What I’ve Been Curating Lately, and Where

I’ll start with the “where” — Flipboard. My all-time favorite iPad app, and that spans almost four years now, as I’ve been on the iPad since the very first day the product was available. (I’m now on my third, an iPad Air.) I haven’t checked lately, but I’d be shocked if Flipboard isn’t the most-downloaded free app for the iPad, ever. The company later launched an iPhone version and, of course, Android versions followed. So, if you aren’t using Flipboard for your own customized news feeds in whatever categories you’re interested, presented in an elegant magazine-style UI… well, you have no excuse.

If you’re not a Flipboard user, you may be asking, what does content curation have to do with it?  Well, you see, anyone who uses this free app can also start a magazine of their own — and thousands have. The challenge, of course, is to choose a topic other people are interested in, and to be able to keep “flipping” enough interesting content into it to attract subscribers.

So, *what* have I been curating on Flipboard? I started in December 2013 with a magazine called Big Data in the Wild. (<< That’s the link to the web version of the magazine, but the tablet version is a much better experience — you simply search by magazine title or topic within the app to see it there.) This magazine of mine is doing pretty well now, with more than 4,100 subscribers and 63,000 page flips. I recently invited one of my colleagues from Minneanalytics, Dan Atkins, to be a contributor. Flipboard was nice enough to feature it in their “Daily Picks” a couple of times, and the CEO of Flipbard, Mike McCue, even tweeted me saying “great magazine!”

After launching that magazine, I decided to try another one. This time I thought a focus on healthcare technology would be good, as I hadn’t found anything in that category that seemed to have the kind of content I thought deserved curation into a single magazine. The fact that I had been getting exposure to new technologies and startups in this space lately, especially through my work with Minneanalytics and its recent conference focusing on life sciences, added to my interest in the space — which began early in my career, when I did marketing work for several MInnesota medical device companies. Thus, my second effort on Flipboard was born: Healthcare Tech News. I rolled it out in January, and it’s getting off to a nice start.

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (where have I heard that before?), so I wasn’t done yet. I decided that the technology increasingly becoming a part of the sport of surfing was a topic that wasn’t being served well yet on Flipboard — or anywhere for that matter. So, just recently, I created Surfing the Waves of Technology. The adventure is just beginning!

So, now you know why I haven’t been blogging very regularly here — I’ve been busy curating elsewhere!

Please hit that “Subscribe” button in the upper left of each magazine…. 🙂  Thanks!

UPDATE 3/16/14: I’m also now curating content on yet another magazine, Mobile Maven, after being invited to be a contributor by a client: vBENCH. It’s an online talent exchange for the rapidly growing U.S. contingent workforce, focused especially on matching mobile developers with those who want to hire them as contractors. (Follow this startup on Twitter @vBENCH1099.)