Pearltrees Review - Web Content Curation Community. Pearltrees Raises $6.7M For Its “Collaborative Interest Graph” Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.
The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button. Following the lead from Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank, Pearltrees has named its technology TreeRank. In essence, it’s offering its own version of the “interest graph”, a goal that many startups are chasing. Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and the company says it has been growing consistently at 15 percent per month, and that users have now created 15 million pearls which were assembled into 2 million trees. Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round. Silicon Valley Watcher - at the intersection of technology and media: PRWatch Archives. The first Hubbies awards (winners above) were presented in San Francisco earlier this week recognizing breakthrough digital creative work.
It is organized by a new publication The Hub, a sister publication to PR Week. Steve Barrett, (below, right) Editor-in-Chief of PR Week was on hand as part of a day-long conference discussing key trends in digital PR. He also interviewed Brian Solis from Altimeter Group. The Hub is based in San Francisco and edited by Omar Akhtar (below, left) Story continues... When I first introduced the concept of every company is a media company in 2005 there were very few people that understood what this meant. With so few media professionals around to help tell a company’s stories it makes sense for companies to try to tell their own stories and get them out online and into the many communities that matter to them. Story continues...
Richard Edelman (right) with Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week, at a Churchill Club event in 2013. Story continues... Pearltrees Brings Your Interest Graph' to the iPad. One of the more buzzword-y buzzwords in Silicon Valley right now is the "interest graph," which is supposed to connect people and the topics that they're interested in.
Lots of startups promise to tap into the interest graph, but Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe says a new app from his startup is "maybe the first time you actually see an interest graph. " The new feature, which Lamothe variously describes as "visual discovery" (his pitch to the tech press) and "related interests" (what it's actually called in the app), is included in the just-launched iPad application from the previously Web-only company.
Related interests have also been added to the Pearltrees website, but Lamothe is clearly more excited by the iPad version—he warned that the Web experience probably isn't quite as good. That kind of self-deprecation from a startup CEO is a little strange, except that the Pearltrees iPad app is pretty impressive. Creative Destruction & the Innovator's Dilemma.