Jason Calacanis has yet another pivot in the works for his Culver City outfit, Inside Inc. The company, once known as Mahalo and which was most recently a creator of online video content, this week will release a self-titled news-reader app.

Inside will deliver stories in a mobile-friendly format, with a stream of content written and boiled down by a team of freelancers.

Calacanis, who built his fortune by selling blog network Weblogs Inc. to AOL Inc. in 2005 for a reported $25 million, declined to discuss specifics in advance of the release. But sources who have seen the finished product confirmed some of the details, which line up with the bits Calacanis has posted online.

Earlier this month, an article in the New York Times reported that Inside had hired former Atlantic Online editor Gabriel Snyder to act as the company's editorial chief.

Expectations within Inside are high, certainly at the top. Calacanis has already predicted that the app will eventually become a more important news service than CNN and the New York Times and have more content than Wikipedia.

"Nobody's won mobile news yet," Calacanis said in interview with the Business Journal. "There's a big opportunity in this field now."

While it's easy to write these predictions off as entrepreneurial bluster, his plan for Inside takes him into a tech category that's seeing a lot of activity of late. Companies as large as Yahoo Inc. as well as newer startups are trying their hand at developing an app that delivers news tailored for mobile devices....