Corporations have begun to buy smaller companies that support their ecosystems in order to ward off competition or in order to gain access to new technologies that their programmers probably didn’t think of.
We saw Twitter buying TweetDeck, Google buying Motorola, and I am not even sure what Facebook bought in the recent weeks. CNN, the venerable news source has begun to feel a little insecure itself, with people accusing it of having a ‘for-children’ type of edition for the Americans, while the International edition of CNN presents a far more superior, diverse and edgy news and opinion articles. Thus, it should not come to us as a surprise that CNN today bought Zite, the popular personalized newsmagazine service for iPad users.
Users of iPad have the ability to use Zite in order to ‘teach’ Zite what they like reading and over a period of time, Zite brings rich and colorful magazine-like pages with articles that the users would like to read, based on their previous reading preferences. Personalized news is a growing phenomenon that even CNN seems to think is important. Perhaps this is why it decided to purchase San Francisco-based Zite for almost $25 million. CNN claimed that the intention was to support a really talented startup to have the backing of one of the most important media companies.
It could also be seen from a different viewpoint. Maybe, CNN wants iPad and other tablet readers to use its services through Zite, and probably rake in the ad revenue in the process. Zite competes with Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Broadfeed and News360. Zite CEO Mark Johnson seems to be happy to be bought by CNN as he would now not have to worry about competition, so to speak. You could also take a look at Shuffler.fm, which is a cool blog-generated audio magazine. Perhaps, you might want to take a look at the 20 cool Magazine Themes for WordPress as well.
