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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
As of today certain aspects of the Flipboard experience have been blocked for Chinese users, at the very least access to Facebook and Twitter according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. While direct access to Facebook and Twitter is routinely blocked in China, the Flipboard app talked to its own US-based servers, which in turn talked to Twitter and Facebook so this block is particularly… → Read More
When it comes to publishing apps on the iPad, there are two models: 1) social readers that bring all your realtime news feeds together like Flipboard; or 2) single-title apps from major publishers like the New Yorker, The Daily or the New York Times. Those two models are also dividing along the lines of subscriptions versus ad-supported/free.
In the video above, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue makes… → Read More
When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?
Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. … → Read More
When news came out the other day that Flipboard just raised another $50 million at a $200 million valuation for its iPad news reading app, I gave CEO Mike McCue a hard time on Twitter and here on TechCrunch. Does an iPad app startup really need $50 million, or is this yet another sign of a bubble? McCue responded on Twitter, but yesterday we spoke by phone and he went into great detail about why… → Read More
There is no question that Flipboard has an early lead in iPad news consumption. The company just raised a massive $50 million B round to cement that lead. This comes in between iPhone photo app Color raising a $41 million A round, and LivingSocial raising $400 million so that its founders and early investors could take half of that off the table. There is obviously a lot of venture money… → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social… → Read More
It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, that changes as they’re finally ready to unveil their API. And they already have some pretty nice implementations right off the bat to show what it can do.
Co-founder Kevin Systrom says that it would… → Read More
When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the… → Read More
Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp’s iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City’s meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won’t look anything like The Daily. I know because I’ve been playing… → Read More
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually… → Read More
It’s time for this week’s episode of Fly or Die, the TCTV show where CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I look at three new products and debate their longterm chances of survival. In today’s show, we discuss Windows Phone 7, the just-announced Casio Tryx digital camera, and the popular Flipboard iPad app. At the end of the show, a special surprise guest appears from one of the companies involved… → Read More
It’s time for this week’s episode of Fly or Die, the TCTV show where CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I look at three new products and debate their longterm chances of survival. In today’s show, we discuss Windows Phone 7, the just-announced Casio Tryx digital camera, and the popular Flipboard iPad app. At the end of the show, a special surprise guest appears from one of the companies involved… → Read More
Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “App of the Year” award. The winner? Flipboard. The social magazine app launched in July with some glowing reviews and since then, a few small updates have made it even better. But the update they’re releasing today makes it a lot better. So much so that if Flipboard was… → Read More
It’s perplexing to me that Facebook still hasn’t released an iPad app. And recent comments from the company suggest that they’re in no hurry to. Because of this, apps like Friendly have risen that wrap Facebook’s touch site in a cocoa skin and sell it for $0.99. They’ve undoubtedly made a killing doing that. Now the popular visual RSS reader, Pulse, is about to add Facebook support as well. → Read More
News Corp is taking the iPad very seriously as a new way to distribute the news. The media giant is taking it so seriously that it is developing a new publication called the Daily which will only be available on the iPad (no print edition, no Website). News Corp is hiring 100 journalists for this iPad newspaper and is reportedly working with engineers on loan from Apple to make it shine.
The… → Read More
Alphonso Labs‘ Pulse app for the iPad provides a beautiful way to read your favorite feeds. Unfortunately, compared to the newer entry Flipboard, it’s not very socially personalized. An update tonight hopes to change that.
Pulse is teaming up with Posterous to create a simple way for users to create their own “Pulses.” What this means is that they can with one tap add any article to their own… → Read More
Created by Jason Baptiste, PadPressed is a Wordpress plugin that makes any Wordpress blog look like a native iPad app when accessed from iPad. Bestowing upon your humble blog the iPad features we’ve come to know and love such as “swipe to advance” articles, touch navigation, accelerometer positioning and home screen icon support when you’re really jonseing for that authentic app feeling.
While… → Read More
Back in May, we first wrote about Pulse, an innovative and pretty news reading app for the iPad created by a couple of Stanford grads. Just about a month later, it hit for the iPhone as well. Today, they’re wasting little time graduating beyond the iUniverse with the launch of Pulse for Android.
Pulse is essentially a better-looking and more intuitive way to read your favorite RSS feeds. That’s… → Read More
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