Flickpad: A Seamless Marriage of iPad and Facebook

Kobie Fuller

June 25, 2010

Shacked — a company specializing in product and development for iPhone, iPad and mac apps — just launched a product called Flickpad which, I find, has done a great job of marrying some of the best of the iPad and Facebook. What exactly is it?

– It’s an app that runs native on the iPad that is used to view your friends’ Facebook photos
– A user enters their Facebook login credentials into the app and instantly you start seeing friends’ photos elegantly displayed on your iPad
– You have the ability to easily flick pictures you don’t want to view off of the iPad, and double-click any photo to see the rest of the album
– Any photo you like you can easily save to your iPad so you can have them stored in your personal library

What Shacked did here was simple. They saw a consumer activity (photo sharing) that could be taken to the next level by a device that has phenomenal capabilities (iPad). With that, they created a simple app that connected both worlds in a seamless way, delivering an advanced user experience.

The marriage of Apple’s slick interface with a sliver of Facebook’s content here is brilliant. The management teams at both companies have employed some great business growth strategies that allow their platform to be open enough to allow third party developers to build on top of their technology and connect to their information while still keeping some elements off limits. The result is great competitive positioning by Apple and Facebook, coupled with rapid innovation through the relatively open app universe.
-KKF

General Partner

<strong>Kobie Fuller</strong> is a General Partner at <a href="https://upfront.com/">Upfront Ventures</a>. Previously he was the Principal at Accel Partners in San Francisco where he helped identify and work with entrepreneurs who were building category-defining companies. He has more than 10 years of experience in funding and building software companies.