Flipboard to reach 10 million users by early 2011

Things are going exceptionally good for iPad magazine application founder, Mike McCue.
Launched in July 2010, Flipboard has caught up a happy growth trajectory. According to Mr. McCue, also the chief executive of Flipboard, the company is on track to reach 10 million users early 2011.

This will be four folds of the number of users Flipboard currently has. Flipboard currently has around 2.5 million users, up from around 1.1 million users in January.

The CEO is also convinced that the startup’s business model has begun to take shape, will start booking positive cash flow later next year, reports Business Insider. Notably, the company which is quite favorite among its VCs, is not generating any revenue yet. Mr. Flipboard raised a $50 million in April this year, at a valuation of $200 million.

Right now, as a part of advertising trials, many of the 30 publications are showing magazine style ads (entire page ads apt for brand advertising) without charging the advertisers for the ad. But according to BI, later this summer, Flipboard will launch a formal advertising program that will allow publishers to begin selling ads. The ad revenue so received will be shared by Flipboard and the publishers. Details of which are not known.

Upbeat, the company plans to gradually expand to other mobile platforms, including Google’s Android system (possibly later this year), to even pull the growth trajectory further north. Another area where the company is working right now is to assit hundreds of publications inside and outside US to adapt their content for Flipboard app. In addition, the company which has around 35 employees now, plans to rasie the count to 55 or 60 by year end.

Interestingly, Flipboard released a new, faster version of its app in March, which may have contributed to the surge in popularity too. An iPhone version is expected later this summer. Another factor, which the ceo says augmented Flipboard’s recent growth, was the launch of Apple’s iPad2 in March this year. The app is now seeing about 400 million “flips” or pageviews per month, up from about 100 million flips in February. Again a 400 percent growth.

What is Flipboard: Flipboard is an ipad Application which lets users create their own digital magazines by selecting content from about 30 publications plus from top social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This user chosen content is presented in a magazine-like format – whose pages, populated with text, graphics and pictures from chosen sources, can be flipped to navigate. The user can share that content across social networks too.

A brief profile picture of Mike McCue: Mike, formerly Netscape’s vice president of technology, is a seasoned entrepreneur and engineer. After his NetScape days, Mike co-founded speech-recognition technology company Tellme Networks, which was bought by Microsoft in 2007 for about to $800 million. --------

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