ReadCast.ly - your reading backlog solved

Do you have a reading list of articles that grows faster than you can keep up with?

Are you a fan of podcasts because they allow you do explore topics and learn fascinating things while on the go?

Is reading from a screen the last thing you want to do after a long day on your laptop, smartphone and other devices?

Give your eyes a break and your ears a treat!

ReadCast.ly allows you to drop in URLs or select articles from 60+ global sources - including news, entertainment, business, sports the arts and more - and listen to the content in your choice of 16 female and male voices, read to you with the natural-language text-to-speech technology Amazon has spent years developing.

• Easily toggle between views of your ReadCasts and Top Stories, listening to what you want and saving the rest in your library for later.

• Want to share your favorite ReadCasts with a friend? ReadCast.ly can also give you a link to stream the ReadCast. Or better yet, register for the app and add the ability to send an mp3 file via email or text.

• Have lots of ReadCasts in your queue? Use the search box to filter your results and find all the articles on Bitcoin or Bowie.

The Team and tech stack:

ReadCast.ly was conceived, architected and built in 4 weeks as the thesis product of four full-stack software engineers at Hack Reactor in New York City: Michiya Hibino, Viswada Yangala, John Packel and Andrew Fechner.

ReadCast.ly employs 4 APIs to pull data from 60+ news sources, parse the text, convert to mp3 audio and then store and stream from Amazon S3 to the in-app player.

The team also wrote custom algorithms to further cleanse the text and ensure a quality listening experience, and they built a flexible SQL database that enables powerful relational look-ups between users and their preferences, articles and news sources and audio file distribution methods.