They were initiated by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto and come after pressure from investors to grow its audience and launch new products. The news comes courtesy of Re/Code who were informed by an uncited source.
Flipboard has achieved over $160 million in investment and was valued at around $800 million during its last investment round in 2013. Last year it stated that it had a total user base of 100 million but that figure comprises everybody who has ever signed up for the service.
Some have suggested that the number of people who actually use the app on a regular basis has been levelling off and even declining recently. A deal for the Flipboard app to be preinstalled on Samsung phones has now expired and increasingly people go directly to the responsive and modern websites of the modern Internet to read news.
Flipboard is headed by well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue. He formerly sat on the Twitter board but stood down as Flipboard and Twitter became increasingly competitive. In recent times, both companies have experienced user growth woes however.
The Guardian suggests that the two may be able to help each other out. Twitter could bring stable and mature revenue via advertising to Flipboard while the latter could bring a new and attractive layout to Twitter. Twitter CFO Anthony Noto told a conference in May that nobody knows how to use Twitter but everybody knows what it is, a predicament that the Flipboard interface design could potentially solve for casual users.
Twitter and Flipboard both refused Re/Code‘s request for comment. With a leader as respected as McCue, it is easy to see why Twitter may be interested in acquiring Flipboard but with talks reportedly stalled for now it is uncertain where the two may go in the future.
