18 Sep 09 BNO News Works Out iPhone Dilemma

Just a week or so ago, BNO News (@BreakingNews), Twitter’s kings of domestic and international breaking news, announced rather unceremoniously that they would no longer support their newly released iPhone app.

With the newest revision of the app just weeks old, BNO’s announcement came as a huge surprise to me. Given the fact that I am a fan of breaking news and mobile computing, I was concerned (OK, as concerned as someone can be about an iPhone app).

A request for more information received no immediate response and as quickly as the statement was made, the tweet was deleted and followed up with a promise to clarify their statement later in the day.

At the time I speculated that it was probably a disagreement between BNO and their Iowa-based app developer, BitMethod– probably over royalties or rights to any user information collected. Well, nice to see I wasn’t too far off.

While it took BNO a little longer to get back to inquiries than anticipated, they finally responded today:

Last weekend, a misunderstanding between our team and the company developing
our iPhone application led us to temporarly suspend the use of the
application. Later that day, our companies agreed to a solution and took
appropriate steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

We want to let you know that the BNO News iPhone application remains
supported by BNO News and that a new version will soon be released, in which
we hope to provide you with an even better service by offering you more
options.

If you have any comments or suggestions for our application, feel free to
e-mail us with your thoughts at support@bnonews.com.

We hope you will continue to enjoy using our services, and find them useful,
and hope you will accept our apologies for any confussion about the
application.

Thank you.
BNO News