Flipboard marches into China's investment market

Tencent Technology News reported that the integration of social media content applications Flipboard released a new generation of Chinese products, the biggest change is now allowing users to create their own magazine, has become their own magazine editors.

In the English version of Flipboard, this feature has been introduced for a long time, and very popular. Currently the new Chinese version of Flipboard is limited to the Android platform, iOS platform will be launched in a few months later.

Eric Alexander, vice president of business development at Flipboard, said the new features give users the means to reorganize their content and easily repost the over-published content for magazines and other media.

At the same time that the new Chinese version is released, Flipboard also announced that it will restart its investment in the Chinese market. Eric Alexander said Flipboard currently has more than 100 million users worldwide, and China is Flipboard's second-largest market. "Now we do not want to develop products in the United States and then to China, but rather to develop products suitable for China in China."

Compared to foreign markets, the Chinese market is very different in news reading. Most foreign users read news on mobile devices through apps such as Flipboard and Circa, but domestic people are more likely to get news through news portals, which is a challenge for applications such as Flipboard and Fresh Fruit reading.

In response, Editor-in-Chief Ma Xin Yi of Greater China, Flipboard, said that Flipboard is not only positioning itself for news reading, as well as magazines and other media, hoping to provide readers with a wider range of reading content.

Flipboard was released in the Chinese version at the end of 2011, but after a good start, Flipboard did not go well in China. At the GMIC Internet conference earlier this month, Flipboard CTO Eric Feng publicly stated that in 2012 and 2013 Flipboard stopped investing in the Chinese market due to limited resources. At the end of last year, Xie Ziyang, head of Flipboard China, left for joining Millet, reducing its Chinese staff to only one.

Nevertheless, China is still the second largest market for Flipboard. This year Flipboard has re-enlarged its investment in China. Currently, Flipboard has recruited several new employees in China, including branding, marketing and engineering. Flipboard plans to increase its workforce to 10 in China this summer.