CNN has acquired San Francisco-based tech company Zite, CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton announced today. Zite is a free news app for iPads that collects user data to curate (or aggregate) a personalized variety of content from free sources accross the web in a magazine-style experience.
All of the Zite team is sticking around, though it will be a wholly owned subsidiary and stand-alone business of CNN.
Zite is a Flipboard competitor, and its curation practices have elicted a bunch of cease and desists from news producers like the Washington Post and the AP, according to TechCrunch.
CNN parent company Time Warner has enough homegrown news content to keep Zite out of legal trouble, and Zite’s technology could be an easy and effective way to synthesize its disparate offerings for iPad users.
TechCrunch cited a Canadian news site Techvibes report that Zite would sell to CNN for between $20 and $25 million.
