Flipboard Buys Rival Zite From CNN
Flipboard, the magazine-style news reading app, is buying competitor Zite from CNN, the companies announced Wednesday.
The Zite app was a part of CNN for three years, since it had acquired the company for nearly $20 million. The terms and money involved in this deal have not yet been disclosed clearly. The move is a sign of ongoing consolidation in the space and comes in the wake of Facebook launching a Flipboard competitor called Paper. Flipboard benefits by cutting one more competitor from the field through the sheer act of buying it.
“We’re going to integrate the technology into Flipboard in the coming months,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said during a press call Wednesday. “We do not plan to continue to evolve Zite, we think we should focus on a single product.”
He added that Zite users will be able to use their logins to set up a new Flipboard account, and that Flipboard will continue to support Zite for the time it takes to complete the integration of its technology.
If you are not familiar with Zite, it is a personal news reading application that launched on the iPad in 2011. Essentially, Zite was a big recommendation engine that gives you articles based on what you like to read—based on your social feeds like Facebook and Twitter, but also based on your reading history and preferences.
