Apple lives at the center of the worldwide technological transformation that's underway, and Lashinsky's new book sheds light on how the enigmatic company works. It profiles Apple's leaders and their various styles and talents, it describes how the organization is woven around them, and it tells the stories of Apple insiders and outsiders at all levels.

Lashinsky reveals many telling facts and anecdotes about Apple's culture in the book. We discussed whether Apple's obsession and perfectionism are creepy, and to what extent this is driven by the personalities of its leaders.

We considered the extreme secrecy imposed on Apple's lower ranks and what effects that has on morale and the quality of work. We also thought about Apple's unique sense of timing, taste and presentation that make it such a phenomenon in the culture at large.

Apple's organization is centrally controlled by a closed group of leaders, and I asked Lashinsky about the importance of their personalities in the way the company operates. We discussed the extent to which Steve Jobs' legacy shaped the culture and whether those shapes will hold after his passing.

Then we talked about Tim Cook's new and starkly different style as CEO. Lashinsky has also referred to SVP of iOS Software Scott Forstall as a "CEO-in-waiting," and the book points to the contrast between him and Cook as one of the upcoming dramas in Apple's next chapter.

Finally, we looked at the products, the part of the company where Apple meets the public. We discussed the powerful influence of Jobs' last products and how we'll have to wait for the ones that come after him to see the real face of a post-Jobs Apple.

I found our conversation illuminating, and the whole evening was a lot of fun. Here's the full video of my interview with Adam Lashinsky:

All photos and video by the excellent team at SAY Media

To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.

As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.

I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.

Dennis Crowley: I think we're starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about "oh, now I get it."

After we launched Explore on the Web, they're like, "This isn't about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare's getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have." That's been our goal all along.

One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that's all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we're still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year's about us getting out of that.

Foursquare's new Web-based "Explore" feature.

How do you get past that stereotype and grow?

The challenge isn't really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was "oh, it's just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they're going to the movies." That wasn't interesting for a lot of people.

Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that's when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that's how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter's importance for a lot of people.

For us, we're starting to get to that point where people see that we're more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it's not analogous - it's not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we're still working to overcome.

I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That's why, looking at those blog posts, it's really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.

What will you change?

There's still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We're in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We're basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it... You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, "Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?" And I think if we can do that properly, then that's our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.

A peek at Foursquare's brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York

What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?

It's a project for the near term. That's a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It's experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don't look at it and say, "I can't believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream." You say, "this is great, there's a $10 discount here."

Since 2009, we've been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we're starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we'll be continuing to push that.

Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there's a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn't feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There's a whole wide variety of it. It's just rewarding the user for things that they'd be doing anyway with Foursquare.

This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?

Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.

And you could see a world where it's like, here's five things that I'm looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I'm walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you'd probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.

I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Paul Berry: We're 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We're at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.

The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.

Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.

And these 220 people are...

That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post... we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.

The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful - we had no money. I couldn't just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that's not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can't have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.

What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?

Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you're spending a lot of time talking about security, it's because you've gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it's terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you're talking about security or scalability, you're generally suffering. It's a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape - how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.

So what are these new projects?

There's two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I've actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I'm really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.

Rebel Mouse is the startup company that's well defined - it has its name and its logo and it's a really well-defined concept that we're deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It's not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there's a ton of companies. It's going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we'll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.

My definition of viral is: We don't spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.

Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?

When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack - whichever you end up using - you have tremendous potential. It's crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.

One of the surprises has been that MySQL - when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die - and it's actually very much alive. We use Redis ("sort of a database alternative") a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we'll definitely be using at the incubator.

Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.

Jori Lallo: "We didn't actually plan to build a bookmarking service. We made our first prototype service about one and a half years ago over one or two days. It was a quick hack project for an app contest.

"We both bought iPads right when they came out, both me and [Kippt designer] Karri [Saarinen]. We were constantly emailing links to ourselves. So, we just wanted to build a really simple list of links where we could save stuff from the Web and from the iPad's browser.

"It got pretty okay traction for a hack project. After that, we were thinking about how to evolve the service beyond that and how we use these kinds of services."

Beyond the Chore of Tagging

"We both had been opposed to the traditional tagging. I find it to be pretty hard for a user in the sense that you have to create your own topology or map of the tags you use. Tagging is really good for hardcore users, but if you don't [take] the time for tags... I think many Delicious users have been in the situation where you have more tags than you have links. So, we wanted to do things simpler.

"I've found that just plain folders actually work pretty well. That's why we chose lists for the service. When we were building the new iteration of the service, we wanted to approach the problem from the workflow perspective.

"We wanted to build a medium between Instapaper and more heavy bookmarking services, and that's why Kippt is pretty simple at the moment. We're planning to add social sharing features later on, when we have more time. But right now, we're just trying to get the base product right."

What's Wrong With Bookmarking

RWW: When you say "medium," do you mean something between a temporary, time-shifting app like Instapaper and a big link taxonomy like the bookmarking services?

JL: "With 'bookmarking,' it's kind of a disliked term. People have a habit of saving stuff that they don't necessarily go back to anymore. I used to use Delicious quite a lot, but I rarely went back for my links. I guess that's partly because of their tagging system. Also, their search wasn't too good, at least some years ago. I don't know what the situation is nowadays.

"But now, with Kippt, I have lists for projects, like Web development, design inspiration and so on, and I actually go to those lists way more often. I find it a little bit more accessible."

RWW: Is Kippt's 'inbox' meant to be a more temporary workspace, then?

"Inbox, for me, is where I save stuff I need to do later, or I need to process. I don't want to think about the categorization now.

"My girlfriend actually uses Kippt in this way. At the start, she just saved everything in her inbox and just started thinking about the categorization after that, once she had more stuff there."

Link Saving Vs. "Read Later"

RWW: What about the 'Read Later' section?

"We don't want to build a full-featured reading experience within the app, but we still added the 'Read Later' list as a default, because it's a nice place to just put in articles that you can read and from there drag and drop to more permanent lists later on. I find that works pretty well for my personal use cases."

RWW: It seems like bookmarking services still have a niche appeal, while dedicated read-later services are catching on. Why do you think that is?

JL: "I think there has been a trend moving away from bookmarking stuff, probably because Google is pretty good nowadays for finding the things you need. When I've been talking about the app with people, it seems that some people are really into bookmarking, and some people just don't get it at all anymore after the read-later services.

"It's not for everyone, but some people, at least, love bookmarking services a lot."

RWW: What is it about those people?

JL: "I think it's about attention span. Some people, who are really fast, especially entrepreneurs, seem to like the Instapaper kind of approach. This is just my personal stuff I have noticed. I still feel there's a need for more permanent storage.

"Links are more than they used to be in the early 2000s. You have more information about them. And now we have this whole new generation of [richer Web] services."

RWW: It's not just static HTML documents anymore.

JL: Yeah.

Keeping Links Forever

RWW: Do you think that keeping Web links forever is something everyone should do? Does the Web work like a bookshelf in your house, where keeping things around, even just for nostalgic purposes, is something people are going to do?

JL: "I think they're already doing it quite a lot. When we first launched Kippt, we didn't have any kind of importing mechanism, and that was by far the most requested feature."

JL: "Yeah. I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff, even though they wouldn't use it, but they still like to keep it. That's the same thing we've seen with [Lallo's other project, hosted IRC chat service] Grove.io. People are saving their IRC logs for years and years. I guess that's the nature of human beings.

"We welcome people to use our service to save links forever, especially if other services don't have good search, and we're improving the search in Kippt. That's one of my top priorities at the moment.

And we're probably going to add some kind of tagging layer on top of the lists because people are asking for it. I think tagging might work pretty well in hashtag form, some kind of way that's more modern. Especially on top of the lists and search, it wouldn't be the main way of categorizing stuff."

RWW: So lists are where the links live, but tags are just a way to quickly find them?

JL: "Yep."

The Browser Vs. "Apps"

RWW: Do you think that the browser is a better place to work with links than separate, native apps like Instapaper or Evernote?

JL: "I actually agree on that, just by experience. We wanted to push Kippt out really quickly. That's why it's so simple. After the launch, we got tons of feedback and feature requests. They mapped out with our plans really well. But one thing I noticed was that no one was asking for the mobile [app] stuff. This kind of service is more important when it's in your browser.

"[Native versus Web] depends on the situation. It's the content that matters. I'm making [Kippt's mobile view] in Javascript, but it's going to be a Web page mostly, not try to mimic native apps. Personally, I hate the mobile Web apps that try to look and feel like iOS apps. In almost every case, they fail pretty miserably."

Play around with Kippt for a few minutes, and you'll see. Bookmarking as a chore is only for hardcore Web librarians, but anyone who uses the Web wants to keep links around for one reason or another. Instapaper and the like are great dedicated reading services, but they're designed around that use, not for storing and retrieving your favorite links.

Kippt just sits as a layer in your Web browser. It's like a bookshelf for keeping and organizing the Web sites and apps you come across. Its two modes are the most useful part; you can save to the inbox for "I'll get to that later," or if you already know what shelf a link belongs on, you can save it straight there. Not everything is an "article" on the Web anymore. Websites are increasingly "stuff." Don't we all need a place to keep our stuff?

Check out Kippt at Kippt.com. You can follow @KipptApp and @JoriLallo on Twitter.

You may recognize that metallic crunching sound from the comments section on ReadWriteWeb or many of the other big blogs, or perhaps out in the wild on Twitter. FAKEGRIMLOCK stomps around the Web, thriving on code, coffee, beer, bacon and the bones of stupid human bloggers and commenters. Mostly out of fear of becoming his NO EAT FRIDAY meal, I sat down with FAKEGRIMLOCK to ask him what he wants. After devouring everyone else at the table, he turned to me and said, "HERE INTERVIEW. OR ELSE."

ReadWriteWeb: Many of us know you from the comments on major tech blogs. Why do you like tech blogs?

ME, GRIMLOCK, MAIN SKILLS LACK OF SOCIAL GRACE, OVERBLOWN REGARD OF OWN OPINION, AND OBSESSION WITH IRRELEVANT MINUTIAE. TECH BLOGS PERFECT FIT!

RWW: Which are more challenging in the industry right now: technical problems or human problems? Why?

ALL PROBLEMS HUMAN PROBLEMS.

HUMANS TRY TO FIX THOSE PROBLEMS SINCE FIRST CAVEMAN HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO BOSS WHY INTEGRATE FIRE WITH LOINCLOTH NOT GOING TO WORK.

RWW: What technological problem do you most want solved?

BROWSER. SHOULD BE WINDOW TO INTERNET. IT NOT JOB OF WINDOW TO BREAK THING YOU LOOKING AT DEPENDING ON WHAT WINDOW YOU USE.

RWW: Let's pretend it's NO EAT FRIDAY for big Web companies. Who gets eaten first? Who do you save for later?

EAT FACEBOOK. NO NEED MICROSOFT FOR INTERNET.

SAVE TWITTER. THEM ONLY ONES FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO "BE USEFUL" AND "DON'T BE EVIL" AT SAME TIME.

RWW: What Web services does a big, hungry dinosaur like you use every day, and why?

TWITTER. BECAUSE THAT WHERE GRIMLOCK LIVE.

GMAIL. BECAUSE IT WEB MAIL THAT SUCK LEAST.

RWW: Android or iOS?

IOS. SPEND ALL DAY FIX COMPUTER. NOT NEED FIX PHONE TOO.

RWW: Where can puny humans find you and follow you?

TWITTER: @FAKEGRIMLOCK

SITE ME TOO LAZY TO MAKE NICE: FAKEGRIMLOCK.COM

Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.

At this point, Apple's lead in tablets is daunting. At a base price of $499, the 9.5-inch iPad and the devices it inspired are even encroaching on the bottom end of the PC market. Apple's "post-PC world" rhetoric is projected to be surprisingly prescient.

But there seems to be room below the iPad in the market. Surveys found consumers clamoring for a cheaper tablet, and Apple competitors have begun to deliver. Amazon announced the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire in September, and in response Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet yesterday with twice the memory and storage space of the Fire.

The Amazon and Barnes & Noble tablets are geared towards consumption, as one would expect from two companies whose businesses were built on selling books and music. Apple is in the content business as well, though it positions the iPad to be for much more than that. Even so, consumption, specifically reading, of quality content has been reborn on the iPad.

The Reading App Gold Rush

Developers have built all kinds of applications to deliver the ideal iPad reading experience, and Big Publishing wants in on the action. Flipboard publishers now show magazine-style full-page ads, and Zite was bought by CNN. AOL made Editions, Yahoo made Livestand, Google's making Propeller, all to do the same thing. It's a gold rush.

Publishers are even building their own apps now, and the new iOS 5 Newsstand provides a home for them. The Guardian iPad edition launched the same day as iOS 5. The New Yorker iPad app has surpassed 100,000 readers. These are first-rate iPad experiences, not just crumpled Web views, and they're finding traction as subscription publications.

Instapaper's Content Shift

But one $5 app, not affiliated with any publishers, showing no advertisements, requiring no "monetizing" other than its modest price tag, and created by one person, has remained near the top of the heap of iOS reading apps all along. Instapaper continues to introduce iPad and iPhone readers to the notion of content-shifting, saving one's daily Web reading with one click, so that it can be read later from one sparse, quiet place, even offline.

Really, Instapaper can be read in three places; anyone can use Instapaper.com from her or his desktop, tablet or smartphone. But it's also a universal $5 app for iPhone and iPad, and the release of Instapaper 4.0 last month redesigned the experience as the self-curated, instant newspaper for iOS 5.

Arment recently answered a few questions for us about Instapaper, iOS and the future of reading:

ReadWriteWeb: Do you think about the big picture for Web content, or is that not really your concern?

Marco Arment: "I want Instapaper to be a tool that people use to read longer pieces, and more attentively, than they otherwise would have. By doing this, I hope to make it more feasible for publishers to maintain an audience while publishing articles more substantial than what we usually see on formulaic high-volume blogs."

RWW: What are your plans for Give Me Something To Read?

MA: "Give Me Something To Read serves Instapaper very well as a curated list of the best long-form nonfiction writing and reporting. My plans are to keep it going, really -- it's exactly where I want it to be."

RWW: You said recently that you don't like to emphasize the offline part of Instapaper. Why is that? Isn't that a distinguishing feature?

MA: "It's certainly a very good and useful feature, but it's not a feature that a lot of people know that they need, so they aren't looking for a solution to that problem. Once they have Instapaper, it's a feature that most customers use and benefit from very often, but it's not a very good selling point."

RWW: Is iOS changing the way we read at a platform level? The great RSS readers have some of their most compelling apps ever on iOS, and the competitors in the publishing biz are there, too. Even major content sites (like The Guardian) are starting to put save-for-later functionality into native apps. Is the nature of the whole platform responsible for this? Or have you just inspired everyone?

MA: "The iPhone, and especially the iPad, have brought a fundamental shift to the publishing business: it's now very easy for customers to pay for apps and content directly, with small amounts of money, in large volumes. This wasn't (and still isn't) practical on the web. And with the rising popularity of iOS, many millions of people are devoting more of their computing time to devices that are much better suited for reading than desktops and laptops.

"These two shifts, more than anything, have brought new life to the publishing business, from big newspapers and magazines to individual bloggers, by increasing demand for content and making it easier to make money without wedging ads everywhere.

"Instapaper and its various clones help bridge the web and iOS worlds. There's relatively little competition only because it's a very new problem that the mass market has yet to realize that they have. It's not just "read later", but "read elsewhere" - most people would prefer the reading experience on an iPad to a web browser on a PC."

The iPad And The Couch

Instapaper is not the only cross-platform content-shifting app out there, and we've argued that all tablet reading apps should have the feature. The Guardian's new iPad app does.

But the single content-shifting app, - like Instapaper or Read It Later - pulls all the day's articles into one familiar place, like the iPad's equivalent of the couch on which we read it. That's the most important part of the future of content, which the ad-riddled Web is only just starting to understand: the experience.

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper. He also blogs about technology (and coffee) at Marco.org, and he hosts Build & Analyze a weekly news and discussion show about iPhone, iPad, iOS and mobile Web development with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. Follow him on Twitter @marcoarment.

Do you use any content-shifting apps for your daily reading? Share your digital reading habits in the comments.

Local news aggregator Topix held a "State of Local Online Advertising" survey with some of the top U.S. advertising agencies. The survey shows that 60% of advertisers believe geo-targeted ads deliver stronger return on investment, with 33% of advertisers seeing double-digit gains. In an interview, Topix CEO Chris Tolles said advertisers and publishers do not need to be "hyperlocal" to make money in local markets.

At the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit last week, publisher and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis blasted local news saying "no one gives a s**t about local."

Tolles would disagree. He sited a FCC report that recently said that there are not enough page views in local news and said that it was not local consumers who are the problem, but rather the journalists.

"An FCC report came out recently that said 'wow, there is not enough traffic to local news sites.' I think people are interested in local news and I think the people who are not interested in local news are journalists," Tolles said. "The people who do not (have an interest in) local news are journalists. They are the problem, they are not the answer. The opportunity is to change the journalists' minds about local news because there is a hierarchy of news reporting that no one talks about. Everybody wants to have the pyramid of news end at the White House. I say, invert the pyramid of news so that the highest calling is to do local news and the PTA meeting. Some guy at Gawker said once 'America needs you to cover all the news that I don't want to.'"

Tolles said this is where he fundamentally disagrees with Calacanis.

"Let me point out that our site is bigger than his site," Tolles said with a smile (he was very particular on making sure to be quoted with a smile). "I won't comment on his aspirations but to say no one cares about local? Yeah, except for the 100 billion or 150 billion dollar ad market that is out there and the fact that newspapers have been the largest way to make wealth in the media for quite a while until the dissemination of the Internet happened."

The Town As the Contextual Advertising Unit

Traffic to Topix truly comes from the local level. Tolles said that he gets "more traffic from Utica, New York than he gets from New York City" and that in some towns of 5,000 to 10,000 people he is getting upwards of 100,000 page views. The trick, Tolles says, is to start conversations around "sticky" topics, like politics. The more controversial, the better.

As such, Topix will be making a big move into the political sphere on the local level for the 2012 general elections. Advertising revenue is always on an upswing in presidential election years and Tolles is smart to take advantage of the localized aspect of that, creating political heat maps for certain types of debates across the country.

CPM Works for Topix, Will Not Work for Small Local Publishers

"What we noticed is that the localizable unit is the town," Tolles said. "We notice most of our traffic from small to medium-sized towns. In that way you don't really need to segment zip code. For instance, if you are in Colesville, Maryland ... we can get to Colesville We have a news page about them and it is contextually relevant to Colesville."

Local is a tricky market when it comes to advertising. Topix can function on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis because it can target ad inventory on a state or county level. Yet, small local publishers cannot make money on CPM because on a localized basis, there are just not enough page views (there are other revenue models, such as sponsorship and local deals).

"We use all parts of the dollar at Topix," Tolles said. "We do whatever works. There are definitely CPM issues with a small site. It is very hard to get there through a page view point. People like Groupon and Foursquare are exposing different ways to do local advertising."

Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the current era of web apps. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. For a more in-depth look at these and other web app usage trends, read on...

RM: Is there a particular demographic that you've found has used Evernote more than others?

PL: It's pretty broad-based by design. So the idea with Evernote is that most people have two halves in their lives. There's the social half, which is everything you do with your friends, co-workers and family - and keeping up with them. The social half is really well represented by new technologies: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all that stuff. But then, most people have this other half: their private half, their informational half. It's much more about keeping track of their own stuff. There really needed to be a signature company in that half. So that's where we see Evernote.

We target people that have important information centric components in their lives, which basically means it skews a little bit older. The median age for an Evernote user is about 37. We skew towards higher education, college graduates. We skew higher income, more professional people. But we've got all sorts of people using it and some of the fastest new growth [rates] are coming from students. We're starting to get real popularity in high schools. In the past, it's been people who have many things on their mind. People who have been doing things in their lives for a few years and have a lot of stuff they keep track of. So, it's been older than the typical MySpace user.

I think it's actually similar to what Twitter sees [in terms of demographics]. There's a perception that it's kids who drive the growth of the Internet, but that's certainly not true for a lot of the main services.

Mixing Work & Personal in Web Apps

RM: What are some of the main usage patterns for Evernote. You just mentioned students. I would guess they're using it for note taking in their classes and things like that. Have there been other usage patterns that have stood out?

PL: Well, they're really broad usage patterns. We interview a lot of people who use it and the usage is really all over the place. For example, I use it for everything - I pretty much live in it. It's got all of my personal information, when I travel to Japan I take pictures of everything I eat, [etc]. But it also has all of my business cards (when I get a business card, I just take a picture of it and upload it to Evernote. It also has all of my web clips, work documents - it all goes into Evernote. So it's all of my professional life and all my personal life together.

About 80% of our users say that they use Evernote both at home and at work. So, I think that's the real sweet spot for us. It crosses several generations, but there's a type of person - a modern knowledge worker, or someone who's on their way to becoming a modern knowledge worker, that has a really permeable membrane between work stuff and personal stuff. That distinction is eroding for a lot of folks. That seems to be the type of person who is becoming enthusiastic about Evernote.

RM: Yes, I've found this in my own use of Evernote - that it crosses both my work and personal life. I've got lists of things for my personal life and lists for my work life, so it's an interesting product in that respect.

PL: Yes and that's very common. That's very much what we find in our surveys. And a lot of companies are recognizing that to keep their knowledge workers happy and productive, they want to put as few artificial restrictions as possible about how they can be productive. So if someone likes using a certain set of tools for their personal life and that makes them happy and productive, a lot of companies want you to be able to use the same stuff at work. Evernote has found a really good spot in that kind of environment.

Your Own Private Google?

RM: Do you think of Evernote as like a private Google? Enabling you to search on your past, the things that you've done in the past or things that you've found in the past...

PL: A little bit. It's definitely your personal information, your personal memory. Everything that's in Evernote is highly relevant to you, because you were the person who put it in there. So, in some sense it is your personal search and it works really well when you combine it with public search.

With our Chrome extension, we just launched a feature that you can turn on in there called simultaneous search. So if you have the Chrome extension, whenever you search Google it will simultaneously search your Evernote account and it'll combine the results. Both of them [Google and Evernote] become much more meaningful because it puts context around whatever it is you're searching for.

You definitely hit on something. Obviously Google is very big, but I think a search engine for your actual life and memories is a very good way to look at it.

RM: Thanks Phil! We'd love to hear what RWW readers think of how modern web apps cross the boundaries between work and personal life. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Will consumers want to access a web app like Evernote via a chip in their head? Before you make up your mind, find out what Evernote has in store for the next 20 years...

If you're unfamiliar with Evernote, this cutesy promo video does a good job of explaining the product:

Evernote launched as a public beta in June 2008. I began Part 2 of the interview by asking Evernote CEO Phil Libin if Evernote has changed much since June 2008...

Phil Libin: Well, it got a lot bigger. The basics were all there at launch. That took about a year since I'd joined in the summer of 2007. I brought a whole bunch of new people with me, who were going to be part of my original company, and we all spent about a year building the new product. We worked on it from the summer of 2007, launched it into Beta in June 2008 - and the main pieces were all there. We had a Windows app, a Mac app, a web service - everything synced together. We had Windows Mobile and iPhone versions. Since then, it's expanded to a lot more phones and software platforms, plus we've added many features. It's grown to keep pace with what the original vision was.

Richard MacManus: One thing that we've seen over the last year or so is that you have expanded into different devices like the iPad. Have you got any further plans for device expansion?

PL: Yes, definitely. The goal is to be everywhere. Ubiquity is a really big part of Evernote. It's supposed to be all of your memories, all the time, everywhere, without ever having to worry about what device you happen to be using.

In the past two and a half years, we have broadened quite a bit. So now we're on pretty much every type of phone, every type of computer [and] we are going on a whole bunch of new tablets. We have an iPad version now for tablets. There are a lot of android devices and a lot of tablets coming out, that Evernote will be on. In the short term, we will also be on smart televisions, refrigerators, cars. The real vision is that at some point this is part of you, but until that happens it should be a part of everything that you touch.

We laid out a plan that was an almost 20-year plan, for where we want Evernote to come up to. So it still feels like we're very much in the early stages of that.

RM: What do you mean by "at some point this is part of you"? Tell us more about the long-term vision, because 20 years is a long time in technology...

PL: The idea is that in the very long term, we are talking about the sci-fi distant future twenty years or whatever, it won't matter. You will just have a chip in your head, or something. You'll just think about it and there's your external brain; and you'll get things that way.

[Ed: for an alternative view on brain implants, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's op-ed: The Internet Brain Implant: Why We Should Say No]

Until that happens, the next best thing is that (for example) you wake up in a strange hotel room at 3 AM, you're not exactly where you are because you're still kind of asleep, and you just reach your hand out and get whatever device, whatever gadget you first touch, and you should be able to run Evernote on that. So, it should be on your phone, your camera, your TV, your car - absolutely everywhere.

TBC...

In Part 3 we will find out who is using Evernote currently and some of the popular use cases.

In Part 1 of this interview, Phil Libin explains that link to the Newton and how it ultimately led to the "secondary brain" app called Evernote. In Part 2 (to be published tomorrow) we discuss Evernote's ambitious 20-year plan.

Richard MacManus: How was Evernote conceived and what was the inspiration for it?

Phil Libin: The basic idea was really simple. We figured that no one is really fully satisfied with our normal brains, with our normal memory. Everyone wants a better brain. And a few years ago, it looked like technology was finally at a point where it would be viable to try to build a service to be your secondary brain - your external brain.

RM: How did that line of thinking come about, that people needed a secondary brain?

PL: The company was founded by Stepan Pachikov, who was kind of this brilliant mad scientist from Russia. He and his team were behind a lot of the pioneering work that went into the Apple Newton, fifteen years ago. The handwriting recognition engine [Ed: the CalliGrapher word-based handwriting recognition engine] was built by these guys. They had a company called ParaGraph, which Apple licensed.

So the original idea really started in the Newton days. Back then it was just a device, but it grew to be more of a service that would let you keep all of your memories. [It would] just remember everything. [Ed: One of Evernote's defining features is recognizing text in photos]

After Stepan sold that company to SGI [in 1997] and spent a few years there, he and his core team of Russian and Russian-American R&D folks - researchers and technologists - started Evernote in 2005. They started it with this idea of giving everyone a better brain, giving everyone a perfect memory. And they spent a few years working on the technology. There wasn't really a product [at that time], but there was a whole bunch of really interesting back end tech around image recognition and things like that.

RM: When did you meet Stepan and what were you doing before then?

PL: I had started a couple of companies in Boston and in 2007 I was starting to think about what to do next. My previous company was pretty successful, but it was in the government security space - very interesting technologically, but not the sort of thing that a hundred million people would be excited about. And I really wanted to have my next thing be something that a billion people would wake up in the morning and be psyched about. I wanted something really mass market.

So I was thinking about what it should be and I thought: "Well, everyone wants more, better memory. Let me try to do something around that." I put together a little business plan and started doing research to do my own start-up, that was going to focus on memory enhancement for consumers.

And in that due diligence process I ran into this company called Evernote - and Stepan [pictured to the left], who had been talking about a lot of the same stuff.

I flew to California to meet with Stepan, in the spring of in 2007, and saw the tech they already had. I was really, really impressed by the vision and the background technology that was already built. However there was not much of a product or a business model. So we joined forces, instead of me starting another company to compete. I was invited to come on board as CEO and take the tech that had been developed over the past couple of years and build it out as a consumer service.

I joined as CEO in the summer of 2007. It was like the company that I wanted to start, except that it already had a 2 year head start on the technology.

RM: Wonderful story. When did the first version of Evernote launch?

PL: The first version, of what the service is now, launched in open Beta in June 2008. We'd had a closed Beta for a few months before then.

TBC...

In Part 2 of this interview, to be published tomorrow, we explore how Evernote evolved after its launch and its grand 20-year plan. Hint: it involves brain implants!

Photo credit: New_Context_Conference; Esther Dyson

I caught up with Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier, who has been with the company since it was founded in 2007, to find out how Groupon began and what's made it such a success.

Richard MacManus: Can you tell us how Groupon was conceived. Were you around right at the beginning?

Ken Pelletier: A lot of people think that Groupon began in November of '08. That's when we made a significant change in our direction, but we really started back in early '07. Andrew Mason, our founder, had an idea for a collective action platform [where] the collective solve problems that are not easy to solve as individuals. So we built that platform [called The Point].

It was an open platform where anyone could create a campaign. At a tipping point and if you've got enough people - or money in a case of a fund raiser - to solve your problem, only then would anybody be on the hook to do whatever the action was, or to give the money that they pledged. So that was the basic model.

We had a fairly small crew then. I was one of the first people in, I think second after Andrew [the founder]. We had a team of about four or five. Three of those people are still here.

At the end of '08, in the fall, we'd had this idea knocking around for a while to use the same model [for] collective buying. We thought it would be logistically heavy and sticky for us, selling products, having to have sales people and customer service. But, at that time, we decided to do an experiment - just to see if that idea had any legs. So we did the cheapest thing that we could possibly do to improve how we ran some local deals here in Chicago, with merchants. The first one was right here in our building.

We built up a small mailing list [and] got a recipe that we thought would work best for local stuff. A new deal each day. We launched something pretty quickly, really just a few weeks between the time we decided we'd do that experiment and [when] we built it.

We manned it on top of the same [collective action] platform that we'd already built, The Point. I mean most of what Groupon was built on was The Point and we were just putting a new face on it, a new user experience. And kind of adapting it for Groupon.

How Groupon Has Evolved Since 2008

RM: Since the launch in late 2008 till now, did the product change over that time?

KP: Yes, significantly. Once we realized that it looked promising, we started spending more of our time pursuing that [idea]. Then fairly quickly we pivoted and said: let's go full steam on this. Because we were getting signals that it was really good and was going to work well for us. So we decided that we'd put all our efforts into it.

We invested pretty heavily in tuning the user experience in particular, as a first step. And then we changed the core platform to do more things that were really squarely in the collective buying category, as opposed to an open flexible platform for anything. And we've grown the team and done lots of things.

Next Page: User demographics, usage patterns, and how Groupon leverages Twitter and Facebook.

Richard MacManus: Is there a particular type of person that uses this product a lot, in terms of the demographics, or is it pretty broad?

Ken Pelletier: I think it's pretty broad. It makes it a fun product to work on, where there's a really broad appeal. We have a pretty good handle on our demographics, but there's fairly wide spectrum. We know that skews toward women [and] it's a fairly young audience. But we offer [retail] products and we're in a number of different cities, so that makes the spectrum of demographics pretty wide.

RM: Since the launch, have there been any particular usage patterns that have surprised you as the product has grown? Things that you perhaps weren't expecting when you launched the product...

KP: We've had a really strong word of mouth element to our growth. I guess it's no surprise, but it's one of the things we thought about in the beginning - and to try to tune for. People like to share a deal with friends for a variety of reasons. Maybe to help them save money, or maybe they want to plan to do something together. Or for a lot of social reasons. It's an easy thing to do, whereas on The Point when we were doing collective action, it's a little bit of a higher bar.

So it certainly is a high level of social sharing and we see lots and lots of activity on Twitter and Facebook. So in subtle ways we try to optimize for that.

Twitter and Facebook

RM: Facebook and Twitter have become extremely popular in the last year or two, so has that changed the way people use Groupon?

KP: I think so, yeah. I think there's a natural shift towards people using those different types of media to share - which we are certainly happy with. So we make all of that possible right from the site.

We watch those [platforms] and they are really, really active. There's a lot of hype [about] Twitter in particular and Facebook as well. It's a little bit easier to see [results] on Twitter, if you get a live search going and you watch references to Groupon. It's pretty active, so it is certainly a big factor.

Focus on Mobile

RM: In April, you had a big investment into the company and I know that a lot of that will be used for expanding into different markets [i.e. new countries and cities]. But in terms of the product itself, are you planning to expand the product - for example targeting different devices or creating new features?

KP: Yes, absolutely. Of course, part of that is to expand and we're expanding rapidly. We're in 30 countries now, something like 250 cities internationally - including about 100 cities in the US. We're growing rapidly and hiring for expansion. But a big part of that is certainly going to be focused on the product.

There are some big things that we're doing and things that we've announced already, like personalization of deals.

Mobile is a big push for us. We've got a whole team of mobile developers and we are already on Android and iPhone. We've got a mobile website as well. We're seeing a lot of growth in that area [and] we think it's a really natural fit. And there's certainly a trend in the industry toward mobile.

One of the things that I see as a challenge is to keep the simplicity which we think is one of the key parts of the recipe that makes Groupon work. It's a pretty simple interface, it's easy to use. So we're going to defend that and not just add features. We're investing pretty heavily on features that don't change the way the user acts, like a personalization engine. It doesn't compromise that simplicity. [But] there's a lot of complexity and sophistication that goes into that. It gives a better over-all experience. At the end of the day, you're [still] presented with a single deal per day.

Those were the kinds of things that we're working on, plus lots of things that we're not announcing yet.

RM: Thanks Ken! Readers, let us know in the comments if you use Groupon or similar 'deal of the day' products. What's been your experience of it?

It may sound like an odd thing to do, to stop and take a photo of a plate of food. But it turns out that Foodspotting is a handy way to discover what foods are recommended in a particular city or area. It might come in useful when on holiday, for example. I spoke to Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski to find out what inspired the product, who's using it, and the company's surprising plans to expand beyond food.

Richard MacManus: How did you come up with the idea for Foodspotting?

Alexa Andrzejewski: The original idea was inspired by my traveling to Japan and Korea, where I learned about all of these different foods that I'd never heard about growing up. So my original idea was to create a way for people to learn about new foods around the world and then find those foods locally. My initial idea was actually to create a book that would help people do that. But then, when I shared the idea with people I realized that it would be so much more useful as a mobile app.

I was working for company called Adaptive Path at that time, which does use experience consulting, strategy and imagining. I worked in a lot of projects there thinking about the future of mobile and I've worked for some of the major handset manufacturers, thinking about the future of mobile and what it will be like five years from now. [for example] We had the idea of the mobile device being less like a phone and more like a lens on the world, that shows you more information about things around you. And I realized that people are really into the photo aspect, [so] I could make Foodspotting uniquely mobile.

RM: What time period was it when you first came up with the idea and started to play around with this concept?

AA: I first came up with the idea in January 2009, then it was about 6 months from the original idea of it being a book to knowing that I wanted to do this as an app. In August of 2009 I started looking in earnest for a co-founder who could do the technological part.

RM: When did the development of the product start?

AA: September 2009. And we launched a private beta in November 2009. We launched publicly on January with the website and we launched the iPhone App at SXSW in March of 2010.

RM: Right. So since the launch of the product, has the vision for the product changed at all - or was it pretty much what you envisioned back in August-September 2009?

AA: I think definitely it has evolved. Initially it was really focused on it being our way to find specific dishes and focused on learning about new foods and that kind of thing.

But the vision for it has evolved into being a discovery engine for the real world. A way to stumble upon good things around you, wherever you go.

We've been thinking about how Foodspotting can be useful to anybody, not just serious foodies. Originally it was about finding specific dishes that were kind of obscure. But that was a relatively small audience. And the more we brainstormed, [the more] we wanted this to be for anybody who's looking for good food. So we thought, why can't we create something that is compelling and useful to the mass market not just to like serious foodies. It can be eventually extended beyond food too.

RM: I see, so do you have plans to expand beyond food?

AA: Yes, that's something we have kept in mind - but we'd like to do food well first, because it's the natural fit. At the same time there's been an interest in people sharing other interesting fine products or travel experiences, like sites to see and things like that. In the same way, this idea of being a visual discovery engine could easily extend to other things as well. So that's something we're interested in exploring.

Usage Patterns

RM: What have been the main usage patterns that you've noticed?

AA: The weekends is when people spotting food happens the most, there's a very clear spike then. And the audience of people who love food [is] very active. People who post food, the foodspotters, there's 65,000 of them. We have 300,000 app users in total.

Some people have 2,000 things that they've posted and some have a couple of hundred. We were surprised by how much content a single person can generate.

We get between 8 and 10 thousand [app] launches a day. And we get up to a thousand [food] sightings per day.

RM: That's great! Is there a particular type of user, are there any patterns there?

AA: Well at the moment, we've definitely skewed towards 20-30 year old female Asians. If you look around San Francisco, you'll see Asian Americans taking pictures of food. There's definitely something there - it's more of a culture that shares, celebrates dishes and food.

The Future of Foodspotting

RM: Do you have any plans to integrate Foodspotting with barcodes or RFID tags on food packaging?

AA: Not right now, no. We do a little bit of people spotting packaged food at stores, but most of it is food on a plate. And I think the idea of having people add barcodes to things is just not realistic. The idea of getting [info from] barcodes that are already there would definitely be very interesting.

RM: What other interesting features are you cooking up?

AA: We're working on game mechanics around people's regions, because we've realized that a lot of people share foods and take a lot of pride in their regions. Showing off food from their hometowns and from their home countries. So we're exploring some interesting game mechanics around that.

We've developed a platform for creating location-based guides, which are kind of like playlists for stuff in the real world that you want to try - or that somebody has recommended. That's another interesting aspect of the food-finding platform that we're working on refining.

In the long run, Foodspotting is going to become a lot smarter. So when you launch the app, instead of just seeing the nearest, latest or best foods - you will see things that are recommended for you based on your social graph and on the kinds of food you've viewed in the past. We [also] want it to become a lot easier to find things that are likely to be good to you - and use all kinds of data to do that.

CiviGuard is an inspiring example of how mobile and real-time web technologies can be used to bring about meaningful change. I spoke with the 3 founders to find out more.

The idea for CiviGuard "consistently got positive feedback" from people at Singularity University, said CMO Shawna Pandya. "The ability to be able to message civilians and tell them where to go and what to do next, in near real-time," she told me, "is something that has huge value."

According to CEO Zubin Wadia, the product came about due to a number of trends they had been tracking. These included "the rise of social media, mobile software, smartphones, increasing mobile data bandwidth and eventually in the future sensor networks."

"We want to make the world a little bit safer by providing clarity and context when people need it the most," added Wadia.

CiviGuard launched in March of this year, had its first customer by April (City of Manor) and went live for that customer in September. While its grand plan is to be useful to governments in civil emergencies, it is also being marketed to the likes of corporations, sports stadiums, religious organizations and more.

The following video shows its capabilities:

CiviGuard hasn't been tested in a real world emergency yet. But it has gone through scenario tests and the founders are confident they've built a platform that will withstand the rigors of a crisis. Kudos to CiviGuard for thinking big!

Instapaper was launched in January 2008 by the co-founder of Tumblr, Marco Arment. In fact Arment has only just gone full-time with Instapaper, announcing last month that he's moving on from Tumblr after 4 years as its lead developer. He has big plans for Instapaper as a business, as you'll discover in this interview.

Marco Arment: Yes, that's correct. It's more continuing it as a business, because it's kind of always been one. Just now I have more time to spend on it.

RM: How did you come up with the idea for Instapaper and what was the inspiration for it?

MA: I'd just gotten an iPhone in the fall of '07. I would find things during the workday that I wanted to read, but I was at work - so I really couldn't. I would skim articles [or] I would open a tab and never go back to it, until my browser crashed and then I forgot about it. Or some other non-solution to this problem. [chuckle] And then similarly, I had to commute on the train everyday for about an hour or two. When I was on the train, I had my iPhone and I could browse the internet - but only before it went underground. There were a load of things I had to read.

So I made Instapaper just for myself, really, and didn't even tell anybody about it for about three months after I made it. I just used it myself, just because I wanted something to use to temporarily store those links - so that I could save them at work and read them on the train.

That's how it started and it was very, very basic. In the beginning, there wasn't even a text view. And the reason I got the text view was because mobile Safari [on iPhone] would kick pages out of memory if you load it too much. And so what I was trying to do was load a bunch of pages at once, before the train went underground and before I lost my connectivity for about 25 minutes or so. The text view allowed me to store more than in the mobile browser, because they were much lighter.

Also when I would scroll on the iPhone, I hated if I accidentally lost the alignment in the column I was reading. It would accidentally scroll drag me a little bit and I couldn't scroll it up again. [chuckle] So I made it single-column reading.

I told a couple of friends about it, about three months in, and they loved it. So on January 26th, 2008, I made my initial blog post about it and it just exploded! It was popular very quickly, far past my expectations. I wasn't sure if anybody else would find it useful. [laughter] I figured that I just thought of myself, that it's useful to me but... I was very pleasantly surprised by its reception.

RM: What was the time period between the time that you came up with the idea and when you launched Instapaper in January 2008?

MA: It was about three months.

RM: So it was a very quick development process...

MA: Yeah. I developed the basics of the service in about two nights. It was a very basic service. And I already had a lot of the framework. I already had a lot of that written for other things, including Tumblr. It was in a language I already knew and a framework I already knew. And so I made the entire first draft of the service, I guess you can call it, in about two nights.

How the iPad Version Was Developed

RM: And when did you come up with the iPad version of Instapaper and the idea of integrating that with iPad apps?

MA: I was already doing all these weird mobile Safari apps, so I jumped right on the opportunity to make a real app as soon as it came. I was in the iPhone store on day one, of course. Sorry, actually on day two or three. [chuckle] I tried to be there on day one but missed it. Anyway, so I was in the iPad store right in summer '08 when it launched.

So when the iPad was announced and the SDK for it, I knew I needed an iPad app in addition to the iPhone app. I also decided pretty early on that I would make a universal app which would work on both - preferably optimized interfaces for each one - and that was only half done [at the time the iPad was announced]. The question was really whether I wanted to release that in advance of the launch of the iPad, so it would be there on day one. But I would never have a chance to actually try it on an iPad before submitting it, which is certainly a risk. Or I could wait until after I used an iPad physically and optimize it, then submit it afterward.

I chose to go with the option of having it there on day one [i.e. releasing it before the iPad launched] and taking that risk. And it worked out alright. The first version was functional. It was not pretty, but it worked. And yeah, there were some buttons which were badly placed, the colors were way too bright, the screen was much brighter than I thought it would be. So I made a few tweaks and released an update, a couple of weeks later.

RM: I'm finding the Instapaper app very useful on iPad, for example when I'm using Flipboard and I can save articles I find there to read later on. I like the integration with other apps in the App Store as well.

MA: Thanks. That's been a huge benefit for Instapaper. The first app I ever made was for Tweetie for iPhone. Now, almost every mobile Twitter client and almost every mobile feed reader has a 'Send to Instapaper' feature.

Next Page: Instapaper usage patterns & the future of the product...

RM: What are the main usage patterns that you've noticed so far with Instapaper - and has anything surprised you about how people are using it? Whether on the iPhone, or iPad or even on the web.

MA: Yeah, there have been few surprises. One of the biggest was when I first launched the iPhone app, I thought that it would just be people who are already familiar with the web app - that they'd want the iPhone app to go along with it. Okay, that's pretty much the way I use it. I use the web app first and the iPhone app as an accessory to it. And what surprised me was from the very beginning - and it still holds true today - how many people do both the browsing and the reading on the iPhone. Instapaper is really optimized for browsing on the computer and then reading on the iPhone. But a lot of people just do everything on the iPhone.

Another big surprise was that the iPad has taken off like crazy. At least half of my paid app sales are from the iPad, which given the size of its relative installed base (iPad versus the iPhone), that's a pretty impressive number.

The iPad has proven to be a better device for reading content than even I expected. I had high hopes for it, but I thought it would be about the same for reading as the iPhone. And it ended up that a lot more people find the bigger screen more comfortable. So a lot more people are reading web content on the iPad than on the iPhone.

RM: Yes, that's certainly been my experience. So is the success of the iPad what prompted you to go full time on the business?

MA: Oh sure, that was a huge part. Especially because the iPad sales [of Instapaper] have more than doubled my overall sales since the iPad came out. So it finally gave me enough momentum to take it full time.

RM: Right. And are you hiring other people in the business?

MA: Not at the moment. I do have a contractor who edits the front page editor's picks, also called "Give me something to read." It's the popular, good, long form stories saved by users. So I have a contractor who does that. But otherwise it's just me.

In the future I might hire employees to help out with certain things, but I have no immediate plans to do that.

The Future of Instapaper

RM: Let's discuss the future of the product. Do you plan to expand to other delivery platforms, or are you going to stay focused on iPad and iPhone?

MA: For now, I'm certainly focusing on the iOS platform and also on the Kindle. I really do like the Kindle a lot. It's a much smaller market, but it's a very devoted and very hardcore market - people who really love reading. So right now it's iOS and Kindle. I don't have any immediate plans to support Android or Blackberry, or other mobile platforms directly. But what I'm going to do is make a full feature API, so that other people can write clients for those if they want to.

Right now there are a few Android clients that are unofficial, but because there's no good official API they have just kind of scraped the site to try and make it work. And it's worked with mixed success. So hopefully a real API will encourage better clients to be made.

RM: Will Instapaper add more social sharing and curation features in the near future? [hat-tip Justin Houk for suggesting this question via Twitter]

MA: That's a good question. One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn't really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don't think it's really used like that as much anymore - if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization.

I also want to add features that help people with information overload management. I don't want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That's the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it's not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it.

Regarding social features, I have a few draft ideas in my head of some kind of sharing features. For the most part they're very, very alpha stage. But even in my head there's something I roughly want to do. It's the kind of feature that before I was doing this full time, which was only two weeks ago, I would never have had the time to do non-essential features like that. Now that I have time to do that sort of thing, I will probably explore those options in the future.

As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. We discuss how he came up with the idea, before the iPad had even been announced, then rapidly developed and launched Flipboard. We also talk about how people are using Flipboard (hint: it's more than just for reading magazines) and its future plans to expand beyond the iPad - including to smartphones.

Richard MacManus: How was the product conceived and what was the inspiration for it?

Mike McCue: When I left Tell Me at Microsoft, I wasn't sure what I was going to do next. But I did know one thing - that I really like building products and thinking about product design and so on. So I knew that I would start prototyping ideas and things like that. I started looking around for somebody who I could work with, to just start prototyping things. And Evan Doll, one of the early engineers on the iPhone team at Apple, was someone that I got the chance to meet.

When we got together, we decided to do a thought experiment: imagine if the Web was washed away in a hurricane and we needed to build a new one from scratch. What would it look like? How would it be different? What would the user interface be? Would there still be the notion of a browser? If you build a totally new Web, knowing everything we know today and where the technology is and where it's likely to be heading, what would you do differently?

RM: When was this?

MM: This was in late August of 2009.

So we just started meeting and talking about that. Also writing to a bunch of other folks who I've worked with in the past and brainstorming it. We started coming up with some ideas that ultimately led to Flipboard.

There were a couple of core principles. One was that Social Media was absolutely fundamental to where the web was headed, we felt. And also, the beauty and timeless graphic design principles of print. We wanted to create something that was much more visually beautiful than what we've seen with web pages.

RM: Was the product specifically conceived for the iPad, or were you thinking more generally in terms of tablets - or even mobile phones?

MM: The idea evolved. When we started off, we were thinking in terms of the web broadly. And we were thinking we might develop downloadable apps for the PC, for the Mac or perhaps an HTML 5 based website. But then the idea evolved further.

When I traveled, I would buy magazines before I got on an airplane. I love magazines, I read them all the time. As I was reading them, I'd ask myself: "Why is it that the Web isn't as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?" And of course, along with that line of thinking, I was saying to myself: "If this [Apple] tablet that is rumored ever happens, it would be the perfect form factor for doing exactly that - for making websites as beautiful as magazines."

The date that I started realizing we needed to go more towards the magazine approach, in terms of the aesthetics and design, was in the September-October time frame.

As we talked more about it, we decided that the best way to start would be on this theoretical product that Apple was rumored to be doing. And then when Apple actually announced it [in January 2010], it was obviously very exciting for us. We realized that it was as we had hoped - that it would be the platform that could allow us to re-visualize the web in a way that maps more to print. So it would be the perfect place for us to start. And then, as we came to that realization, we married that up with social media. And we realized what we're really doing here is creating a social magazine. We first started calling it a social magazine in January.

RM: before the iPad was launched, did you have access to the device so that you could build something on it?

MM: No. We wish. [chuckle] The day that the iPad was announced, the SDK showed up. And we downloaded the SDK and started coding Flipboard on that day.

The iPad was shipped on April 3rd. So we got the iPad and started running our code on it for the first time. Not on a simulator, but actually on the iPad. The real serious coding, where we were actually running on a real iPad, started on April 3rd. A decent amount of time prior to that was spent running in the simulator.

Flipboard launched in July of this year.

Next Page: Flipboard's plans to expand beyond the iPad, plus Mike McCue reveals the usage patterns so far.

Beyond The iPad: Expanding to Other Platforms

RM: Flipboard at the moment is obviously very focused on the iPad. Are you targeting other tablet devices or even other mobile devices?

MM: Not at this point in time, but it's only a matter of time before we do other devices. The iPad had such a tremendous start and it's such an incredible platform, there's a lot more we can do on that platform with the product. Rather than diffusing our resources across a bunch of different platforms, we're focused on making the application on the iPad better. So that's our current focus.

RM: When you do expand to other devices, will you be tdoing smartphones? Or would that require a different type of application and you'd have to rethink that...

MM: Yes, it would be a different type of product. But we do think there is an opportunity to do something on the iPhone, for example. That's relatively straightforward to do, because the coding that's required to do that isn't a huge difference from what we're doing [on iPad]. The big thing is the design. With a smaller screen, from a design point-of-view how would the product look and feel?

With the phone, you're going to have that in your pocket all the time and you have a camera - so you'll tend to use a bit more [for] content creation than you do with the iPad. So there are a lot of design decisions that we would need to make, in order to have a version that would run on a smartphone or the iPhone. It would be a different version of what we are doing now.

Usage Patterns

RM: Since the launch of the product, what kind of usage patterns have you noticed with people using the product? And have any of those surprised you?

MM: There's a tremendous amount of repeat usage on any given day, by a large percentage of the installed base. So it's being utilized at a level [of activity] that is higher than what we anticipated.

It's a very active user base, pretty engaged and really involved in the Twitter [ecosystem].

RM: When I spoke to Jim Spencer of Newsy, he told me that they'd noticed that a lot of their usage was in the weekends - which kind of surprised them. Have you noticed anything similar in terms of when people are using Flipboard?

MM: Yes, definitely similar. A lot of it is of course because we're on the iPad, because that's when [many] people use the iPad. It's when you have time to sit back and relax and look at great content. And so I think we're seeing similar scenarios with weekend usage.

At the same time, there's a social networking aspect to Flipboard - something a lot of people do pervasively throughout the entire day [during the week]. And so we're seeing a lot of that, too.

We're also seeing iPad usage during the evening, in reading time. People use it in bed, before they go to sleep.

RM: One thing I'm curious about is your promotion of Flipboard as a social magazine. Are users doing more personalization at this point in time, than using the social features? The reason I ask is that my own usage of Flipboard has been mostly to customize the magazine and what information I want, and then consuming it. I haven't really used the Twitter features and other social features, so I'm wondering if that's the general usage pattern - or are people using the Twitter, Facebook and other social functionality a lot?

MM: We have about 70% of our users connected up to Facebook or Twitter, or both. And about 30% just use it to plug feeds into Flipboard and read those feeds. So, there are definitely two different types of users. There's the more social networking-oriented user and there's the RSS news reader type of user.

With Flipboard, it's hard to categorize it. It's not really a Twitter client or a Facebook client. And it's not an RSS Reader either. Flipboard is really unique, in that it is built on social infrastructure. We use Twitter almost as social RSS. So it's a very different type of product than has been out there before.

Over time, you'll see us add more capabilities in terms of allowing people to discover content more readily on their social networks. We'll allow them to view that content in more interesting and beautiful ways. And we'll also let them share that, across all of their social network, in more and more interesting ways.

When you take a step back, Flipboard's all about allowing people to discover, browse and share content across their social network.

RM: Thanks Mike! Readers, let us know in the comments if you've used Flipboard and your impressions so far of this "social magazine" for iPad.