It is a quiet morning, and Silicon Valley veteran Mike McCue can finally sit down on a big red couch and talk about his latest product — Flipboard, an app for Apple’s iPad that turns your Facebook, Twitter and other social content into a digital magazine.
Flipboard launched in July to glowing reviews. So many people wanted to download the free app that the company had to move to a reservation system, holding back new customers until its servers could handle the load.
The doors are now wide open.
“Everybody who wants to use the app immediately now can,” says McCue, former CEO of voice-search pioneer Tellme Networks, which was sold to Microsoft for $800 million in 2007.
He got the idea for Flipboard while on a flight with a stack of magazines.
“A magazine is so much more beautiful than what’s online,” says McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “Content online still lives as if it’s the mid-1990s.”
How Flipboard works: After you register with your Twitter and Facebook credentials, it takes tweets and updates from your friends and lays them out as if they were being presented in a magazine. Interesting Internet link suggestions show up as article snippets interspersed with photos and comments from friends.
Your iPad has to be online to use Flipboard. A new version, which will be available by next week, will save the information from your last visit, making it possible to read offline.
To create Flipboard, McCue teamed with Evan Doll, a former Apple engineer. They first conceived of it for the Web but shifted gears to target the iPad, because it “perfectly matches what you would expect a social magazine to be in, the kind of thing you can hold in your hand and flip through pages,” McCue says.
McCue raised $10.5 million from venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, actor Ashton…