The app was an instant hit, and as Flipboard came to the iPhone and to Android phones and tablets , it acquired more than million registered users. It also made a tentative move onto the web: two years ago, the company experimented with coding user-created magazines in HTML 5. Instead, you scroll. Stories are arranged in a nicely varied grid that alternates between small clusters of stories and big, full-bleed photos.
Click an individual link and it opens the original web page in its own tab. Or you can "flip" the story into your own magazine ; Flipboard says its users have created 15 million of these collections, up from 10 million magazines in October.
The resulting product is a bit of a mutant. Flipboard also shares the drawbacks of many RSS readers: the sense of being totally overwhelmed at the sheer volume of items in your reader. One nice thing about physical magazines is that they end — you can often start and finish one in a single sitting. Last year Flipboard acquired Zite , a magazine app with deep personalization technology, and used it to populate the 34, topics you can now follow.
I complained about the acquisition rather loudly. McCue says his goal with Flipboard is to give readers "the latest and greatest" — that is, the most recent news, and the most interesting articles you might have missed otherwise. And the company puts together a daily publication of curated news articles, known as the Daily Edition , to provide an at-a-glance look at the day for anyone who feels overwhelmed by all that content. You can do all of this either from your phone, tablet, or computer's web browser using any of the Flipboard sharing tools.
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Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. And Evan Doll, one of the early engineers on the iPhone team at Apple, was someone that I got the chance to meet. When we got together, we decided to do a thought experiment: imagine if the Web was washed away in a hurricane and we needed to build a new one from scratch. What would it look like? How would it be different? What would the user interface be? Would there still be the notion of a browser?
So we just started meeting and talking about that. We started coming up with some ideas that ultimately led to Flipboard. There were a couple of core principles. One was that Social Media was absolutely fundamental to where the web was headed, we felt. And also, the beauty and timeless graphic design principles of print. RM: Was the product specifically conceived for the iPad, or were you thinking more generally in terms of tablets — or even mobile phones? MM: The idea evolved.
When we started off, we were thinking in terms of the web broadly. But then the idea evolved further. When I traveled, I would buy magazines before I got on an airplane. I love magazines, I read them all the time. As someone who used to use Flipboard and stopped for no good reason , I really like your take on the company.
Is there a valid play charging consumers and creating a niche business? Seems a shame that an app with such a great UX and value creation should fail as a business…. It could and should test different models.
However we now see more and more apps monetizing via subscriptions. As consumers become more comfortable with subscriptions, Flipboard could try going that route. Flipboard could even asking for donations similar to what Wikipedia does.
I am also a huge fan of the app, so your post caught my eye! I am more bullish on them because if nothing else they have created a lot of value and have the potential to explore different business models to capture it.
I agree with your assessment of the continuing decrease of ad revenue they might get. However, they could use affiliate programs to capture some revenue as a mobile influencer aggregator with an active following. I think they can experiment with their business models.
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