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in a past life I spent a lot of time concerned about how M&A would unfold in this space... This is interesting as we never had the sense Zite had particularly i
by btrautsc 13y ago
in a past life I spent a lot of time concerned about how M&A would unfold in this space... This is interesting as we never had the sense Zite had particularly innovative tech, whereas Flipboard needed a 'horseman' to acquire them.
This may ultimately be more of a licensing/ partnership between CNN & Flipboard... In hindsight I wasted a lot of that time.
- pinko 13y agoYou're right that Zite has little innovative tech, but--for me--it just works slightly better in a variety of subtle ways that give it an edge over other apps. Sometimes that's all it takes.
- statictype 13y agoFor whatever it's worth, I use Zite pretty much everyday. It's like my morning paper. I don't use Flipboard at all. It's a nice app for sure, but for some reason, Zite always seemed to give me more interesting things to read.
- mercer 13y agoSame here, so I hope we'll get to keep Zite with Flipbook's look. Zite has a few serious UI issues, and it's a testament to how good it's actual recommendations are that it's still my most-used consumption source (other than HN).
- mikeklaas 13y agoAs Zite's CTO, it's interesting to see how the tech is perceived externally. For whom did you work in a previous life, out of curiousity?
- btrautsc 13y agoI was part of two failed attempts at personalizing news/ creating communities of topic expertise around news. Both ended in the many tens of thousands of users, and acqui-hire talks (not with either Zite or Flipboard). My thought on the tech was it was consistently good, the product was simple and easy to use, and worked very well at aggregating subject based articles (I'm sure there was much more behind the scenes that would have scared us at the time)... we were trying to do not only the smart aggregation, but create hooks into reading communities to encourage an atmosphere like HN - instead of mystical karma points, you would see btrautsc; expert in X, knowledgable in Y, novice in Z and so forth. Like I said, it ultimately died a timely death. Congratulations on the deal by the way!
- newman314 13y agoI prefer Zite over Flipboard. That whole flipping UI thing just never sat right with me.