Kooaba connects 2000 newspapers to the digital world

Using Kooaba’s Paperboy mobile app, readers can snap pictures of full pages or articles of interest in their favorite printed newspapers and share them immediately as fill PDFs via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or SMS or store them for future reference on my.kooaba.com or Evernote. But it’s not just about sharing a PDF of the article – with full text search capabilities, of course. Paperboy, available for iPhone and Android devices, also gives newspaper readers access to additional information like videos or related online content.

Paperboy connects printed media to the digital world with one click: All the application’s powerful image recognition technology needs is a photo taken by a smartphone camera of an article or page in a newspaper or magazine. Paperboy then matches the photo to the images in Kooaba’s sizeable library of printed media or identifies that page or article from NewspaperDirect’s inventory of over 2,000 same-day, digital newspapers replicas. Users can then share, email or archive the electronic version on the go, anywhere, anytime or explore related information like videos, images or links to selected topics. Paperboy automatically finds URLs on pages of print publications. In some publications, exclusive Paperboy content is for pages with the Shutter icon.

In the first roll-out phase, the cooperation with NewspaperDirect makes newspaper content immediately available within Paperboy in Germany, Switzerland and Austria – for more than 75 additional titles. Among them the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), the Austrian Der Standard and Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. More than 780 US, UK and Canadian newspapers will follow in November. Russian, Asian and other European readers, as well as readers in Australia, New Zealand and all other countries will be able to use the Paperboy app with their local newspapers later in the year. A list of the newspapers already supported can be found on the Kooaba Blog.

kooaba was founded in November 2006 as a spin-off company from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.It was awarded with the CTI Start-up Label in 2011.