News aggregation app Retickr has announced a series A $1.5 million funding, led by the Lamp Post Group, which had previously ponied up $150,000 of seed funding back in 2011. The Mac Desktop reader app also got an update Wenesday.

Retickr functions on the idea that people don't have time to comb through scads of news sources to find what they want. The app personalizes a news feed based on past preference choices, making the user's profile ever more customized the more it is used.

The company's CFO Brian Trautschold indicated that he views Retickr less as a simple news app, and more like a big data company.

“[We] founded retickr in 2011 with the vision to personalize news," said Trautschold to VatorNews.

"We raised an initial seed round of $150k from Lamp Post Group in March 2011. [Then] about 2 weeks ago we finalized our Series A with Lamp Post...and we are now positioned to continue to improve our product, grow our team, and innovate a way people get their news."

Having run in Beta until August of last year, Retickr is headquartered in a somewhat unlikely location, Chattanooga TN. However, this startup seems very much a learn-as-they-go operation.

"If what we launched in August can even be considered a product, what we have now is much closer to a solution," said the company on its website, (which is certainly an interesting thing to admit)."Our newest release, Retickr 2.0, is something that we have tried to do the right way and it is a pretty cool piece of software. It feels like a promising year."

The new Retickr 2.0 allows users to sync Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader feeds, as well as the 85,000 news sites that Retickr itself culls from, then group that feed into customized playlists. The newer version of the app apparently also allows the user to set a "cut-off time slider" to ensure that his or her feed has only the latest news.

The app is free and requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later.