Flipboard is On a Roll
Flipboard, the white hot social magazine iPad app startup, has snapped up another company in a bid to make sense out of the streams of links and social data coming from networks like Twitter.
The company announced that it had acquired The Ellerdale Project, a two-year-old company that indexes almost 70 million Facebook, Twitter, and other social status messages a day.
Flipboard, a “revolutionary” social magazine designed for the iPad (Ashton Kutcher’s word, not mine) pulls in articles, photos, and other data from a user’s friends, and spits them out as a cleanly formatted virtual magazine. The company intends to put the Ellerdale technology at the center of its app, letting it determine the most relevant content for each user.
“This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. Itʼs a great combination,” said Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue in a statement.
Ellerdale co-founder Arthur van Hoff, who helped develop Java at Sun Microsystems, will join Flipboard as chief technology officer.
The company was founded by McCue, who sold voice recognition company Tellme to Microsoft for $700 million in 2007, and Evan Doll, a former Apple iPhone engineer.
Flipboard received $10.5M in its first round of funding. High profile investors included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Ashton Kutcher.
The Flipboard app, which was released this week, has been riding a wave of positive press. A massive influx of users at launch caused login delays, and prompted the company to implement an invitation system to keep their system from being overwhelmed overwhelmed.
