When is the social curation bubble going to burst? You just can’t move for social curation services right now.
The biggest noise might be coming from Pinterest, which is growing like a weed — but whether it’s the new-look Delicious, Switzerland’s Paperli, shopping curation site Svpply, image service Mlkshk or another site, the fact is that almost everybody seems to want to help you save and sort and share the things you find on the web right now. With this swirl of activity, then, it’s no surprise to hear that Parisian service Pearltrees — slogan “collect, organize, discover” — has just raised another $6 million of funding, led by local conglomerate Groupe Accueil. The company, which has been running in public since 2009, welcomed the injection of funds as a way to help expand and scale up its system for bookmarking and organizing, which is based around a clustered visual interface.
And it needs that scale. Right now Pearltrees is small and has moderate momentum, building up 350,000 users in the past three years. Pearltrees Raises $6.7M, Boasts Of “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. "Pearltrees lève 5 millions d'euros pour engager sa stratégie de monétisation"
Le service de curation Pearltrees souhaite ouvrir son système d'arbres de perles à de nouveaux objets numériques et être rentable d'ici un an.
JDN. Qu'est-ce que Pearltrees ? Patrice Lamothe. Pearltrees est un service en ligne de curation né en 2009 dont l'objectif est de permettre aux internautes d'organiser, de partager et de découvrir du contenu. Chaque internaute peut ainsi créer des arbres de perles dont chacune représente un lien qu'ils aiment et qu'ils peuvent partager. Que représentez-vous en termes de trafic ? Nous comptons environ 350 000 contributeurs et un million de visiteurs uniques mensuels, le tout générant 30 millions de pages vues par mois.