of your own little world a bit to see other popular news items.

The overall look-and-feel of Pipes and the functionality it provides is compelling. However, ultimately the app will have to face down other more popular competitors like Flipboard or Bloglovin for casual news readers, or RSS feed-reading utilities like Feedly or Reeder for hard-core news consumers.

The co-founders have worked on several business ventures together in the past, including two that failed, one that Anand describes as a "moderate success" and now Pipes, their fourth venture. This time around, they're funding development through money from Doodle Creatives, their Mumbai-based design and development shop, but have not taken in outside funding.

Pipes is a free download on both iOS and Android.

Indian football: In the 20th century and now

By Sourish Sengupta

In a country of 1.2 billion people and counting, it is poignant and at the same time ridiculous that we don’t see a playing eleven qualify for the FIFA world cup. But would an Indian believe that India was invited to play the football world cup in Brazil in the year 1950, after its splendid performance in the previous years in International circuit was noted? With all the players being chosen for the World Cup final team, it was certainly a green signal for the Indian footballers. But unfortunately, the governing body of Indian football decided against it. There are a few conjectures about why the players weren’t allowed to play in the World Cup. The key reason still being unknown, many say that playing bare foot proved to be a crime for the skillful players. Another reason may be that the economic condition of the state at the time was not good enough. However, the decision of the governing body was final and irrevocable.

Had we participated in the 1950 World Cup, the story would have been different now. Let’s go back to 1911 when Calcutta’s Mohun Bagan beat the East Yorkshire Regiment 2-1 in the final of the IFA Shield. At that point of time, the IFA Shield was regarded as one of the premier football tournaments in India. After this, the actual rise of Indian football began. Many teams -East Bengal, Mohun Bagan, Mahamedan Sporting, Eastern Railway, Arians Football Club, and others- came up. A whole lot of young promising footballers started shining. As the British had set up their capital in Calcutta, football started becoming popular in the Eastern region. After the English moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, the football fever started spreading. Players from the south as well as the north dreamt of playing in the Calcutta league, the most prestigious football league in India then. Playing for a team in the Calcutta league was like playing in the English premier league. This is regarded as the golden era in the Indian football history, wherein India saw its talent grow, with players like Chuni Goswami, PK Banerjee, Balram, Thangaraj, Jarnail Singh, Nayimudin and many others showing up.

Why did Prakash Padukone hone his badminton skills with champions like Morten Frost Hansen and Spend Pri? That is because it would uplift his set of skills. Similarly, Vishwanathan Anand chose to play and practice with the Russian champions. This is a very simple logic, for which one may not have to be an expert in the field of psychology or physical education. The more one practices with someone with a higher skill set, the more he is bound to improve his game or his skill set. Playing with the same colleagues or your own team mates won’t help. One has to go out there and compete with the best. India ranks 168^th in the FIFA world ranking. Now if she plays against a team like Brazil on a regular basis, she is bound to improve her game. But if she continues to play against a team lower to her, it would be nothing but a waste of time.

There used to be a time when no other Asian team could defeat India. This isn’t the case now. What has gone wrong? Is the lack of infrastructure, or is it that the level of the players has degraded in India? Or is it because, there isn’t any money in the game?

The answer is, all of the above. The infrastructure is below par. In a country like Germany, whose size is just about that of West Bengal, there are more than 200 tough grounds; I hope that the Modi government will bring in some changes as far as infrastructure is concerned. The second is the quality of the players being produced. But this again is a multidimensional issue. If there isn’t any money or scope for a career, no mother will encourage his son or daughter to play the game. One should be professional, most certainly. And I am glad that the governing body of the All India Football Federation has taken a few steps by initiating a project like the ‘Indian Super League’. This is a vital project for sure. This will bring in new technology, foreign technical advisors, appointment of good capable coaches and, most importantly, money. The young talented lot will now turn up and play some good football India hasn’t seen in many years.

 

Suarez Bit My Finger: Out With Charlie, in With Luis

This is the best of all the Suarez biting memes, and haven't we all been waiting for this one?

What happens when viral video Charlie Bit My Finger is rehashed with the (in)famous Luis Suarez, banned from the FIFA World Cup for biting? Look no further. After the zillion memes of the... ahem biting incident, here's an absolutely hilarious video - Suarez Bit My Finger.

Lydia Raghavan and Timothy McCourt created this video by editing out Charlie's face and replacing it with the Uruguayan footballer's. It's so funny you'll be gasping for air with this one.

Watch it to believe it and keep chanting: Suarez Bit My Finger

In a Diner With Obama, A Serving of Ordinary Life

Minneapolis:  In the first episode in a series the White House is marketing as "Day in the Life" visits ahead of the midterm elections in November, President Barack Obama spent part of Thursday with a working mother who had written to him about her struggles.

In a working-class neighborhood of Corcoran, Minnesota, the president shed his suit jacket and ducked into Matt's Bar, a dimly lit restaurant, for lunch with Rebekah Erler, a 36-year-old accountant and a mother of two preschool-age boys. Erler sent him a letter in March about her financial troubles.

Over a hamburger known as the Jucy Lucy - a meat patty with melted cheese in the middle - and later at a town hall-style meeting here, Obama held up Erler as an example of the difficulties that working families face, and as the kind of person who could be helped by his initiatives.

"You're the reason I ran for office," Obama told his lunch companion, as he described their conversation later at the meeting that drew about 350 people in Minnehaha Park. "I don't want you to think that I'm not fighting for you."

For all the effort to reach ordinary Americans, Obama's day had the feel of a campaign tour, choreographed by the White House for vibrant pictures of the president engaging with regular people, his shirtsleeves rolled up. At the meeting after the lunch, the president even wrapped up with what sounded like a new slogan.

"Cynicism is popular these days, but hope's better," he said.

Erler's letter was one of the 10 that Obama gets each day in his briefing book as part of an effort to expose him to a cross section of what Americans are experiencing. Hers stuck out, White House officials said, because it touched on the range of challenges weighing on working people in the midst of an economic recovery that has left millions of Americans behind.

"We just want to be able to pay for our kids' day care, pay for our house, feed our kids some fresh food," Erler said she told the president.

Obama asked about the details of her family's experience, she said, adding, "I feel like I got the chance to start a conversation about what a lot of the people I know are going through."

In featuring Erler - whose husband lost his construction company during the economic downturn, and who borrowed to finance her own retraining at a community college - the president was making the case for his own agenda, including raising the minimum wage and helping people refinance their student loans. He was also targeting Republicans, whose opposition has blocked action on those items in Congress.

"I'm not always going to get it done as fast as I want, because right now, we've got a Congress that's dysfunctional, and - I'll be honest with you - you've got a party on the other side whose only rationale, motivation, seems to be opposing me," Obama said.

The visits are in keeping with recent efforts by Obama - his power lessened in the sixth year of his presidency and his domestic agenda all but dead in Congress - to escape the White House, even just to visit restaurants like Chipotle in Washington. Obama has compared his wanderings to those of a circus bear off his chain and took the analogy a step further Thursday.

"I'm like a caged bear, and every once in a while, I break loose, and I'm feeling super-loose today," Obama said at the town hall meeting, "So you don't know what I might do."

© 2014, The New York Times News Service