In July a tiny Palo Alto (Calif.) startup called Flipboard stirred up the tech world with an application for Apple's iPad that promised to change the way Internet users discover and read online news. The app, which is free to download, asks users to enter their Facebook or Twitter account information and favorite publications. Then it pulls in all the relevant links to news articles, blog items, and photographs streaming through those social-networking feeds and displays the content in a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate format evocative of a traditional magazine.

iPad owners and the Internet cognoscenti immediately turned the innovative little program into one of the top-rated free news apps for the iPad. The startup's servers were overloaded for much of its first week.

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