Disclosure: All Things Digital is part of Flipboard’s new publisher beta.

11:01 am: Personal bio stuff: McCue says he’s a product guy. A friend pointed out to him that this Flipboard is his “fourth browser company”–Paper Software, then Netscape, then TellMe, a voice browser, and Flipboard, a social media browser.

Flipboard is a social magazine. The idea is to bring the aesthetics of print to the world of social media.

When McCue left Microsoft after it bought TellMe, started brainstorming with (Flipboard co-founder) Evan Doll, who was formerly at Apple. HTML5 and the tablet mean “information can take a major step up in terms of how it looks.”

11:05 am: Katie: Isn’t this designed for lurkers? You’re not generating anything on your own.

McCue: This is the first snapshot of our vision, and we didn’t focus on publishing, but rather the lean-back experience that the iPad is great at. We wanted to focus on a new kind of way to consume social media. Our peak hours are between 8 and 11 p.m. People just leave Flipboard on all day and browse through when they have time.

This is not for the power user, says McCue, illustrating by gesturing a set of vertical columns with his hands (the universal hand signal for TweetDeck, I believe).

People post stuff on my Facebook wall that’s amazing, and Flipboard is for when I have time to consume that.

11:08 am: Katie asks about the new Flipboard Pages product for publishers. McCue explains the Web is cluttered, slow, and “the content doesn’t have enough room to breathe.” Wanted to leverage three trends: HMTL5, social media and the iPad. “Now we have the opportunity to present Web sites like magazine pages.”

Instead of going to a Web page when you double-click on an article, you go to a formatted version.

11:12 am: It’s hard to read long articles on the web, McCue says.

11:14 am: McCue: We definitely do not plan to charge for Flipboard itself, but publishers will find value.

Ads in Flipboard are likely to be from the same advertisers as they already have a relationship with, just a different form. We may be able to help them sell more or target the ads they have.

“The Web is at the point in time when I think it needs a game-changer. It needs a face lift. It needs a new approach to monetization.”

Katie: Other sites like Twitter are going toward infinite scrolling, but you like pages.

McCue: In an ideal world, you paginate. It allows designers to build beautiful content because they know what the alignment of that content is going to be.

11:17 am: It’s also better for ads, he says, because a full-page ad doesn’t work on the Web.

Katie: How are you going to bring in lots more publishers?

McCue: It’s going to be HTML5 (so everyone can build for it). We spent about an hour on each template so far. We’ll publish tools and mechanisms for how to do this. Our goal is to open this to the Web at large sometime next year.

Katie: What about non-iPad form factors?

McCue: The iPad is an amazing device, an incredible development environment, and Apple’s been great to work with. From a start-up perspective, you have to first prove out the concept for users (in our case, publishers), and after you’ve gotten that far enough along, then you scale.

11:22 am: We’re working in the lab on other platforms, things like iPhone–not quite Android yet because we’d have to hire Android engineers. You can see the HTMLification of our app coming.

First we’re thinking about integrations with other services, says McCue. You could imagine an integration with Foursquare, with a magazine about where you are at the moment. (Hmm, that sounds neat!)

Katie: You acquired the Ellerdale Project, are you using that now?

McCue: We actually use RSS now for excerpts after getting links from Twitter. It’s publisher-friendly and a way of getting clean excerpt content. Ellerdale helped us put that together. But the real application is dealing with the information overload of social media.

11:26 am: There are literally billions and billions of links on these social networks, and that’s overwhelming.

Katie: I can’t use groups or differentiate between social sources of content in Flipboard.

McCue: That will change soon. We’ll prioritize more important events–like a friend gets engaged–rather than just a chronological order like we do today. That’s a really hard problem, and that’s what the Ellerdale guys have been working on. We’ll show context with your social screen.

11:28 am: Katie: Who’s your competition? Pulse?

McCue: There are traditional news RSS aggregators, and Pulse is an iPad version of those. There are Seesmic and TweetDeck doing iPad versions. Bigger idea is moving from a publisher-centric view to a person-centric view, merging these two ideas.

Audience question: What about other sources of content?

McCue: Video social networks like YouTube and Vimeo would be nice, but we don’t want too many flashing things.

Audience question: Do you have the rights to your content?

McCue: Yes. Looking for win-win-win with publishers, readers, us.

And that’s it for this session

Tonight, All Things Digital will debut its first extension of the D: All Things Digital conference, with D: Dive Into Mobile.

The original nickname for the event was “mini-d,” since it is shorter than big-D, focused on one key topic and has a more intimate audience.

But the speakers Walt Mossberg and I have assembled are anything but small on the critical topic of mobile–beginning with tonight’s opening session with Google Android kingpin Andy Rubin.

There is a lot to talk, about from monetization of the ever-popular operating system to its rivalry with the Apple iPhone to its relationship with wireless carriers.

D: Dive Into Mobile continues all day Tuesday, with speakers that include: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie; and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

D: Dive Into Mobile is being held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Mossberg and me, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret and MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka will be conducting the interviews.

For more information, click here for D: Dive Into Mobile news and more.

And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

While everyone is considering whether to brine or deep-fry the turkey this week, All Things Digital HQ will be busy with our preparations for D: Dive Into Mobile.

That includes setting the program, which takes place in two weeks and will open with an evening interview with Google’s Andy Rubin (pictured here).

As the search giant’s mobile chief and principal force and creator of its Android operating system, Rubin is responsible for the ongoing development of the major rival to the Apple iPhone.

Many have challenged Android, including a recent jab from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, questioning its overall experience and whether or not it’s actually open.

Nonetheless, Rubin and Android have proven to be a disruptive and fast-growing force in the mobile space, aiming for dominance akin to Microsoft’s on the desktop.

Ironic? Yes.

Rubin started as an engineer at Apple and later worked at General Magic, where he participated in developing Magic Cap, an operating system and interface for handheld devices. When Magic Cap failed, Rubin joined Artemis Research, founded by Steve Perlman, which became WebTV and was eventually acquired by Microsoft.

After several years, Rubin left to found another smartphone effort called Danger, which was also acquired by Microsoft, in 2008.

Disillusionment with his ouster as CEO of Danger motivated him to found Android, which was later acquired by Google.

Now, it seems Rubin is poised to make good on his first efforts at making a truly smart smartphone ubiquitous.

And he is only one of many of the industry heavyweight speakers at D: Dive Into Mobile, among them: Dan Hesse, president and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, vice president of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google advertising czar Susan Wojcicki; and Glenn Lurie, president of Emerging Devices for AT&T.

Plus, there is also one more big speaker we’ll be announcing soon, so stay tuned.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on December 6 and 7.

It represents the very first brand extension of our flagship D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating. What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews, where real news is often broken.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Along with Walt Mossberg and me, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret and MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka will be conducting the interviews.

As usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

But there’s nothing like being there, so you can sign up for the D: Dive Into Mobile conference here.

Can Google’s Android keep surging without fatally fragmenting? Can Research in Motion get back its mojo? Can Palm be revived inside the Hewlett-Packard monolith? Can Microsoft resuscitate its mobile business? Will local apps and mobile Web sites fight to the death or co-exist? Is the Apple iPad a fluke or will tablets spread like wildfire, threatening laptops?

And what will it matter without better networks, must-have software and a viable advertising model?

These are some of the questions we hope to explore with top mobile industry leaders at the first new edition of our D, conference, to take place December 6th and 7th in San Francisco.

While our main D event, which will continue to occur each year in the late spring, takes a wide view of technology and digital media, this new, shorter confab, called D: Dive Into Mobile, is focused on the most dynamic area of tech–mobile devices and all of the content, apps, social networking and commerce that they support.

Answering all these questions is a strong lineup of leaders in the mobile sector, including Andy Rubin, who runs the surging Android platform at Google; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM and the father of the BlackBerry; and Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, the wireless carrier that leads in the race to faster 4G networks.

In addition, we’ll be hearing from Jon Rubinstein, who heads Palm; Joe Belfiore, product manager for the new Windows Phone 7; Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Glenn Lurie, who handles the iPhone and other cutting-edge devices for AT&T; and Susan Wojcicki, the advertising center square at Google.

We’re excited to be doing a deep dive into an exciting topic, using our tried-and-tested technique from eight years of D conferences: No canned speeches, no slides, no large panels–just unrehearsed journalistic interviews on stage, sprinkled with a few demos of interesting new products.

And, this time, we’re adding a fresh twist. In addition to Kara Swisher and me, two of our colleagues, Peter Kafka and Katherine Boehret, will also be conducting onstage interviews.

To learn more, and to register, click here.

Yes, it’s true–All Things Digital is expanding. And, for our first trick–ta-da–we bring you: D: Dive Into Mobile.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature a gathering of industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel (S); Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIMM); Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft (MSFT); Andy Rubin, Vice President of Mobile Platforms for Google (GOOG); Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ); Foursquare CEO and Co-founder Dennis Crowley; and several more big speakers to be announced soon.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on December 6 and 7 and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret and MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka will be conducting the interviews.

But there’s nothing like being there, so you can sign up for the D: Dive Into Mobile conference here.

ATD has much more to come, of course, including D9 from May 31 to June 2, so watch this space for our next prestidigitation.

And, to give you an idea of how we run a D event, here are some greatest-hits videos from past conferences, including that famous joint interview with Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of Microsoft, as well as Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101013/d-all-things-digital-goes-plural-with-new-d-dive-into-mobile-conference/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100721/heres-flipboards-video-so-you-can-understand-what-the-heck-it-does/ http://allthingsd.com/20100721/heres-flipboards-video-so-you-can-understand-what-the-heck-it-does/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:47:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=31029

It looks like this promotional video for Flipboard, the high-profile and very slick new iPad app launched yesterday, was shot in its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

Because the service is a bit of a conceptual leap in digesting social networking, this video might help explain the excitement among tech bloggers and others about its debut.

Flipboard has dubbed itself a “social magazine,” attempting to make the social networking universe and the real-time Web more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the popular Apple (AAPL) device.

As I wrote yesterday:

“Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from 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 this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.”

The innovative Flipboard emerged from stealth mode last night. It was co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January and has grabbed a large $10.5 million funding from top tech power players.

Here’s the video, which–except for the unusually sleepy demoer for the free app–pretty much explains it all, as well as the interview I did with McCue about the company:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100721/heres-flipboards-video-so-you-can-understand-what-the-heck-it-does/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100720/flipboard-your-own-digital-magazine/ http://allthingsd.com/20100720/flipboard-your-own-digital-magazine/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:03:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1284 Glancing through a beautiful catalog or magazine reveals on each page a new group of thoughtfully assembled images and words. That pleasurable experience, sorely lacking on most websites, has been duplicated on the iPad, which makes reading digital magazines more like the real thing.

This week I tested Flipboard, an iPad app that is a personalized digital magazine made up of content that relates to you and your life. A Flipboard is created when the app automatically gathers social-networking updates from your Facebook and Twitter accounts and displays them on attractively formatted individual pages.

If you’re not a social-networking expert, you can select content for your Flipboard from a list of 20 to 30 categories, including photography, health, technology, film, music, food and others. Behind the scenes, these categories are populated by Twitter lists (groups of tweets about the same subject) selected by the Flipboard team. You can also search for specific lists on Twitter, including lists you’ve added to your Twitter account, and create a section based on that search. For now, the Contents section of a Flipboard holds nine sections, but this will grow in future iterations of the app.

I’ve been using Flipboard for the past couple months, and I’ve grown accustomed to relying on it as a favorite method for checking friends’ updates and news updates. On Wednesday, you, too, can download this free iPad app from Apple’s App Store. For now, Flipboard doesn’t contain ads.

One downside to Flipboard is that it doesn’t cache content for you to read when you’re offline. Other iPad apps, like The Wall Street Journal, do this, and have saved me on countless occasions when my iPad is not in a Wi-Fi zone and isn’t loaded with new material to read. (People who own iPads with always-on 3G network connections won’t have this problem as often.) A Flipboard engineer says that the company is investigating some degree of an offline mode for the app in the future.

Another Flipboard frustration is that the app doesn’t allow enough personal customization of content. It mostly presents status updates chronologically. A new version of Flipboard, due out this fall, will include more personalized content.

One of the more outstanding things about Flipboard is its ability to take plain-text tweets or Facebook updates and turn them into visuals of a shared photo or Web link in a status message. This means that instead of reading a friend’s update that says, “Wildlife news here wwf.panda.org,” Flipboard will already have retrieved a small sample of that website, including images and text, to display on a page of my digital magazine.

Flipboard’s visual effects were so appealing that I found myself wanting to see how the app displayed my social-networking content, even if I had recently checked Facebook or seen the latest updates from Twitter.

Users can flip through pages with right-to-left swipes, which give the illusion that the current page creases in its center as one side of the page flips up and over. If you flip slowly, you can read both sides of a page at once, which looks incredibly cool.

IPad app Flipboard gathers social-network updates into a magazine

By touching on one status update, you can open a pop-up screen that shows comments made by other friends on Facebook; on Twitter, this menu shows who has retweeted a post. Here, too, you can hit a button to “like” a Facebook update, favorite it on Twitter, retweet a tweet or email an item to others. If one of your friends is too “noisy,” you can click a button to hide that person’s updates from your Flipboard.

A strip of dots at the bottom of each Flipboard page provides a place where you can drag a finger and skip ahead in the Facebook or Twitter feed timeline. Since I regularly check Facebook on my computer and BlackBerry, I found a lot of content on Flipboard that I had already viewed. Flipboard’s co-founder and CEO Mike McCue said the company is considering ways of marking certain content as already read. On Twitter, I follow over a hundred people, so Flipboard’s content was always fresh.

Photos shared on Facebook and Twitter are illustrated on Flipboard in magnified images, and a rotating selection of certain images is chosen for the cover of your Flipboard magazine. More than once, I was startled to see a friend’s new baby or family shot on the front page of the app when I opened it.

Flipboard does an excellent job of taking otherwise plain content and arranging it in a digestible and attractive format. It could stand to make its content more customizable and tweaked to individual preferences, but company representatives say they’re working on these improvements. If you enjoy reading news from the Web and/or keeping up with your social network, this app is a beautiful, visual way to do so.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

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Related Post and Video

• Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth “Social Magazine” Start-Up That Just Nabbed $10.5 Million in Funding.

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