• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, November 9, 2011

Digital media holding company Black Ocean has taken a controlling interest in LMK LLC, a mobile app company incubated by Hearst Entertainment & Syndication, for an undisclosed sum. The company’s main product is the custom news app LMK on iOS. The download lets users create a news “river” from hundreds of topics, company names, celebrities, etc.

Black Ocean plans to relaunch the app in early 2012.

Black Ocean says that it will infuse LMK’s app development with more capital, use its operational efficiencies to streamline development and take the paid app to a free model. The current beta version of LMK is available now in the iOS app store and later this month in the Android Marketplace.

The company says that LMK is different from automated aggregators like Flipboard and Zite because it lets users assemble their own news filter via topic choice. News is updated to the river every few minutes, so LMK pitches it as both a source for breaking news, as well as a collection of less pressing news feeds parsed into granular order. There are over 500 companies and people listed as topics in the Business section and as many in the Celebrity section. 

LMK first appeared on the Apple platform over a year ago as a vast collection of highly targeted news apps available separately by topic (Lady Gaga, cupcakes, coffee, etc.) for 99-cents to $1.99 in the iPhone App Store. More than 60 topics were available at one point.