Social magazine Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud.
Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the debut of a Flipboard app for Japan, following its previous launches in China and France. And there’s an update which will matter a lot to a smaller number of users: integration of Apple’s voiceover controls to provide better access for the visually impaired. → Read More
Last December, Google launched Currents, its attempt at challenging mobile apps like Flipboard and Zite. Since then, the company has added about 400 new publishers and over 14,000 self-published editions to its lineup . Until now, though, Currents, which runs on Android and iOS, was only available in the United States. That’s changing today, as Google is taking Currents global. Local publishers can now start adding their content to the app and U.S. publishers can now turn on a translation feature to make their texts available in any of the 44 languages that are supported by Google Translate. → Read More
In the landgrab among reading apps that aggregate content to make it more accessible on tablets and smartphones, one of the early movers, Pulse, is today announcing a deal with magazine publisher Bonnier that will give its offering a significant boost.
Bonnier is adding 20 titles from its special-interest magazine portfolio to the Pulse reading stream, including titles like Field and Stream, Parenting, Saveur, Scuba Diving, Skiing and Sound + Vision. Pulse, which already had some 300 content partners on its platform, says the Bonnier deal is its biggest yet. → Read More
Started originally as a ridesharing service, then pivoting to become a document uploading and reading service, Scribd now has 100 million registered users, with 90 million monthly active users. That makes it probably the biggest effort of its kind, but leveraging that size hasn’t always been easy.
Scribd, TechCrunch has learned, is at a crossroads in mobile — a crossroads that almost saw the company sell its iOS mobile news aggregation app, Float, to Yahoo.
When Float launched in July 2011, it was off to a good start: 150 partners at signup, including biggies like the AP; with that number eventually growing to 200. It has also regularly made the top-15 rankings for reading and news apps on the App Store, and in the last three months has seen the number of active enaged users of the app go up 30 percent month over month. → Read More
Good news, new iPad users: everyone’s favorite iPad news magazine Flipboard (OK, my favorite, but I hear the Flipboard / Zite battles get fierce) is now Retina-ready. I know, we all thought the enhanced app would be approved by tonight, but, as it turns out, the update was shipped a bit earlier. Consider this your PSA.
However, in the brief note Flipboard sent me about the update, something struck me as interesting: company co-founder Evan Doll casually speculated that the Retina Display would lead to longer Flipboard reading sessions. Will that actually be true, though, in the long-term?
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Flipboard is rolling out the first major update to its social magazine tonight since its December launch on the iPhone. The new release brings the iPhone app’s most popular feature, “Cover Stories,” to the iPad’s bigger screen. Now, iPad users will see a large, double-tiled pane on the first page of their Flipboard app. There, you’ll find a mix of stories popular among your friends, those that are popular across Flipboard’s network, as well as those that are uniquely relevant to you.
Also new in tonight’s release are a number of design tweaks, meant to give Flipboard a print magazine-like appeal, as well as a much-requested third page in Flipboard’s Table of Contents. And for international users, there’s even more big news: Flipboard just launched its first standalone European edition with the arrival of Flipboard in France, and is promising more localized editions to come. → Read More
Our industry lauds cutting-edge UX. Look no further than the exceptional work of Path. One either swoons over it, or one is blind. But what if that sends a wrong signal? Don’t get me wrong, I feel very strongly about the importance of UX, but since I’ve played around with NewsFlash, a feature-stripped free news app for iOS (iTunes link), I’ve asked myself whether more often than not users work for the UX, instead of the other way around. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
Back in May, my6sense raised another $1.1 million to continue pushing its digital intuition technology to market.
Today, the company is releasing a brand new product called ‘Smart Magazine’ which can be best described as a Flipboard for iPhone with added digital intuition that helps brings relevant content to its users ‘automagically’.
Except that the company elected to forgo iOS and launch on Android and Windows Phone instead. Both versions are free and can be downloaded, here. One thing to note is that the Android version is exclusive to all Samsung Galaxy models. In three months, it’ll be free available in the Android Market store. → Read More
Only one week after Flipboard’s highly anticipated launch on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), the company is announcing it has added 1 million users to its service and has tripled its engagement. According to the company, that means it now has over 5 million users in total using the app across the iOS platform.
Before last week’s release, Flipboard had registered 650 million flips per month on the iPad. Now it’s trending towards 2 billion flips per month. → Read More
Since launching early last year, young social travel site Gogobot has been off to a pretty good start, or at least it has, shall we say, been hitting all the stops. As Jason pointed out recently, it was named one of Time’s top sites for 2011, won a Crunchie for best design in 2010, and brought its total funding to just under $20 million with a series B raise from Redpoint Ventures, Battery Ventures and CrunchFund. It launched a good looking iOS app in October, and has seen its user base grow 10x in the last six months. → Read More
It’s been a very busy week at TechCrunch with our Disrupt conference and other internal disruptions, so you may have missed some great and revealing interviews. Devin Coldewey wrote a post with the Six Must-Watch On-Stage Videos from Disrupt. But there was a lot of activity going on backstage too. We did more than 60 interviews with entrepreneurs, VC’s, Angels, CEO’s, and a Mayor.
Also, if you find yourself missing or still humming the tunes from Disrupt, you can download the music created for us by Smith & Keats Music in this post.
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Moprise is launching a new iPad application it’s calling a “Flipboard for the Enterprise.” The app is a tablet-optimized version of the company’s currently available Coaxion iPhone application. The Flipboard analogy isn’t quite right, however. Flipboard is about reading news and articles, browsing photos and viewing updates from your social networks in a magazine-like format. Coaxion and Flipboard are only similar in that they both have easy-to-browse, touchable, swipe-friendly user interfaces. But Coaxion’s content is corporate documents, not news or tweets.
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Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now many of, News360 uses semantic analysis to deliver the most relevant news of the day, including stories about your favorite topics from your favorite sources. → Read More
The dream of a personalized magazine tuned just for you keeps showing itself on the iPad. Today’s edition comes from AOL Editions, which is finally coming out after much fine-tuning and a silly video. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is also owned by AOL). Editions assembles a digital magazine for you once a day from a variety of online news sources and blogs—The Atlantic, Businessweek, CNNMoney, Forbes, TechCrunch, Cnet, Business Insider, Wired. It is trying to stake a position somewhere between The Daily’s all-original (and expensive) reporting and Flipboard‘s endless pages of prettified RSS feeds and social streams.
AOL Editions is designed to be completed in one sitting. It pulls in 30 to 50 stories across different sections like Top News, Technology, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Local News, and Travel. You pick the sections you want, enter your zipcode, and it does the rest. You can further train the app each time you read an article by tapping on sources and topics you want to follow or hide. The app pulls out a few main topic tags associated with each story for which you can effectively give a thumbs up or down by tapping on a check mark or an X. The next editions will show more stories from those sources or on those topics. You also can add blogs or news sources via a search box on each section start page as well (but only from sources without paywalls, no New York Times articles appear, for instance). → Read More
Social news viewing app An update to social news viewing app Flipboard goes live in the app store today, with a new souped up 1.5 version that optimizes the reader experience even further. Earlier this week we had the chance to sit down with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and did a demo of the new features, above.
McCue tells me that the redesign focused on three core points.
1. People can now navigate to an infinite number of feeds.
2. Navigation through content is much more efficient via a Content Guide.
3. Users can follow their LinkedIn graph through added LinkedIn integration. → Read More
This should be interesting. Flipboard is getting an editorial director from the world of print magazines: Josh Quittner, my former boss at Business 2.0 magazine and most recently the editor at Time Inc. behind many of its digital magazine initiatives. (Quittner is the one on the right of this picture from our B2.0 days, with Om Malik and me in the background).
I’ve been telling Josh for years that he should leave print behind and dive headfirst into digital, and I’m glad to see him finally taking my advice. When Josh talks about what a digital magazine should be, Flipboard is actually the first thing that comes to mind. He’s been toying with the idea of creating a purely digital magazine for the iPad, and it will be interesting to see if any of those ideas make it into Flipboard. Last time I spoke with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, he had just come from a meeting at Time Inc. and he was taking just like Josh, saying, “people like to see their content atomized,” a Quittnerism I was familiar with. → Read More
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