flipboard pages as media delivery engine
From the information on Flipboard.com about their new Pages (product? service?) effort...
Flipboard Pages are built on a lightweight JavaScript engine that lays out articles in a paginated format optimized for iPad. Through semantic analysis, the taxonomy of an article is broken down into essential components including headline, images, byline, captions, and pullquotes. The content is then reflowed into an HTML5 template for short- and long-form articles and image galleries, in both portrait and landscape orientations. Given that Flipboard is a highly visual experience, Flipboard Pages incorporate high-res images and significant branding elements as well.
Combine this with Mike McCue's comments to Om Malik about RSS and HTML5, and it seems that what they're building is a content rendering engine optimized for beauty. Flipboard's own iPad could end up being just the first place to experience Flipboard Pages content; it's easy to imagine them extending this to mobile, browsers, desktop apps...and then delivering the technology as a value-add service (combined with Flipboard-powered ad experiences?) back to the publishers' own domains as well.