Fortune magazine starts web app

Fortune magazine has built a new application to run inside web browsers on a variety of platforms, reports Nat Ives of Advertising Age.

Ives writes, “As a web app, Fortune500+ joins what seems to be a slowly rising tide of apps that run in web browsers instead of the operating systems of particular devices. Magazines, like others, have introduced many apps specifically for the iPad. But magazines have also published a couple of web apps so far, such as Sports Illustrated Snapshot, a free daily photos app that sells extra content, and Skiing Interactive, a free app that updates weekly over the summer and goes daily again in October. ‘I think you’ll see that more and more apps will go this way,’ said Daniel Roth, managing editor at Fortune.com.

“The free version of Fortune500+, a Fortune 500 dashboard and toolkit arriving Thursday with sponsorships from Adobe and the city of Las Vegas, will provide company descriptions and ranks, details on financials and management, customizable stock charts and live related headlines. A premium version priced at $9.99 year will let users view their LinkedIn connections at each company, sort companies by factors like industry and location, and build and share lists.

“‘It enables users to use all of our reporting in a way we’ve never done before,’ Mr. Roth said. ‘We know people use our information as a tool. Why not actually build a tool for them?’

“Fortune expects to release ‘native’ app versions of Fortune500+ for specific devices by the end of this year, but wanted to tweak the code it built for the web rather than write different programs for several systems at once. And this way it starts off with the widest potential audience: Not everyone has an iPad, but just about everyone uses a web browser.”

Read more here.