Google arrête Fast Flip et CNN rachète Zite (VIDEO) La chaine d’information en continu met la main sur Zite, un agrégateur de flux RSS, concurrent frontal de Flipboard.
Dans le même temps Google tire un trait sur Fast Flip une application qui permettait de passer la presse du jour en revue. Ca bouge dans le petit monde de la presse en ligne, mais pas forcément où l’on s’y attendait le plus. La chaine de télévision américaine CNN a ainsi annoncé la semaine dernière le rachat de Zite, une start-up canadienne, qui était jusqu’alors le principal concurrent de Flipboard, sur le marché des agrégateurs de flux RSS pour iPad. Montant de la transaction, autour de 20 millions de dollars. Une conclusion assez satisfaisante pour une start-up dont le chiffre d’affaires relevait de l’encéphalogramme plat et dont le cœur de métier consistait à piller la production éditoriale de centaines de journaux et de producteurs de contenus pour, officiellement, en rendre la lecture plus agréable à l’internaute. « Certains paris payent, d’autres non »
Zite incident shows why publishers need to enable automatic, controlled content distribution. In an era of free, frictionless content distribution, how can creators of that content be paid for their work?
The question was highlighted on Wednesday as 11 major media organizations — from Dow Jones Co. to Time — sent a letter to news aggregator Zite ordering the company to stop what the news outlets characterized as pervasive copyright infringement. Zite pulls Web content from a wide variety of sites, reformats it, and displays it — without the ads — within its app. No one can argue about the infringement; Zite has already changed the way it presents the complainants’ content.
But presentation is not the reason consumers downloaded the iPad app 120,000 times in the first week. The real value of the app is its ability to predict which stories will appeal to each user. For publishers, the problem is that Zite is really, really good at personalization and filtering. What efforts have major media companies made to build or enable their own innovative news consumption products?
13 Alternative Ways to Consume Your News. How we consume the news has changed dramatically over the years.
With the rise of social and information networks like Twitter and Facebook, we now have access to our own crowdsourced news wires. Add to that an army of applications reinterpreting the magazine and newspaper for mobile and tablet forms, and what we have is a news media renaissance that puts the reader's interests above all else. Should you prefer to discover news through social connections, you can turn to Flipboard, Smartr or XYDO. If you want to consume news from just the publishers you trust, then you'll likely develop an affinity for Pulse or FLUD. But if you'd rather your application tell you what to read, Zite may be right for you. iPad App News.me Now Free. News.me, the Betaworks-incubated iPad application for discovering news articles experts and friends see on Twitter, became an independent company Wednesday.
The just-hatched startup's first order of business was to do away with the cost-prohibitive $0.99-per-week fee and make the News.me iPad application free. The company is also promising a slew of application updates in the months ahead. Two things to note: Existing News.me application users will need to download the new version of the application, and paying subscribers must manually discontinue their plans. "News.me is on a mission to reinvent an industry — to use what we’ve learned from the social web to make the discovery and consumption of news better," the News.me team said in a blog post.
For those playing catch-up, News.me was born inside the R&D lab at The New York Times and then incubated at Bitly, a Betaworks company. Exclusive: NBC iPad App Now Broadcasts Full Episodes. NBC upgraded its iPad app Thursday so users can watch entire shows on their tablets.
The network held off on featuring full episodes when the app was first released in June. Starting Thursday evening, fans can watch all the content available on nbc.com on their NBC iPad app. That includes "pretty much everything" on the network, though the standard is to offer the five most recently aired shows, says Vivi Zigler, president of NBC Universal Digital Entertainment. Though other networks, notably ABC and CBS, have offered full shows on their iPad apps for more than a year, Zigler says NBC "wanted to understand the business model mechanism" of the iPad before it moved forward. Before Thursday's upgrade, the app featured short clips from the network, but not full episodes. Could Google Fast Flip Have Survived on Tablets? CNN Acquires iPad Newsreading App Zite. CNN has acquired iPad newsreading app Zite, the company announced Tuesday.
Like AOL's more recently launched iPad newsreading app, Editions, Zite creates a personalized, magazine-like reading experience by filtering stories from your Google Reader, social networks and self-defined preferences. The more you read, the more finely tailored it becomes. It keeps note of the kinds and length of stories you click on, how long you’re reading them for — and, just as importantly, the stories you don’t click on.
Zite's existing CEO, Mark Johnson, will continue to run Zite day-to-day from its headquarters in San Francisco and report to KC Estenson, general manager of CNN Digital.