Exclusive: Flipboard Confirms $50 Million Funding at $200 Million Valuation - Kara Swisher

Things continue to hot up in the crowded tablet news reader market, as Flipboard announces a $50M round:

Exclusive: Flipboard Confirms $50 Million Funding at $200 Million Valuation

by Kara Swisher
Posted on April 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM PT

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

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The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

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Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment. In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site. McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms. The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually. Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices. Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

Bing’s iPad App: Good Enough To Kill Off Local Newspapers?

So, it may turn out that search engines — not Craigslist — are going to be the newpaper killers as we move into the tablet era. Damon Kiesow rhapsodizes about the new Bing iPad app, which is much more than a search tool, since it streams all sorts of news in a beautiful package:

Damon Kiesow, Bing’s new iPad app is a newspaper in disguise

The app is not significantly different than what Google or Yahoo offer on the Web. But Bing has redesigned its features into a tablet-friendly interface that begins to feel like the content-bundle of a daily newspaper.

That bundle includes channels for news, weather, movies, stocks, maps, traffic, business listings, videos and shopping. (All the app is missing are the comics and Dear Abby.) News is sectioned into standard categories: Top stories, U.S., Sports, World, etc. The results are apparently all automated, closely resembling those found at bing.com/news.

The app’s primary weakness is likely a result of Microsoft being a tech company focused on search, not content. The news selection feels like it is programmed by an algorithm, not chosen by a person making editorial decisions.

Like Google News, the stories presented are only as good as the algorithm selecting them. Those calculations work fairly well for major national and international events, but are of little use in surfacing local and regional news.

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Though it features a collection of content channels, Bing is not a media app in the traditional sense. But it does inhabit a new middle ground — almost a news app, almost a weather app — but still a search engine at heart. So, Bing is not going replace any of the apps already on your iPad, but it does provide a roadmap for a new way of thinking about presenting information on a tablet.

The challenge for publishers is that Microsoft could easily move toward a Flipboard-like personalized experience in its next upgrade. Done well, that could present a challenge for local and national media apps. That is true especially as consumers look for alternatives to the growing list of paid-content media websites and mobile apps.

For now, Bing is not a fully featured aggregator like Flipboard or an original news source such as The New York Times. But for some consumers it may be a decent alternative.

Damon doesn’t talk at all about the social dimension, which I guess means it is non-existent. But I will take a look, and follow up, here, later.

AP Timeline Reader

There are some interesting UX elements in the AP Timeline Reader.

First of all, the timeline is the primary organizing mechanism, with the option to add one or more categories of stories. If you mouse over a story, it expands in place:

[Note: I glanced at the app this morning, a Saturday, and it is clear that AP doesn’t work on the weekend.]

If you click on the ‘continue reading’ link in any story, the tool presents a different presentation, which is a horizontal ‘storyflow’ sort of UI where all the stories in the timeline can be walked through.

There is also an option to ‘queue’ stories, which can be viewed in the same fashion. This is basically just a sort of arbitrary filter.

The Timeline Reader reminds a lot of Flipboard, but lacks the option to add my own feeds, which makes it extremely limited. Still the timeline view is something that I am sure we will see in many other news reader tools in the future.

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