VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwire) -

Core News Facts:

• Zite, a personalized iPad magazine that understands what you like and gets smarter as you use it, launched today as a free application.
• Zite is an intelligent system that helps you discover content personalized to your tastes.
• Zite is the first iPad news reader to go beyond manual customization and leverage deeper technology to provide an individually personalized experience.
• Zite looks for all of the things that make you, you -- and personalizes your experience with them in mind. Here's how it works:
  • After you download the application on your iPad, you can link Zite to your Twitter and Google Reader accounts to personalize your magazine via analysis of your feeds.
  • Then, choose from various categories you enjoy (e.g. technology, business, sports). You can also enter thousands of specialized sections (e.g. journalism, virtual reality, vegetarianism) using an autosuggest feature.
  • As you use it, Zite intelligently learns your preferences. In addition to automatically personalizing sections around the topics you are interested in, Zite also determines if you like popular news sources or lesser-known blogs, long articles or short, and even the types of articles you like (e.g. news, analysis, editorials or features).
  • Zite also has a "Top Articles" section that brings together some of the most interesting articles with your taste in mind.
  • You can give Zite direct feedback through thumbs-up and thumbs-down votes on any article you read, helping it learn your taste more quickly.
  • Zite's magazine-style layout features full-text articles. You can share articles on Zite via email, Twitter or Facebook directly from the app.
• Zite's personalization technology filters through low quality content so you can enjoy casually browsing the most interesting content served up just for you and stop wasting time sifting through all the noise on the web to find a nugget of something interesting.
• Zite is based on technology developed by researchers from the University of British Columbia's Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. The Zite project began in 2010, carrying on technology developed by discovery engine Worio.

Quotes:

Ali Davar, Founder and CEO, Zite

"Browsing content on the iPad should not just be fun and easy, it should give people interesting, personally relevant information. It should be an intelligent system that learns your unique tastes and interests to bring you the best content -- for you -- from across the web. We've dedicated several years of research and development to building a product that delivers this experience."

Mike Klaas, CTO, Zite
"The beautiful reading experience afforded by the iPad provides a perfect showcase for our content discovery technology which we've been perfecting over the last several years. Zite is the best way to read the best content for you from the whole web."

About the iPad Magazine Market:

• Close to half of all iPad owners actively use the device to read magazines, newspapers or blogs (ChangeWave).
• More than three quarters of people spend at least 30 minutes during a typical day consuming news on their iPad. Nearly half of the respondents said they spent an hour or more during a typical day consuming news on their iPad (RJI).
• More than nine out of 10 of those who read at least an hour's worth of news on their iPads each day said they are either very likely (71.8 percent) or somewhat likely (21.2 percent) to use a newspaper's app for reading news and feature stories as opposed to using a Web browser to navigate the newspaper's website (RJI).

About Zite:
Zite is a free, personalized iPad magazine that understands what you like and gets smarter as you use it. Zite helps you discover what you've been missing in one convenient app. Zite learns as you use it to bring you the articles you will find most interesting from a variety of sources across the web. Zite is based on technology developed by researchers from the University of British Columbia's Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Zite is supported in part by grants from the Canadian Government. To get to know Zite, go to www.zite.com.