15014 - Pearltrees Raises EUR 5m to Expand ‘Interest Graph’ In France, Pearltrees - which provides an interface for finding, sharing and analyzing web content - has raised EUR 5 million ($6.7m) in new funding, which will be used to scale its ‘interest graph’ product. Launched in December 2009, Paris-based Pearltrees enables users to make social connections based on shared interests such as news, the arts, entertainment and sciences. The system produces data which can be used by marketers to provide insight into ‘the consumer mind’. The basic unit of Pearltrees’ service is the ‘pearl’, which is basically a visual bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. The latest round of funding was led by former investor The Group Accueil, bringing the total raised to date, to around EUR 11.6 million. Web site: www.pearltrees.com .
Pearltrees Gets Funding To Chase After Pinterest So it is not surprising that investment is pouring in, as investors themselves go gaga over the most promising firms. Just this week, Pearltrees received $6.6 million in series B funding, as part of the wave of investment in sites that bring together folks with common “interest graphs.” The site uses a clustered visual interface to organize anything that users see or read on the web. This is merely the latest example of a tectonic shift among venture capitalist and merchant bankers away from funding general social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, towards internet startups that curate user interests, which is another way of stating that these sites offer human bookmarking and organization. More popularly known sites that similarly use bookmarking and organization include Pinterest and GetGlue. Pinterest has accumulated more than 12 million users in the US alone, and has been aggressively building its engagement worldwide.
2012-03-17 11.50.33 The 12 Bookmarklets Your Social Media Life Is Missing - Technology If you juggle multiple social media presences (and these days, who doesn't?), you're almost certainly spending more time clicking back and forth than you need to. Bookmarklets are free, minimally invasive, time-saving applications, yet a small fraction of internet denizens are using them. They make sharing and posting content while surfing the Web as easy as clicking a button—without leaving the page you're on. These tools do everything from creating Tumblr posts to tweeting links—all without requiring you to be on the social media site itself. So whenever you have a desire to "share" an Internet gem with your fellow culture vultures, the bookmarklet will get the job done in the time it takes you to open up a new tab. Pinterest When you click the "Pin It" button while browsing the Web, a matrix of images from the page will appear. Tumblr Just hit "Share on Tumblr" and a post box will pop up. Svpply Digg Facebook Twitter It doesn't matter whether there's a "Tweet" button next to an article.
Publications Pearltrees Grabs $6.6M In Funding For 'Interest Graphs' 02/14 Lured by the promise of better “interest graphs,” investors just ponied up about $6.6 million for social curation startup Pearltrees. Great, but “what the heck is an interest graph?” asks VentureBeat. “Put differently,” VB explains, “while social networks like Facebook focus on what you have in common with your friends … interest graph-based models [Pinterest, GetGlue, etc.] make social connections based on shared interests, not the other way around.” According to GigaOm, the startup really needs the money to help scale its system for bookmarking and organizing, which is based around a clustered visual interface. “Right now, Pearltrees is small and has moderate momentum, building up 350,000 users in the past three years,” GigOm writes. “Some of [Pearltrees’s] most interesting technology … actually powers the discovery mechanism that is slowly becoming a more important part of the user experience,” notes SiliconFilter.com.
cats Dropmark Is A Collaborative Presentations Tool Please enable JavaScript to watch this video. Dropmark offers simple drag-and-drop file sharing, like a number of web apps before it. But you can also create presentations or slideshows, and collaborate with others just as easily. You can see the basic functionality of Dropmark in the video above, but here’s a rundown. You create a collection of files, drag those files right into your browser, wait for them to upload, and then decide how to share that collection. You can make it public or share with individuals. Depending on what you upload, you can use a collection as a (full screen) photo slideshow or presentation. In the event you don’t want to visit the Dropmark site to upload your files, you can just install a browser extension that’ll bring up a sidebar you can use to quickly add files to any collection. Dropmark
With 5 Million More Euros in the Bank, Pearltrees Gets Ready to Scale and Start Monetizing The Paris-based social curation platform Pearltrees just announced that it has raised a Series B round of 5 million Euros (about $6.62 million USD). The money is coming from Group Accueil, which had also invested in the service’s previous round. In total, Pearltrees has now raised 8.5 million Euros. The company, which launched its first alpha almost 3 years ago, aims to use this money to scale its product and – maybe even more importantly – implement a freemium business model for its service. The company did not publicly discuss what exactly this freemium model will look like. Pearltrees is probably best known for its highly visual interface to its collaborative curation service. Pearltrees, according to its own data, had about 1 million unique visitors in January, which accounted for about 30 million pageviews.
Tes Exposé is a bookmarklet that lets your friends be the editors What if your friends laid out the home pages of major news organizations, instead of a bunch of editors you’ve never met? The folks at News.me toyed with that idea at an afternoon hackathon a few months ago, and the result is News.me Exposé, a bookmarklet that reveals the “top stories” as determined by what your friends are sharing on Twitter. A wee bookmarklet it may be, but Exposé reflects the company’s belief that our friends can be better curators than professional journalists — and that home pages are losing relevance as discovery points. “The web is about conversations, not pages — this brings the conversation front and center,” said Jake Levine, the News.me general manager, in an email. “Why do we spend so much time thinking about discovery on publisher homepages when users are finding their news elsewhere? He continued: “Destinations are not irrelevant, but they might be less important than they once were. News.me Exposé could work well as a widget embedded into a news site.
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.
News.me Launces Exposé to Help You Find Relevant News on the Web Social discovery tool News.me helps you find relevant and interesting news based on what your friends are sharing on Twitter. We all get slammed with a river of links when checking our Twitter streams, so the tool has been extremely helpful to parse out the best of the best. Today, the company launched a tool that lets you surf the web and instantly see what you should check out and read on the site you’re on. Instead of waiting to be told that something is relevant when using News.me, the new Exposé bookmarklet will let you click a simple button when visiting your favorite news site and immediately tell you which stories to read based on what your friends have read. Here’s what News.me had to say about the feature: Front page editors at major publishers like the New York Times and the New Yorker are masters at laying out content on their homepages, and the recommendations implicit in that layout are incredibly valuable.
What the heck is an interest graph? Pearltrees raises $6.6M to show us Social curation startup Pearltrees has just sealed a deal for €5 million (around $6.6 million), all in the name of creating a better interest graph. Much is being made in current social media circles of the “interest graph” concept, which is more about what you know than who you know, and which purportedly has strong connections to purchase intent and other matters of concern to online marketers. Put differently, while social networks like Facebook focus on what you have in common with your friends and how you react to friends’ recommendations, interest graph-based models (like the ones behind Pinterest, GetGlue or Foodspotting) make social connections based on shared interests, not the other way around. “Pearltrees has leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web,” said Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe in a release. “As a consequence, Pearltrees harnesses the power of people to organize and discover the most valuable content on the web”, he said.
Seesmic Seesmic has been acquired by HootSuite and as of March 2013, the Seesmic website is no longer supported. But HootSuite welcomes all Seesmic users into our nest! Here’s how you can start using HootSuite today. Making the transition to HootSuite: Getting started is easy. What this means to Seesmic users: Like Seesmic, HootSuite offers a suite of social media management tools for business, with even more options for SMB and enterprise customers. To get a clearer picture of what this means to users, we have prepared a comparison chart that will help you choose the right solution for you.