• Fast Company, Wednesday, March 9, 2011 11:56 AM

Challenging top tablet-based news aggregators -- and the way they serve advertising -- a startup named Zite plans to shake up the field with its "intelligent" content personalization technology. "The technology behind Zite can learn your reading habits and personalize content based on your interests," explains Fast Company.

More to the point, "Other popular readers--Flipboard, Pulse--require users to manually provide sources, whether media outlets or RSS feeds," Fast Company writes. "Zite automates that process and continuously refines content so it's fresher and dynamically tailored to one's interests." "The content personalization space is growing increasingly crowded, so while Zite doesn't have the advantage of being the first on the scene, it does have the advantage of having better technology," according to Vator News.

Still, "consumers ultimately won't care about machine learning -- they might not even care about ‘personalization' -- they'll care about how easy the app is to use and whether it looks good," insists Search Engine Land. Along those lines, "Zite is more usable than Flipboard, though Flipboard is nicer to look at." "Watch out, Flipboard," writes Mashable. "As of Wednesday, you have some serious competition."

That said, "Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features," according to AllThingsD's NetworkEffect blog. "The company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it. Meanwhile, tech blogger Robert Scoble doesn't like the fact that Zite assumes users are big on Twitter or Google Reader. "What if you're not?" he asks. "In this way Flipboard is a far better designed product because it has ready-made sections."

Read the whole story at Fast Company »