Within days of adding local news channels for several US cities, news discovery app SmartNews has announced the launch of an International edition. Until now only relevant to the US and Japan users, the app can now work in over 150 countries.

SmartNews is calling the current International edition a beta release and will be adding more country-specific editions soon.

“After being downloaded more than 10 million times in the U.S. and Japan, we’ve received enormous demand from people around the world to open up SmartNews internationally,” said Dr. Ken Suzuki, co-founder and co-CEO of SmartNews.

To remind you, SmartNews uses an intelligent algorithm to curate the must-read news items for its users. It sports a simple and efficient user-interface and its SmartView content mode allows offline reading too.

“What makes SmartNews special is our discovery engine. Our machine learning algorithm gets smarter every day, learning from millions of users what stories really matter to humanity — not just what your friends are reading. Delivering culturally relevant and country-specific news in real-time is a monumental task. The first step is opening up the SmartNews International edition beta to the world so our algorithm can begin learning what people want to read in each country,” said Kaisei Hamamoto, co-founder and co-CEO, SmartNews.