Tag: Flipboard

Check Out Flipboard’s Cool New Web Version

Mobile apps are being pushed to the desktop. Lately, WhatsApp made its way to the web and now Flipboard is joining the league. The news-reading app stepped into the desktop world and launched the web version of the digital magazine service. It is functional now and looks brilliant.

Flipboard hopes to attract the broader spectrum of web readers, which don’t prefer to browse on mobile. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said in a meeting:

There is a whole group of people who don’t do that much browsing on their phones. That’s what they use their computer for.

Mike says that the thing they are doing is very retro, by which he means shifting the app from a handy and anytime access device to a desktop which is not mobile.

Let’s have a look at how the application works and appears on the desktop:

If you are a Flipboard user then sign in to Flipboard, else make a new account. Once you’re in, make your choice and flip the article in your magazine through the + icon at the extreme right corner below the post. You can also like the post, report it as inappropriate, share it via email, Twitter, and Facebook. Then you have the same option to search for your favourite topics as it’s on mobile.

Flipboard has worked extensively on responsive design, which makes it easier and prettier. Also, it has responsive layouts for diverse screen sizes and has a new scrolling interface as well.

By bringing the web version of Flipboard, the 15 million magazines that could only be read through mobile app until now, can now be browsed on desktop. This gives readers the time to read their personalised magazines on their workstations when in office.

February 11, 2015
Latest Flipboard Update Adds Large Number of Customisation Options

Flipboard, a popular news aggregation app, has rolled out a new update Flipboard 3.0, which involves better curation of the millions of customized magazines that readers have created — using recommendation technology from Zite, acquired earlier this year.

The app, which has over 100 million users, has lost some of its buzz to Facebook which has increasingly been used by social networkers for aggregated news. Flipboard now lets you pick from 34,000 topics to help narrow down what specifically matters most to you, and presents curated, topical stories in a form of ‘Personal Magazine’ that pops up as soon as you open the app. This Personal Magazine includes stories shared by friends, and also the top stories from popular topics you’ve followed like hygiene, business, lifestyle, etc.

Flipboard has added a new feature called ‘The Daily Edition’, an editorially curated news section which gets pushed to you every morning at 7 AM, much like Yahoo News Digest. The Daily Edition is a quick list of main news stories across a variety of topics like sports, business and more, and is selected by an in-house team led by Josh Quittner, Time’s former Director of Digital Editorial Development.

While these new features proved to be hugely popular, the Flipboard Co-Founder and CEO Mike McCue said that after watching readers create more than 10 million magazines on a wide variety of topics, it became obvious that a lot of worthy content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren’t enough discovery tools.

The company also said that their new algorithm for the selection of the news combines the user’s preference and element of surprise together, which has been the result of the Zite acquisition in March.

The fact that users can choose from more than 30,000 topics now, makes Flipboard the most comprehensive online magazine app. The topic engine also pulls in ‘magazines’ that other Flipboard users have put together. So, for example, you like potato salads, the app will create a steady feed of stories it finds from across the web.

“That’s the magic here,” Mr. McCue spoke, “It’s people’s perspectives coming together with an algorithmic curator to create something that’s almost like a bionic curator.”

October 30, 2014
Flipboard Buys Rival Zite From CNN

Flipboard, the magazine-style news reading app, is buying competitor Zite from CNN, the companies announced Wednesday.

The Zite app was a part of CNN for three years, since it had acquired the company for nearly $20 million. The terms and money involved in this deal have not yet been disclosed clearly. The move is a sign of ongoing consolidation in the space and comes in the wake of Facebook launching a Flipboard competitor called Paper. Flipboard benefits by cutting one more competitor from the field through the sheer act of buying it.

“We’re going to integrate the technology into Flipboard in the coming months,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said during a press call Wednesday. “We do not plan to continue to evolve Zite, we think we should focus on a single product.”

He added that Zite users will be able to use their logins to set up a new Flipboard account, and that Flipboard will continue to support Zite for the time it takes to complete the integration of its technology.

If you are not familiar with Zite, it is a personal news reading application that launched on the iPad in 2011. Essentially, Zite was a big recommendation engine that gives you articles based on what you like to read—based on your social feeds like Facebook and Twitter, but also based on your reading history and preferences.

March 6, 2014
Report : Facebook Working On Flipboard Like App

Facebook is experimenting with a lot of mobile-centric ideas, aiming to take the social network’s presence beyond just Facebook. Although it has reportedly been in the works for well over a year, it appears as though Facebook is working on a news aggregating app.

Now according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is developing a new tool that focuses on news consumption in order to re-shape its identity as a social network, like Twitter, that can compete in the news consumption space. The project, which is reportedly called “Reader,” would be a feature that runs on Apple’s iOS Devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

The social network has been quietly working on a service, internally called Reader, that displays content from Facebook users and publishers in a new visual format tailored for mobile devices, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The project, which the company has been developing for more than a year, is designed to showcase news content in particular. Recent versions of Reader resemble Flipboard Inc., a smartphone and tablet app that aggregates stories from multiple sources and lets users swipe to flip through articles, said the people with knowledge of the project.

While it’s unclear when Facebook will be ready to unveil the product, if it ever is, the Reader project is a sign the company is trying to get users to spend more time with it on mobile devices—and to see more ads.

Facebook is clearly making an initiative to be more than just a social network to share photos and statuses

[Via]

June 24, 2013