Index Ventures

Flipboard launches world's first social magazine

July 21 2010

Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard, Inc. began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of Flipboard for the iPad, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard is downloadable for free at Apple’s App Store or at www.flipboard.com.

“Social media today is characterized by endless lists of text updates and links that people have to scroll through and click on to actually see any detail,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for Apple’s iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of your social content. Simply launch Flipboard and flip open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents you can view your sections and personalize your magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let you quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, you no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link - instead you instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets you easily create sections around topics or people you care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

Acquisition of Ellerdale

As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

Investors 

Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Individual investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former News Corp. President Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Sam Lucente, Quincy Smith, Danny Shader, Ashton Kutcher, Emil Michael, Jed Stremel, and Kristina Homer. The company also announced it has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.