On Quora: What are the hottest iPad or tablet application startups?
Flipboard is perhaps the defining iPad app of the present, and in their niche — the social magazine — they command the visionary high ground. There will be a huge competition for that space, and a wide variety of competitors, including traditional publishers like NYTimes, Wired, etc., crossovers like Branson’s Project magazine, and many, many upstarts like Flipboard.
I expect that Twitter’s ambitions in making its own client software suggests they will — sooner or later — take a run at the social magazine niche, once the potential is really obvious. Perhaps an acquisition of Flipboard? Facebook could also build a tablet format social magazine, and drowning in cash, why wouldn’t they?
Google should wade in immediately, since meaning is the new search: we will rely on our social connections to deliver meaningful insights to us instead of relying on search engines’ indexing to find clues. But Google’s social deafness has hampered them for years, so they will likely dither until the metaphor of social magazine has been well-established, and then they will build a sketchy knock-off using three people’s 20% time, wait a few months and shut it down, and then acquire two social magazine start-ups for $50M, wait two years and then shut them down. Then one of the founders of one of those start-ups will build a great social magazine product, which will be acquired by AOL.
