Flipboard showed off its brand new iPhone app, which brings magazine-like aesthetics to smartphones, at LeWeb this morning.
The app, which aggregates content from online publishers, allows you to select categories you are interested in and learns to prioritise content based on your viewing history.
Like its iPad version, the app presents content in a 'stack' format, a bit like a rolodex, which flips vertically so that users can easily find articles of interest them.
It also connects to social networks through a new feature Cover Stories, which prioritises contacts you interact with most often, so you can view photos and articles that friends have shared through Twitter. This will soon be launched on the iPad version as well.
CEO Mike McCue said Flipboard's layout allows content providers, such as the BBC and Rolling Stone, to sell magazine style ads in their articles for 10-15 times more than they sell banner ads for.
We aren't competing with the content providers, what we do is we make their content look amazing on a smartphone."
Flipboard then takes a percentage of any ad revenue, although McCue wouldn't reveal how big the company's cut is.
The start-up has already received $60m in VC funding and employs 50 people, clocking up 4.5m downloads of its iPad app.
The demo at LeWeb showed that Flipboard for iPhone has the potential to be a user-friendly and visually engaging app.
We're trying to reflect a new type of social browsing for a new type of web. It's no longer about just pages pointing to pages, it's people pointing to people and people pointing to pages, and that allows you to do some magical things.
David Moth is a Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter.
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