Today we are happy to announce Wildcard 2.0 is officially in the iOS appstore. The new Wildcard is the best news reader on the iphone, done through a combination of smart algorithms, good design, and a team of amazing editors. The past 7 months has been a process of constant iteration, and the new Wildcard shows a glimpse of our vision to the future of mobile media consumption.

When we started down the path of creating Wildcard 2.0, we thought along three different axis – speed, content coverage and personalization. A lot of design and engineering thoughts went into this, this post will cover some of our technical considerations.

Speed

The smart phone is fantastic. It’s a powerful computer attached to you 24/7. But this incredible accessibility is often limited by software. On average, it takes many times longer to read and understand a topic on the phone than on the desktop. It is quite ironic, that you would ever have to sift through web search results on your phone to find a piece of news.

We approached the speed problem from a fundamental level. Inside Wildcard, every piece of information is organized as a mobile card, which is somewhere between a tweet and a webpage. It is a small unit of content that captures a single use case – whether it’s an image, a video, or a summary and a link to an article. With the combination of a novel random forrest based card creation system (which I will write about in a separate post) and a card-based search engine, we have created what we call “the internet of cards” (IOC). Free from the shackles of the legacy web stack like HTML, CSS and Javascript rendering, mobile cards are represented with structured data and rendered natively. This nice property of mobile cards means we can truly deliver content with incredible speed, and natively change the presentation to any platform, whether it’s iOS, Android, FB, Twitter, or any smartwatch.