Credit: Screenshot from The Memo.
A new site called The Memo launched this week to tell technology stories in a more accessible way, hoping to offer readers a view of the bigger picture "at a glance" through a mix of original content and curation.
"If you look at the tech press... it very much serves people who are within that space, people that are in the tech bubble," said editor Alex Wood.
"But it doesn't explain to people why that matters and I think there's a real opportunity there."
Wood, previously a founding editor of Tech City News, outlined his plans for The Memo to be "as multimedia as possible".
The new outlet has an in-house video team and is planning to release its first video show next week. The show, called Connected, will look at how mobile phones are "changing the world", but will not focus on the latest gadgets and their specifications.
Instead the aim of the show is to showcase how the adoption of mobile devices is changing people's lives in developing countries, or to explore technologies that will enable people to pay for goods using only their phones.
The Memo has also partnered with Reuters, offering all of their video content to the agency's subscribers.
The outlet is looking at areas closely linked to technology, like culture, finance and publishing, hoping to develop these into "sub-brands" in the future.
But The Memo is taking next week's UK General Election seriously as well, with one section devoted to the topic together with an interactive Live Election Monitor.
The Election Monitor is a live social media dashboard developed in partnership with Buzz Radar, designed to be understood "at a glance".
It looks at social media data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to count the most popular subjects or people discussed on social in reference to the election, and to see which political party has a larger "share of voice".
Wood explained that Buzz Radar data analysts are compiling data about hashtags related to the general election, and Twitter accounts and Facebook pages belonging to political parties or candidates.
Screenshot of a panel from The Memo's live election monitor.
The election monitor is also a source of stories and shareable stories for The Memo, as the data enables them to highlight who is the most talked about on social each day, for example.
Once the election is over, this particular section of the site will be transformed to look at policy, and Wood doesn't rule out future collaborations with Buzz Radar.
"We can all get a bit of fatigue with social media dashboards, and it's about trying to find the right fit," he told Journalism.co.uk.
The Memo is also acting as a curator of other technology news, including links to other publishers' stories in its sections in another bid to get its readers informed at a glance.
Wood explained The Memo was about "adding value in publishing", and would for example curate the breaking news from a different source and then publish detailed analysis from its own writers.
"What's the point in chasing the same story that everyone else has?"
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