It seems that News Corp has pulled the plug on Project Alesia after £20m and 12 months working on a nifty news aggregation platform for iPads and other mobile devices.
Media Week reports that as many as 100 staff were working on the project based at Grays Inn Road, away from the main Wapping HQ, and that every major publisher other than The Guardian looked set to agree to have their content appear on the platform.
The extensive Media Week report is well worth a read, but draws no conclusions as to why the project has been canned.
My hunch is that any attempt to reinvent the wheel in terms of creating a new digital content platform is incredibly difficult and always costs for more than you ever imagined it would in terms of money and time. With huge development resources needed for the relaunches of the News International websites behind paywalls, the last of which being the News of the World last month, belts have had to be tightened.
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