The Internet is “melting,” according to Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of startup Citia.
“I’ve been watching this movement from solids and pages to liquids and flows,” she told me. “Everything’s becoming atomic.”
Holliday argued that when you look at sites like Pinterest, you can see how the web is shifting towards a more “card-based” structure. And Citia, which is announcing that it has raised $600,000 in additional funding, aims to help marketers and content creators take advantage of that shift.
The company launched in 2012 by offering card-based layouts for e-book publishers, but now it powers a range of web pages, including eMusic’s Year In Music 2013. When you visit the site, you can browse through cards representing each of the top albums, with the cards sorted into different stacks. Each individual card can be linked to and allows users to listen to music.
Holliday, who was also an angel investor and co-founded Medical Broadcasting Company (now owned by Publicis Groupe and called Digitas Health), described Citia as a “platform as a service” — ultimately, she wants to be the technology provider for these types of online experiences, although the initial projects “need more handholding.” She also said that content management systems like WordPress aren’t competitors — instead, Citia can sit on top of a CMS.
These fancy layouts and the platform powering them are supposed to help marketers in a few key ways. For one thing, they can automatically add and organize streams of content from services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For another, it allows websites to “blow through the Z axis,” creating three dimensional layouts that are more dynamic and allow users to browse through much more content.
The company recently added support for Android, so a big part of my conversation with Holliday involved swapping between demos on a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone — regardless of the device and whether we were on a website or an app, I found the experience was slick and engaging.
As for the funding, it comes from angel investors including David S. Rose and Geoff Judge, and it brings Citia’s total funding to $2.8 million.
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