Flipboard is a social-network aggregation, magazine-format application software for Android and iOS.

It collects the content of social media and other websites and presents it in magazine format and allows users to "flip" through their social-networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with the company.

Originally designed specifically for the iPad, in December 2010, the application was updated to add support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. On May 5th 2012, it was announced that Flipboard would be released for select Android phones, beginning with the Samsung Galaxy S3.^[1] and has since been leaked for all Android devices.^[2]

It is produced by Flipboard, Inc., a United States-based software company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

History[link]

Invention[link]

According to McCue and Doll, the idea for the application was invented during a brainstorming session between them, during which they tried to imagine what the web would look like if it were designed from scratch. The design they came up with placed emphasis on the social web and the ability to consume content in a graphical magazine-like format.^[3]

Reaction[link]

The reaction to the application was mainly positive, with some calling it a "killer" iPad application^[4]. Apple also positively reviewed it and named the application Apple's iPad App of the Year in 2010.^[5] A new update of the software added more features such as support for Google Reader, a web-based aggregator, and content from more publishers. This update also received mostly favorable reviews.^[6]

Censorship[link]

On May 15, 2011, it was blocked by the Great Firewall of China. McCue said on his Twitter feed – "China has now officially blocked Flipboard".^[7]

The company then released its first international edition for China.

From February 2012, the company started self-censoring if the user is using the application from China. The content guide for China does not include Twitter and Facebook anymore. Existing subscriptions for Twitter or Facebook are also automatically removed.^[8]

User interface[link]

The application's user interface is designed for intuitive flipping through content. Once the feeds have been set up, the first page seen when the application is opened is a visual list of the subscribed content.

See also[link]

	Apple Inc. portal
	Internet portal

• Lists of software

References[link]

Flipboard Leaked for Samsung Galaxy S2 - suckmytrend.com/2012/05/09/flipboard-for-android-gets-leaked-from-samsung-galaxy-siii/

Further reading[link]

This section's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. (May 2012)

• Westaway, Luke (July 22, 2010). "Flipboard for iPad Review". CNET. Retrieved March 4, 2012
• Richmond, Shane (August 4, 2010). "Flipboard: The Closest Thing I've Seen to the Future of Magazines". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved March 4, 2012

External links[link]

• flipboard.com, Flipboard, Inc.'s official website
• Flipboard on Twitter

Mike McCue (b.1968) is a successful internet entrepreneur and a founder of Paper Software, Tellme Networks and Flipboard. Since December 2010 he has been a director of Twitter.^[1]

In an interview in 1997 his pursuits outside of work were said to include rock climbing, kung fu and composing classical music on the piano.^[2]

Career[link]

Early career[link]

McCue grew up in Woodstock, New York.^[3] He became hooked on software and began his first business in his early teens, writing video games at home that he licensed to magazines and in the end to a games publisher. He had wanted to be an astronaut and his first real app, he said, was a space shuttle flight simulator he wrote in TI-BASIC in 1981.^[4]

Admiring technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates, McCue joined IBM in 1986, giving up a congressional nomination to attend the US Air Force Academy.^[3][4] He was employed on a six-month temporary contract but ended up staying three-and-a-half years.^[2]

Paper Software and Netscape[link]

In 1989 McCue founded his first company, Paper Software, aiming, he said, "to make using a computer as easy as using a piece of paper".^[4] At first the company was not successful and McCue spent a summer digging ditches and building houses to raise funds, and then doing software design consulting for a company contracted to the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co.^[2]

Paper Software's first product was Sidebar, a set of icons designed to make using a computer more intuitive, but after discovering Mosaic, McCue began to develop technology allowing web browsers to display complex 3-D graphics. McCue acted as CEO, winning nearly 80 percent market share in 3D internet software from Microsoft and SGI.^[2][3]

McCue rejected offers for Paper Software from America Online and Silicon Graphics^[5] before selling to Netscape for $20 million in February 1996.^[3] At Netscape McCue was appointed Vice President of Technology, helping to create Netscape Netcaster^[2] and working on transforming its Netscape Navigator browser into a Web-based desktop operating system. It has been said that the project, called Constellation after a boat McCue's father had helped to restore, led Microsoft to alter its Windows licensing agreements to prevent PC manufacturers using competing software, eventually leading to antitrust proceedings against the company.^[6]

When McCue later paid $200,000 for a 48-foot classic wooden sailboat he named it “Constellation”.^[6]

Tellme Networks and Microsoft[link]

In February 1999 McCue left Netscape to co-found with Angus Davis, Tellme Networks.^[3] McCue had previously recruited Davis to work at Netscape when he was 19 and credited him with the idea for the new company.^[6] Tellme went on to raise $238 million in venture capital.^[7]

Tellme launched in July 2000 with the ambition of creating a 'voice browser' by using voice-recognition software to allow users to find internet-based information through their telephone with simple voice commands.^[8] “When you pick up a phone,” McCue explained in 2001, “you’ll hear a friendly voice say, ‘What would you like to do?’ and you’ll be able to place a call or do a whole variety of things using simple key words.”^[6]

Instead, McCue decided to "go where the phone calls are today, not where they’ll be tomorrow” and Tellme evolved into a service that allowed a caller to communicate with a client's server by translating voice commands into VoiceXML and then transferring the data through its own network, potentially saving large companies hundreds of thousands of dollars on human operators and their own telecom networks.^[7] By 2005 Tellme estimated that 35 million Americans were making calls through their network each month; revenues were more than $100 million. The company became profitable in the second half of 2004.^[7]

Tellme was one of the world’s first internet platforms to deliver web data to anyone over any telephone, a platform that inspired the migration of large-scale phone services from proprietary applications to open standards applications and drove the adoption of VoiceXML.^[9] The system became the standard for "voice browsers"^[10] and in March 2007 the company was acquired by Microsoft for a rumoured $800 million^[11], with McCue joining as General Manager.^[9]

McCue described his efforts to make design a higher priority at Microsoft as a work in progress during his time at the company, "I'd give it probably a 'C-plus' to a 'B' right now," he said in 2009.^[12]

Flipboard[link]

McCue left Microsoft in June 2009 and in January 2010 he co-founded with Evan Doll, one of the early engineers on the iPhone team at Apple, Flipboard, the 'social magazine' app for Apple's iPad.^[13] Flipboard launched in July 2010 having secured $10.5 million of venture capital from investors including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who had also invested in Tellme)^[10], Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Ashton Kutcher.^[14]

Flipboard evolved from a thought experiment undertaken by McCue and Doll in which they asked what the web would look like if it was washed away in a hurricane and needed to be built again from scratch with the knowledge of hindsight. "We thought," said McCue, "it would be possible to build something from the ground up that was inherently social. And we thought that new form factors like the tablet would enable content to be presented in ways that were fundamentally more beautiful."^[4] McCue said that when reading magazines like National Geographic he would ask himself: "Why is it that the Web isn't as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?"^[13]

McCue was critical of the way that journalism appeared on the web, saying that it had been "contaminated by the Web form factor" and was being pushed into trying to support the monetization model of the web by driving page views with slide shows, condensed columns of narrow text and distracting advertisements, a space where, he said, "I don't think it should ever go". "It's not," he said, "a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website."^[15]

With this in mind they recruited Marcos Weskamp, the designer who in 2004 had built newsmap.jp to graphically display a heatmap of stories from the Google News news aggregator.^[16] Flipboard became what they called the first social magazine, allowing people to consume media from Facebook and Twitter in an easier and more aesthetically interesting way.^[4]

By December 2010 Flipboard claimed that they were installed on about 1 million of the 8-9 million iPads then in circulation^[17]; Apple named Flipboard its iPad app of the year.^[18]

Twitter[link]

In December 2010 McCue joined the board of directors of Twitter, leading to speculation that the company was heading towards creating a media and publishing business.^[19] The company had just raised $200 million in a round of funding, the majority of it from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers^[20], with whom McCue had a lengthy association, and one of whose partners, Ellen Pao, is a member of the board at Flipboard.^[19]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Microsoft Tellme Site
• Flipboard
• McCue's Twitter Account