Meet Flipboard the $10.5M Superstar Invested App

The web’s ablaze with speculation about the latest announcement about the new start-up in town. According to All Things Digital, a new social magazine called Flipboard has secured $10.5M in funding from a who’s who in Silicon Valley. Investors include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, and Ashton Kutcher. There’s also a number of angel investors adding their financial might to the nascent application. In addition, they’ve also acquired Ellerdale a  real-time relevancy search engine.

So what is a social magazine exactly? Flipbook is designed to pull in different aspects from your various social networking accounts and arrange them neatly in your iPad. Aside from your Twitter streams, Facebook updates, and Flickr additions, it will also aggregate content which is where Ellerdale comes in. Using Ellerdale’s real-time relevancy search technology, Flipbook can determine what’s trending and deliver it without you having to go hunt it down. Essentially, Flipbook is your own personal magazine made for and by you.

Since its unveiling last night, it’s been widely praised with glowing reviews.  Flipbook is receiving the biggest furor over the way it supplements content. Not only does it pull in status updates and tweets, it bundles them with additional content. For example, if someone were to check in at a restaurant on Foursquare and shared it via Facebook or Twitter, not only would the update show up, you can expect something like a link to the restaurant’s page or a review to show up as well. The other big selling point are the crisp visuals that users can navigate with the touch of a finger.

Needless to say, this is app has the potential to change social networking and web surfing as we know it. Which could be problematic for some people – primarily print publications and their online properties. What happens if Flipboard pulls in content from the New York Times which is set to start charging people for its digital content? The other concern will definitely be ad sales. If Flipbook is pulling a small segment from an article to supplement a tweet, how will users see the advertisements that accompany the article? It’s a foregone conclusion that both print and digital will be watching Flipboard very closely.

The app is currently available for free in the app store. Those of you with an iPad, try it out and let us know what you think.

About the Author
Sherri is a freelance writer that has a love of all things fun and geeky including gadgets, gaming, anime, and comics. When she isn't writing or out on the town living it up, she loves doing 10-12 hour marathon sessions on her Xbox 360 or one of her older consoles. It's not an addiction, it's a way of life!
See all posts by Sherri L. Smith.