Pearltrees Goes Beyond Curation, Adds File Storage Pearltrees, the Paris-based online curation service, today added the ability to upload and share any kind of file to its servers. The service started out as a tool for organizing bookmarks, but it’s long been clear that the company harbored ambitions that went beyond just being a better bookmarking services. Last year, Pearltrees added the ability to upload photos and save notes. With today’s release, the company’s co-founder and CEO Patrice Lamothe told me, it’s getting closer to its vision to “organize everything in a social way.” Users with free accounts on the site now get 250MB of storage and those with paid premium accounts get 5GB (for $1.59/month), 25GB (for $3.19/month) or 100GB ($8.49/per month) of online storage space on Pearltrees. As Lamothe stressed, this doesn’t mean that the company is moving away from its core focus on curation, though this move will put it into direct competition with Dropbox, Skydrive and similar services.
Pearltrees Dives Into Social Curating With Pearltrees Team Content curation and mapping service Pearltrees has decided to focus on the fact that people want to do things in groups and has as of today upgraded its core product with a groups functionality, called Pearltrees Team. Now accesible just by logging in, Pearltrees Team allows you to hook up with other people in order to create a Pearltree collaboratively in realtime. Ideally this goes down as such: You really care about fashion so you search for fashion in the Pearltrees search box and are confronted with really elaborate visual cluster displays of fashion blogs, each blog its own “pearl.” You decide that anyone who likes The Sartorialist is probably a good egg and click on the puzzle piece in the Pearltrees detail window in order to ask if you can join the team. If the team leader accepts, you then can see all the Pearltree curation happening as it happens as well as as comment on individual Pearltree decisions. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.
Pearltrees Brings Visual Content Curation And Discovery Platform To The iPad Content curation and mapping service Pearltrees is launching a dedicated iPad app today to allow users to cultivate and share their interests from the web on the tablet device. For background, Pearltrees is a visual social bookmarking service that allows users to organize, discover and share everything they like on the web. Content can be dragged and dropped into Pearltrees and the service will organize this via a string of ‘pearls,’ which can then be moved around, organized and shared. Launched in December 2009, Pearltrees has gathered more than 10 million pearls. Considering the visual nature of the iPad, Pearltrees founder Patrice Lamothe says that the device is a natural home for Pearltrees. The app also includes a real-time collaborative curation feature that let users spontaneously team-up with others on their favorite topics. Pearltrees faces competition from Pinterest.
Pearltrees: 3 years and €8.5 million later, there's finally talk of a business model In Europe, as many of you may already know, people tend to talk about business models much earlier in the game than they do in the US. In fact, it’s a widely-held belief that European investors don’t tend to invest in companies that aren’t generating cash (which many believe explains the French VCs’ love for e-commerce). While US companies like Instagram, Pinterest, Quora and the likes are busy amassing millions upon millions of non-paying users prior to even talking about their business models (oh wait, Pinterest actually does make money?), European companies are more often than not approaching things from the opposite end. While many European entrepreneurs swear by Susan’s “the business model can wait” approach, the ones who actually practice it often get a little flack. The startup just announced it’s 4th round of funding since it’s launch in 2009, having raised over €8.5 million to date. But this time, if Pearltrees is raising money, it’s clearly for monetization.
Solving Africa’s Local Content Gap With Umuntu’s Johan Nel VENTURES AFRICA - As technology continues to drive growth and development in Africa, the need for local content in ICT crucial as the continent takes shape. Although local content is available, the challenge of capturing, repackaging, storing and disseminating them to a wider group of users cannot be overemphasised. Thus, local content needs originators with motivation and innovative minds to create, adapt or exchange it. In this interview, Ventures Africa speaks with Johan Nel, the brain behind Africa’s leading online publishing platform, Umuntu Media (Umuntu) which runs local content portals across Africa. Johan developed the concept for Umuntu using his experience as a marketing and new media specialist. Johan talks about his business, his hope for the future of Africa tech scene and how his company plan to take over the Africa tech scene fully. VA: What was growing up like? Johan: I was born in Windhoek, Namibia where I spend most of my childhood. VA: What is Umuntu’s business model?
How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later. Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. Backing out of Compete’s numbers, we see Pinterest grew about 50% month over month from a base of zero since its inception (on average, smoothing the curve). Note these numbers are approximations and also do not count the significant traffic the service sees from mobile (Pinterest’s app currently takes the #6 social spot in the iTunes store).
How Much Does Pinterest Marketing Cost? The answer to this question totally depends on the type of Pinterest marketing service you need. So let’s start there. Here are the different types of services we’ve seen: Account Setup This service is usually a one-time fee and would typically include setting up your initial boards with good board names and descriptions, adding x number of pins to each board, setting up group boards that you control, becoming a contributor on a few other relevant group boards. Pricing for this service can range from $300 – $1,000. Content Creation Not all content/images would be great for Pinterest. Consult with the client on what images/content they already have that will do well on PinterestTake existing client content and tweak it to do well on Pinterest (most common)Come up with and create brand new content from scratch The price range for this service, which is usually a one-time fee, is about $200 – $1,500. Account Management We’ve seen prices for this service ranging from $300 – $1,000/month.
How much does it cost to build the world’s hottest startups? Could $100,000 and the right developer skills make you an overnight billionaire? How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app. We interviewed the heads of the top Web and mobile development companies, incubators, agencies and labs to understand what it takes to design and develop the most successful apps of our generation. Here are their breakdowns of the costs and time investments to create 10 of the world’s hottest startups. 1) Twitter Henrik Werdelin, the Managing Partner of Prehype, a venture development firm based in New York City that has helped build companies like Tradable, Barkbox, FancyHands, Basno and Path, says recreating Twitter isn’t necessarily difficult, but the layered features will take time to get right. 2) Instagram 3) Facebook 4) WhatsApp 5) Uber