CEO of Flipboard, Mike McCue, says Apple created a “revolution” with its iPad tablet and said the impact of that revolution is still being understood. He credited Apple as having created an opportunity for publishers to bring design and aesthetics to the mobile Web.
Speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing on Friday, McCue encouraged entrepreneurs and mobile app developers to sometimes “ignore the data.” He challenged designers to consider emotion and “soul” rather than pure logic when building their products.
McCue says content for the Internet has always been designed with an eye toward data, instead of beauty. Browser interfaces, navigation, and web ads are the clutter that makes online content less attractive than print, says McCue.
“When Apple introduced the iPad, it really created a revolution. And we’re just now starting to realize how big that revolution is,” he said. “With an iPad, you can actually navigate through content in a beautiful way that feels a lot like print…This is what “Flipboard” is all about: enabling publishers to present their content this way on devices like the iPad and the iPhone.”
McCue also said that Flipboard had targeted China for its first international expansion because it believed the country “will be the largest mobile internet market in the world.” Flipboard expects the number of Chinese downloads will soon exceed the number of U.S. downloads.