Innovation That Matters

Personalized iPad magazine gets smarter as you use it

Publishing & Media

It’s one thing to create a personalized magazine that reflects your individual tastes in music or a one-off issue on another topic at hand. It’s quite another, however, for an app to watch your preferences and create a magazine tailored ever more narrowly to your personal tastes and interests. That, however, is a fair description of Zite, a new iPad application that creates a custom publication for each user. Launched on Wednesday, Canadian Zite bills itself as “a personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it.” Users begin by either entering their username from Twitter or Google Reader, or by deliberately selecting topics that interest them. From there, Zite creates a custom magazine with personalized news, articles, blogs, videos and other content from a variety of both mainstream and niche publications and sites. So far, so good. What’s really interesting about Zite, however, is that it continues to personalize the magazine it creates for you, using your viewing choices to tailor its content. Though it’s not necessary, users can also “thumbs-up” and “down” content to direct Zite’s offerings. The app refreshes its magazine about every 30 minutes, according to a Wall Street Journal review. A video on YouTube demonstrates Zite in action. Similar in many ways to Flipboard, Zite currently features no ads, but that’s reportedly due to change in the next few months. The app is also going to appear on other mobile devices later this year. App-minded entrepreneurs: what are you waiting for? Spotted by: Katherine Noyes

Email: info@zite.com

Website: www.zite.com