The Zite & Pipes Logo

On March of 2014, Flipboard acquired Zite. So many of us who used to read about things we love, couldn’t anymore. Zite’s app was never updated to support the latest operating systems and latest devices thus starving us off the experience we initially got. That is when we thought of doing something about it.

But first, let me tell you why we did it. For the last three years, I only got my news from one primary source: Zite. Not only did I not consider any other newsreader but, I didn’t even consider a website or another medium, simply because Zite just did it for me. Everything I wanted to read or track or follow; things that I was just so very passionate about showed up. Zite just understood me and gave me the news I really cared about. But, sadly, that wasn’t to be forever.

Hence, after battling myself for close to a month, I decided & set about building Pipes.

And then we worked tirelessly for the next 12 months and have taken Zite’s personalisation engine a step further. We worked on NLP, Neural Networks & Deep Learning to bring you the most artificially intelligent news app. And we’ve taken it one step further.

Even the logo we went with was inspired from them. We wanted all our users to have a sense of intimacy they once felt with Zite.

A. Personalisation & Tags

We know that Zite was loved so much for its personalisation & serendipitous discovery of topics and sources & so we’ve integrated that right into Pipes. But, we’ve added one more thing, that makes it easier than ever to do the aforementioned.

Zite’s personalisation only happened if you told it to. In the sense, in order to not want something on your feed, you had to dislike it or tell it not to show up. With Pipes, we’ve built ‘reinforcement’. This algorithmically looks for cues for reinforcing your interests or the lack of it & curates data automatically to show you content you truly care about.

Pipes’ Tags

Let’s take an example in case here. Let’s presume I hated both Country & Pop music. So, if I were reading about Taylor’s Swift open letter to Apple and vociferously liked, saved & shared my article; naturally, ‘Taylor Swift’ & ‘Apple’ would become my Interests. But, let’s remember, I hate both Country and Pop music.

Pipes is smart enough to continue to show you Apple’s reply to Taylor Swift but it will continue to filter Country and Pop music if that has not been reinforced. However, this restriction is smart enough to only apply on categories and genres & not otherwise. The actuators and thresholds that are part of this algorithm are liberal enough to still allow for an array of recommended stories.

So, if I was reading about Elon Musk, you would still get Tesla, SpaceX & Solar City. It’s quite incredible.

B. Recommendation Engine

With Pipes, we’ve really taken personalisation a few steps forward. We’ve built a recommendation engine that is fragmented in two halves. One is, if you were following topics like Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg & Satya Nadella, Pipes would be smart enough to recommend ‘Sundar Pichai’ or ‘Elon Musk’.

The Pipes recommendation engine

Second bit, if you were reading ‘Tim Cook’s fantastic leadership has lead Apple to the top of Wall Street this quarter’; Pipes’ is going to understand this and give you articles related to exactly this. So, you could see articles similar to:

- Here’s a comparison between Tim Cook & Steve Jobs’ leadership style or

- How did Apple become the most valuable company in this Quarter? or

- Here’s a list of companies that made it big this Quarter on the Wall Street

C. Design

At Pipes, we love design and have taken Pipes’ card views to a whole new level. We have introduced animations that are unlike any news app. These animations are not intrusive but only complement the experience you are already having. Beautiful reading day and night views have been designed in a manner to account for over 12 different times of day.

Zite & Pipes’ Feed Design

D. Topics, Interests & Push Notifications

When Flipboard acquired out Zite, and it killed it for us, they integrated only 30,000 topics. With Pipes, you could search for topics that that app itself does not suggest. For example, Zite never allowed for in depth searching of a niche topic like ‘Carlos Hyde’. We may not have it as part of our search suggestions, but you can definitely search for it. In all, you could explore from over 2 Million topics & Interests.

Searching for Carlos Hyde on Zite & Pipes

Pipes also allows for custom notifications that can be set for your interests. So, you’re not only going to the information you love, but the information you love is also coming to you.

E. iPad

A big part of Zite’s strategy, was it’s iPad app. And, we’ve done the same with Pipes. We’ve designed it specifically for iPad. Split views and adjusted layouts make for the perfect experience on iPad. Pipes’ optimised for Apple Watch as well.

Along with this, there are loads of other things we’ve put into Pipes. Here’s a 90 second video that demos our product. I would love to know what your thoughts are and whether we’ve done justice to it.

Download Pipes for iOS.