Mike McCue
Encyclopedia
Mike McCue is a successful internet entrepreneur and a founder of Paper Software, Tellme Networks
and Flipboard
. Since December 2010 he has been a director of Twitter
.
In an interview in 1997 his pursuits outside of work were said to include rock climbing, kung fu and composing classical music on the piano.
. He became hooked on software and began his first business in his early teens, writing video games at home that he licensed to magazines and in the end to a games publisher. He had wanted to be an astronaut and his first real app, he said, was a space shuttle flight simulator he wrote in TI-BASIC
in 1981.
Admiring technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs
, Mitch Kapor
and Bill Gates
, McCue joined IBM
in 1986, giving up a congressional nomination to attend the US Air Force Academy. He was employed on a six-month temporary contract but ended up staying three-and-a-half years.
Paper Software's first product was Sidebar, a set of icons designed to make using a computer more intuitive, but after discovering Mosaic
, McCue began to develop technology allowing web browsers to display complex 3-D graphics. McCue acted as CEO, winning nearly 80 percent market share in 3D internet software from Microsoft
and SGI
.
McCue rejected offers for Paper Software from America Online and Silicon Graphics
before selling to Netscape
for $20 million in February 1996. At Netscape McCue was appointed Vice President of Technology, helping to create Netscape Netcaster and working on transforming its Netscape Navigator
browser into a Web-based desktop operating system. It has been said that the project, called Constellation after a boat McCue's father had helped to restore, led Microsoft to alter its Windows licensing agreements to prevent PC manufacturers using competing software, eventually leading to antitrust proceedings against the company.
When McCue later paid $200,000 for a 48-foot classic wooden sailboat he named it “Constellation”.
Tellme launched in July 2000 with the ambition of creating a 'voice browser' by using voice-recognition software to allow users to find internet-based information through their telephone with simple voice commands. “When you pick up a phone,” McCue explained in 2001, “you’ll hear a friendly voice say, ‘What would you like to do?’ and you’ll be able to place a call or do a whole variety of things using simple key words.”
Instead, McCue decided to "go where the phone calls are today, not where they’ll be tomorrow” and Tellme evolved into a service that allowed a caller to communicate with a client's server by translating voice commands into VoiceXML
and then transferring the data through its own network, potentially saving large companies hundreds of thousands of dollars on human operators and their own telecom networks. By 2005 Tellme estimated that 35 million Americans were making calls through their network each month; revenues were more than $100 million. The company became profitable in the second half of 2004.
Tellme was one of the world’s first internet platforms to deliver web data to anyone over any telephone, a platform that inspired the migration of large-scale phone services from proprietary applications to open standards applications and drove the adoption of VoiceXML. The system became the standard for "voice browsers" and in March 2007 the company was acquired by Microsoft
for a rumoured $800 million, with McCue joining as General Manager.
McCue described his efforts to make design a higher priority at Microsoft as a work in progress during his time at the company, "I'd give it probably a 'C-plus' to a 'B' right now," he said in 2009.
Flipboard
McCue left Microsoft in June 2009 and in January 2010 he co-founded with Evan Doll, one of the early engineers on the iPhone
team at Apple, Flipboard
, the 'social magazine' app
for Apple's iPad
. Flipboard launched in July 2010 having secured $10.5 million of venture capital
from investors including John Doerr
of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who had also invested in Tellme), Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, Facebook
’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
, and Ashton Kutcher
.
Flipboard evolved from a thought experiment undertaken by McCue and Doll in which they asked what the web would look like if it was washed away in a hurricane and needed to be built again from scratch with the knowledge of hindsight. "We thought," said McCue, "it would be possible to build something from the ground up that was inherently social. And we thought that new form factors like the tablet would enable content to be presented in ways that were fundamentally more beautiful." McCue said that when reading magazines like National Geographic he would ask himself: "Why is it that the Web isn't as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?"
McCue was critical of the way that journalism appeared on the web, saying that it had been "contaminated by the Web form factor" and was being pushed into trying to support the monetization model of the web by driving page views with slide shows, condensed columns of narrow text and distracting advertisements, a space where, he said, "I don't think it should ever go". "It's not," he said, "a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website."
With this in mind they recruited Marcos Weskamp, the designer who in 2004 had built newsmap.jp to graphically display a heatmap of stories from the Google News
news aggregator. Flipboard became what they called the first social magazine, allowing people to consume media from Facebook
and Twitter
in an easier and more aesthetically interesting way.
By December 2010 Flipboard claimed that they were installed on about 1 million of the 8-9 million iPads then in circulation; Apple named Flipboard its iPad app of the year.
Twitter
In December 2010 McCue joined the board of directors of Twitter
, leading to speculation that the company was heading towards creating a media and publishing business. The company had just raised $200 million in a round of funding, the majority of it from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with whom McCue had a lengthy association, and one of whose partner's, Ellen Pao, is a member of the board at Flipboard.
Tellme Networks
Tellme. Networks, Inc. is a company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, based out of Mountain View, California, in the United States, that specializes in telephone-based applications....
and Flipboard
Flipboard
Flipboard is a social magazine application and company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll, based out of Palo Alto, California in the United States for Apple's iPad tablet computer. The application is designed to collect the content of social networks and other websites and present them in...
. Since December 2010 he has been a director of Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
.
In an interview in 1997 his pursuits outside of work were said to include rock climbing, kung fu and composing classical music on the piano.
Early career
McCue grew up in Woodstock, New YorkWoodstock, New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 at the 2000 census.The Town of Woodstock is in the northern part of the county...
. He became hooked on software and began his first business in his early teens, writing video games at home that he licensed to magazines and in the end to a games publisher. He had wanted to be an astronaut and his first real app, he said, was a space shuttle flight simulator he wrote in TI-BASIC
TI-BASIC
TI-BASIC is the unofficial name of a BASIC-like language built into Texas Instruments 's graphing calculators, including the TI-83 series, TI-84 Plus series, TI-89 series, TI-92 series , TI-73, and TI-Nspire...
in 1981.
Admiring technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
, Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...
and Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
, McCue joined IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
in 1986, giving up a congressional nomination to attend the US Air Force Academy. He was employed on a six-month temporary contract but ended up staying three-and-a-half years.
Paper Software and Netscape
In 1989 McCue founded his first company, Paper Software, aiming, he said, "to make using a computer as easy as using a piece of paper". At first the company was not successful and McCue spent a summer digging ditches and building houses to raise funds, and then doing software design consulting for a company contracted to the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co.Paper Software's first product was Sidebar, a set of icons designed to make using a computer more intuitive, but after discovering Mosaic
Mosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
, McCue began to develop technology allowing web browsers to display complex 3-D graphics. McCue acted as CEO, winning nearly 80 percent market share in 3D internet software from Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
.
McCue rejected offers for Paper Software from America Online and Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
before selling to Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
for $20 million in February 1996. At Netscape McCue was appointed Vice President of Technology, helping to create Netscape Netcaster and working on transforming its Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
browser into a Web-based desktop operating system. It has been said that the project, called Constellation after a boat McCue's father had helped to restore, led Microsoft to alter its Windows licensing agreements to prevent PC manufacturers using competing software, eventually leading to antitrust proceedings against the company.
When McCue later paid $200,000 for a 48-foot classic wooden sailboat he named it “Constellation”.
Tellme Networks and Microsoft
In February 1999 McCue left Netscape to co-found with Angus Davis, Tellme Networks. McCue had previously recruited Davis to work at Netscape when he was 19 and credited him with the idea for the new company. Tellme went on to raise $238 million in venture capital.Tellme launched in July 2000 with the ambition of creating a 'voice browser' by using voice-recognition software to allow users to find internet-based information through their telephone with simple voice commands. “When you pick up a phone,” McCue explained in 2001, “you’ll hear a friendly voice say, ‘What would you like to do?’ and you’ll be able to place a call or do a whole variety of things using simple key words.”
Instead, McCue decided to "go where the phone calls are today, not where they’ll be tomorrow” and Tellme evolved into a service that allowed a caller to communicate with a client's server by translating voice commands into VoiceXML
VoiceXML
VoiceXML is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It allows voice applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser,...
and then transferring the data through its own network, potentially saving large companies hundreds of thousands of dollars on human operators and their own telecom networks. By 2005 Tellme estimated that 35 million Americans were making calls through their network each month; revenues were more than $100 million. The company became profitable in the second half of 2004.
Tellme was one of the world’s first internet platforms to deliver web data to anyone over any telephone, a platform that inspired the migration of large-scale phone services from proprietary applications to open standards applications and drove the adoption of VoiceXML. The system became the standard for "voice browsers" and in March 2007 the company was acquired by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
for a rumoured $800 million, with McCue joining as General Manager.
McCue described his efforts to make design a higher priority at Microsoft as a work in progress during his time at the company, "I'd give it probably a 'C-plus' to a 'B' right now," he said in 2009.
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
team at Apple, Flipboard
Flipboard
Flipboard is a social magazine application and company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll, based out of Palo Alto, California in the United States for Apple's iPad tablet computer. The application is designed to collect the content of social networks and other websites and present them in...
, the 'social magazine' app
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
for Apple's iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...
. Flipboard launched in July 2010 having secured $10.5 million of venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
from investors including John Doerr
John Doerr
L. John Doerr is an American venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, California, in Silicon Valley. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed as a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the president and his administration with advice and...
of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who had also invested in Tellme), Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz is an American internet entrepreneur who co-founded the social networking website Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes. Moskovitz owns a 6% share of Facebook. He is also a co-founder and the CEO of Asana. Moskovitz is Jewish...
, and Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher
Christopher Ashton Kutcher , best known as Ashton Kutcher, is an American actor, producer, former fashion model and comedian, best known for his portrayal of Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show...
.
Flipboard evolved from a thought experiment undertaken by McCue and Doll in which they asked what the web would look like if it was washed away in a hurricane and needed to be built again from scratch with the knowledge of hindsight. "We thought," said McCue, "it would be possible to build something from the ground up that was inherently social. And we thought that new form factors like the tablet would enable content to be presented in ways that were fundamentally more beautiful." McCue said that when reading magazines like National Geographic he would ask himself: "Why is it that the Web isn't as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?"
McCue was critical of the way that journalism appeared on the web, saying that it had been "contaminated by the Web form factor" and was being pushed into trying to support the monetization model of the web by driving page views with slide shows, condensed columns of narrow text and distracting advertisements, a space where, he said, "I don't think it should ever go". "It's not," he said, "a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website."
With this in mind they recruited Marcos Weskamp, the designer who in 2004 had built newsmap.jp to graphically display a heatmap of stories from the Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
news aggregator. Flipboard became what they called the first social magazine, allowing people to consume media from Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
in an easier and more aesthetically interesting way.
By December 2010 Flipboard claimed that they were installed on about 1 million of the 8-9 million iPads then in circulation; Apple named Flipboard its iPad app of the year.
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, leading to speculation that the company was heading towards creating a media and publishing business. The company had just raised $200 million in a round of funding, the majority of it from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with whom McCue had a lengthy association, and one of whose partner's, Ellen Pao, is a member of the board at Flipboard.