Zite, the company that recently sold to CNN for $20 million, has launched version 2.0 of the company’s iPhone and iPad application: “For our current fans, don’t worry: we’ve kept all of the things you love about Zite. Our underlying discovery engine still looks at millions of articles each day and create a magazine unique to you based on your personal interests. You’ll discover interesting articles to read that you would have never found otherwise. And we’ll continue to bring you the best of your favorite magazines, newspapers, authors, blogs, and videos. But today, we’ve made Zite a lot better. Zite 2.0 is the evolution of Zite from a personalized magazine to an intelligent magazine. In Zite 2.0 we’ve focused on making Zite smarter than ever, introducing discovery at every turn, and designing Zite to be both beautiful and smart.” Read more

Dan Rowinski of ReadWrite reports, “The integration of old media and new media can often be like trying to mix oil and water. Even when smart media entities have been proactive in approaching the new digital paradigm – the world of smartphones and tablets, social and serendipity – they have failed either through poor decision making or not putting in a full effort. But CNN is different. Where many newspapers and cable companies have faltered, CNN has thrived. A lot of the credit goes to  the cable news company’s acquisition of Zite, the makers of a popular iPad news app.” Read more

Tom Cheredar of VentureBeat reports that Zite, a company that we have covered before, has added publisher sections to its digital magazine apps. Cheredar writes, ” Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.” Read more

Zite, the personalized news magazine app for the iPad, adds an iPhone version of its application to the lineup today. The company, which we wrote about here and which was acquired this summer by CNN, has focused on making the semantically-intelligent app fit the smaller-size format of the smartphone, with one-thumb navigation, vertical story and left-to-right category view flow, and a focus on the facts of story name, title and source , rather than snippets, as starter views.

CEO Mark Johnson says a prerequisite for the iPhone app was its release of Sybil technology in late October, which allowed Zite to have multiple profiles that adapt to the reader’s preference. This made it possible to share the Zite app on a family’s sole iPad without messing up individuals’ preferences. It comes in handy for the new smartphone app because, “if you did all this work on your iPad training this very intelligent AI, you don’t want to lose that when you go to the iPhone,” Johnson says.

Johnson expects the iPhone app to appeal to existing iPad users. “Personalization is really addictive. Once you have it one place, you want it everywhere,” he says

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[UPDATED: 4:10pm ET]
Last week, our own Jennifer Zaino spoke to Zite CEO, Mark Johnson about the startup, Zite.  One of the topics was the speculation around a rumoured acquisition by CNN. Zite is an iPad app that leverages deeper technology to provide an individually personalized experience. Zite surfaces content to users that they will find most interesting from a variety of sources across the Web by learning users’ preferences and getting smarter as it’s used. Today, news broke that, indeed, Zite has sold to CNN.
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Zite CEO Mark Johnson says he’s flattered by the rumors this week of a multi-million dollar CNN acquisition. He won’t comment on them, of course, but he is flattered.

What he will say is that there’s a reason such talk gets started around intelligent, personalized news apps. “Whether a company chooses to partner with a larger company to distribute their technology or go on their own, we are solving a basic consumer need,” Johnson says. The iPad-oriented Zite, which has its semantic groundings in the Worio (the catchier handle for Web of Research Iteration One) contextual discovery engine plug-in that works alongside a user’s search engine, benefits from the six years of work behind that system in personalizing search results, he says.

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The breaking news is that a new service from Regator has resulted from tweaking its semantic algorithms to find within its human-curated collection of web content emerging stories and to quickly alert bloggers and journalists about them via a desktop app.

Regator actually has been around as a curated blog directory and search engine for a couple of years, and in and of itself is a perfectly good and pretty fast source for the word on the digital street, along with the other usual suspects (Twitter, Facebook, Google blogs, CNN, etc.) – at least in so far as the big stories go. “But unless it’s a really big story and Twitter explodes eventually, you won’t find those second-tier news stories so easily,” says Scott Lockhart, Regator cofounder and CEO.

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