Pearltrees Hits 2 Million Pearls Within 7 Months of Launch

Today, Pearltrees announces its new beta, Version 0.7.2, which speeds up performance and adds new functionality for users. Social curation at its best, interest in Pearltrees is growing; people have created two million pearls within 7 months of launch.

This impressive number comes only a week after Peartlrees announced $1.6 million in funding, which will be used to accelerate international development and growth.

As of July 2010, the Pearltrees North American user base has surpassed the French Pearltree community, which is where the service was launched last December. Global growth continues at a rate of 30% month-by-month and some organizations have already adopted Pearltrees, showing increased momentum and interest in the service.

This latest beta release, will significantly improve the user experience by increasing the speed and performance of the platform, by as well as adding new ergonomic features such as full screen video viewing, automatic updates of the detailed window and new meaningful animations.

Pearltrees supports all browsers so can be used on both PCs and Macs. Users can also embed pearls or whole Pearltrees’ into a website or blog with a simple button click, making it as easy to embed a Pearltree as it is to embed a YouTube video. Fans, readers and customers of a particular site or blog can discover a series of web pages and explore them in-depth without ever leaving your site. Users are exposed to a complete experience about a topic in one easy-to-navigate window.

Pearltrees transforms the process of discovering, organizing and sharing content people find on the web while enabling bloggers, journalists and other content creators to add a new level of depth and context to the articles they post online.

As Pearltrees expands in the U.S., new use cases of Pearltrees are sprouting up on various interests including food, restaurants, wine, travel, music and politics, to name a few. Below are a few examples of how people are curating content with Pearltrees:

• Check out a Pearltree showing a simulating iPod playlist to for working out

• Here’s a Pearltree for a special gluten free diet

• Find the resources a teacher needs

• Create a Pearltree to curate your favorite clubs in a city

• Build a guide of Buddhism

• Use Pearltrees if you are a label as a creative way to present your artist

• You can use a Pearltree to organize and curate your favorite wine experts

For example, you could create a Pearltree to share five recipes to make your brunch a success or where to find the best barbecue accessories, or even how to organize a whole meal – from wine and starters to main courses and dessert.

Take a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick's post yesterday in ReadWriteWeb and also at a Buddhism Pearltree below.

Yes in Fact: A Robot Programmed to Fetch a Beer

At Willow Garage, they have various hackathons, designed to program a PR2 robot to doing something useful, cool, fun, productive, interesting or innovative. A recent one held only a few weeks ago resulted in getting PR2 to play pool, in many cases more accurately than his human programmers.

In their third summer hackathon, the Willow Garage "beer hackathon team" started on a Monday and finished on Friday with the goal of having PR2 zip off to the fridge, grab a beer of your choice using object recognition and then having the robot deliver it to you without you having to move from your seat. PR2 was even programmed to pop the cap off the bottle of beer in case you didn't happen to have one handy.

They're calling it the "Beer Me web application." In this web app, the user is presented with a menu of ice cold beers and ciders, and a pull-down menu specifying the office for delivery. Once the user hits the enticing Beer Me button, it's the robot's job to make that magic happen. Take a look at the video below that captures the team's results.

Pop Sci's Robot of the Week

PR2 makes Pop Sci's robot of the week after impressing them and countless others with its ability to zoom off to the fridge, select a beer of your choice and bring it to you. Hats off to the beer hackathon team Willow Garage team!!

Zaragoza Spain the Hub for Latest in Robotics This Week

The 2010 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference is taking place this week at the University of Zaragoza Spain. Research and development leader Willow Garage is there showing off PR2, which TMC News refers to as the most advanced personal robot in the world, PR2 is demonstrating how it can help people with their domestic chores, including folding a pile of clothes, sorting them and storing them.

PR2 is not alone. The presentations at this highly regarded conference are submitted months in advance by researchers working on algorithmic or mathematical foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotic systems. The final program which attendees are participating in this week, highlights the best work of its kind in every category.

300 robotics researchers from 25 countries show up and include companies like Google and Microsoft as well as universities and institutions like NASA. Displayed and demoed this week are robots outfitted with sensors that allow them to see, hear, touch and move, which will make the daily life of humans easier, help people with reduced mobility or perform dangerous tasks.

Another robot - Nao, a 58-centimeter (22-inch) tall creation of French firm Aldebaran Robotics, demonstrated that it could dance like in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, get up from the ground and even tell stories. And, among other demos, Spanish-based Robotnik showed off a highly sophisticated and mobile robot with the ability to deactivate explosives.

Pearltrees Raises $1.6 Million

Pearltrees, a social web curation tool based in Paris-France, announced that it has raised $1.6 million in funding from European entrepreneurs and business angel investors, to accelerate international development.

Since the launch of the Pearltrees beta version in December 2009 at LeWeb in Paris, the social curation tool has developed a strong community. In order to accelerate the international development of Pearltrees, especially in the US, shareholders of the French start-up raised additional funding, totaling $4.6 million to-date.

Since last December, the growing community has pearled and organized nearly two million web pages. Moving far beyond simple bookmarking, Pearltrees users can select each other's pearltrees as a way to follow the topics they care about. Everyone can now browse pearltrees created by passionate users on various subjects, including food, politics, media, arts, travel, music and countless others.

Pearltrees Version 1.0 will be released later this year. Also refer to VentureBeat on the funding announcement.

"Dad is Awesome" Talking Photo

Below is an adorable and compelling use of Fotobabble's very simple and easy-to-use technology. For Father's Day, Mom and kids create a 'talking photo' for their dad using a poem to share how much they love him and what makes him so special. People can get set up in minutes. Also check out the Ballpark All Stars Moms Contest using Fotobabble.

PR2 Robots Now Play Pool

The Willow Garage team programmed one of their PR2 robots to play pool and PR2 not only has a blast doing so, but its accuracy seems to be remarkably better than the Willow Garage's engineering team. Go PR2! Go ROS! (an open-source system for robots)

iVillage & Fotobabble Team Up on Beauty & Style Contest

Fotobabble Teams up with iVillage on the “iVillage I love my…” Contest, which encourages women to share their beauty & style secrets.

In this campaign, talking photos serve as an innovative social media tool to drive user engagement, brand awareness and traffic. The contest, which is currently underway and will run through midnight of June 30, 2010, encourages users to create Fotobabble-powered Talking Photos to start a community dialogue around the products and clothing they love, and express their personal style.

To participate, users simply sign up (takes a few seconds), upload a photo and then click a button to record their own voice and share their secrets for style and confidence. Participants can then share their Talking Photos (or Fotobabbles), with friends and family through email, Facebook or Twitter. Fotobabbles with the top views are eligible to win a $500 gift card from Sephora.

The Fotobabble Platform can provide deeper brand exposure and increase traffic to a site. Easier and faster than video, more engaging and dynamic than photos and easy to embed anywhere on the web, Fotobabble provides companies and individuals a powerful and engaging way to connect with their customers and further extend their reach into popular social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Click play below to learn more about the contest and see a fabulous example of how established brands are using unique social media platforms, such as Fotobabble, to increase fan and customer awareness and engagement.

Georgia Tech's Plans for their PR2 Robot

There has been a lot of buzz over the past week or so highlighting Willow Garage's PR2 Graduation, where 11 robots will be given away to to 10 universities worldwide, with the 11th going to Bosch. I'll be highlighting them in more detail in the coming weeks and months as things develop at various locations.

One of the recipients -- Georgia Tech in Atlanta -- has an interdisciplinary team in place to research how robots can help older adults live independently at home. As populations of the U.S., Europe, and Japan are all getting older resulting in fewer young people to provide care to seniors, experts are concerned that costs will skyrocket and aging adults will not receive the support they need. Robots may be able to help older adults stay in their homes longer with a higher quality of life, which is Georgia Tech's goal through their work with the PR2 they received from Willow Garage this past week.

The team plans to work with older adults to better understand their needs and how robots can help in the short and long term. By working closely with seniors throughout the research process, the team hopes to better meet real needs and accelerate progress.

To make everything more realistic, the robot will spend some of its time in a real, two-story house on the Georgia Tech campus, called the Aware Home. This will enable older adults to work with the robot in a convincing environment, and will give the software developers a good place to test their code.

The School of Psychology's Human Factors and Aging Laboratory will be leading the human-robot interaction research part of the project. Their experience researching technology for older adults, including a recent survey on how older adults would like to use robots, will prove to be extremely useful as the project moves forward.

Bob Rosenschein: Israel the Startup Nation

Answers.com's Bob Rosenschein talks to this year's Israel Conference audience. He talks about his 25+ years in Israel, starting his Company, and the uniqueness of Israel as a start-up nation, a country full of innovators and leaders. He also shows us the latest from Answers.com, which includes mobile support and the ability to tweet your questions directly from Twitter.