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.

Stribe Opens its Social Network Platform

This week, Stribe opens its social network platform and brings together websites sharing the same interest. After 6 months of private beta, Stribe unveils a feature that enables websites to generate more traffic.

Stribe was a finalist during TechCrunch50 2009 and won the last LeWeb European competition startup. More than 10,000 websites have asked to beta test the Stribe service since September 2009, and several hundred websites received an invitation code to embed the service.

More Traffic

Traffic acquisition is an issue for every website. Stribe now helps websites to connect with social media and with other websites sharing the same interests to get more traffic. The entire installation process only requires sites to add one new line of code to their pages. Stribe designed viral mechanisms to let websites invite and connect with each other. All content generated by users will be indexed to improve SEO and drive more traffic to “stribed” websites.

All websites can look for communities, join them or create their own from Stribe.com to link with others and boost their visibility in a ring of similar sites. Most of Stribe's features are free, however there are additional premium modules that cost, such as the back office functionality that allows websites to track key metrics of social activity and manage online communities.

A Shepherd's Journey

Ishmael Khaldi who helped to make our Traveling Geeks first trip to Israel possible and acted as guide on-the-ground, has just released a new book -- his first -- A Shepherd's Journey. This "journey" is his unique story of transformation from his modest village roots to becoming Israel's first bedouin diplomat and voice of reason in the Middle East.

He was born into a traditional Bedouin family in a poor Bedouin village in northern Israel, where he took us to during our trip in 2008. Take a look at some of the visuals from that trip to get an idea of his roots and what shaped him as a child.

His stories include his early days as a sheepherder and schoolboy "fights," to his terrifying first forays into New York's subway system, and later, his remarkable friendships with Jews and Muslims, religious and secular.

Ishmael has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, Defense Ministry and the Israeli Police before being chosen to join the Foreign Ministry. You can order his new book on Amazon.

Web 2.0 Expo Announces Launch Pad Companies

O'Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb, co-producers of Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, Gov 2.0 Expo and Gov 2.0 Summit, today announced the five companies chosen to participate in this year's Launch Pad.

Launch Pad is a program designed to spotlight new products or technologies to the Web 2.0 market and will take place during Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco at the Moscone West Convention Center, from May 3-7, 2010.

The five finalists were selected from over 80 submissions based on their innovation and value to market. Each finalist will present for five minutes in front of Web 2.0 Expo's audience and judging panel of industry experts who will provide real-time feedback. Web 2.0 Expo's panel of judges includes: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, Dave McClure of 500 Hats and Ellen Pack of Elance. Brady Forrest, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair, will emcee the program.

The following five companies will present at Web 2.0 Expo's Launch Pad on Wednesday, May 5, 2019 at 1:15 pm:

* AskYourTargetMarket.com: AskYourTargetMarket is a self-service target market research platform that includes a built-in consumer panel to answer surveys on demand

* Pearltrees: Pearltrees is a social curation tool that gives users a social way to organize, discover and share stuff they like on the Web

* Rhomobile: Rhomobile provides mobility solutions for the enterprise and creates cross-platform native applications for all major smartphones

* Strings: Strings is a social tracking and filtering platform to enable consumers to share and discover experiences that are meaningful and relevant to them

* Stupeflix: the Stupeflix Play platform transforms pages static content into engaging videos, on-the-fly

Additionally, Startup Weekend is an event where individuals come together to build a product and sometimes a company in two short days. A winner is chosen at the end of the event and this year's Launch Pad will include that winner on stage along with the five selected Launch Pad finalists.

A People's Choice Winner will be announced on-site at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. Audience members will be asked to vote for their top choice based on the demos. Votes will be tabulated in real-time and projected live on screen. All presenters are Launch Pad winners and benefit from the instantaneous feedback provided by the judging panel and the audience.

Flex Mathews & Kosha Dillz Free Style using Corporate & Personal Brands

Flex Mathews and Kosha Dillz perform for the 140 Conference audience. They took cards, names and badges to incorporate into their 'free style' rap on the fly in front of the audience today. See if you can identify the companies and brands you can hear? Traveling Geeks and Answers.com are two of them - see if you can hear the others.

Answers.com Unveils New Twitter Hoopoe Service

Answers.com unveiled a new Twitter service code-named called Hoopoe this morning at the 140 Character Conference in New York.

Answers.com Hoopoe, now in alpha, delivers instant instant to users who tweet their questions to @AnswersDotCom or include the hashtag #answersdotcom. Answers.com will search for a good match and offer a reply with a snippet and link to the full answer, if available.

People are spending more time communicating through Twitter and other social media, so it's a perfect extension to Answers.com service on the web. Some example tweets might be:

• @AnswersDotCom What is Jim Carrey’s Twitter username?

• @AnswersDotCom - What caused the Eyjafjallokull volcano in Iceland to erupt?

• @AnswersDotCom Who is Ashton Kutcher?

Since its currently in alpha, they would love to receive feedback on the service, and for you to follow them on Twitter.TechCrunch covered the announcement and here's a quirky, fun demo of the Hoopoe service on YouTube.

Memeburn Goes Live

Memeburn goes live, a news and opinion platform tracking tech culture, innovation and business. The new site, founded by Cape Town-based Matthew Buckland, focuses on the web, mobile, social media, online media and social networking fields.

I am a contributing blogger together with dozens of others, and although Memeburn has a particular focus on emerging markets, it tracks innovation worldwide.

Vator Teams Up with WebsiteSpark on Cool Web Developer Competition

Vator has teamed up with WebsiteSpark to find leading Web developers, designers and development teams. As part of this effort, there's a WebsiteSpark Web developer and designer competition in play. The winner takes home a $5,000 development/design contract, an XBox or Zune HD, a featured video and profiles.

The winner will also receive software from Microsoft WebsiteSpark, including three Web site licenses for Visual Studio Professional, Expression Studio 3 (1 user), Expression Web 3 (up to 2 users), Windows Web Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Web Edition.

Additionally, they'll get premium access to Microsoft’s new business leads pipeline, one year of free Windows Web Server hosting from WebsiteSpark Hosting Partner, a case study done of your business, co-produced with Microsoft, a featured Web Pro interview in monthly WebsiteSpark Newsletter, and consultation with a Microsoft marketing professional to talk about future business strategy.

For those not aware of the initiative, WebsiteSpark is a program that was launched last September. A sister program to Microsoft BizSpark, WebsiteSpark is for independent Web developers and designers, or small companies with fewer than 10 employees who do contract work and build client’s Web sites/Web apps, like an outsourced dev shop. WebsiteSpark provides these Web Pros with extremely low cost MS development tools, and new business leads – customers who need work done, who are passed to WebsiteSpark Web Pros.

WebsiteSpark is a three year program involving a $100 fee, which is payable upon program exit.

To enter the competition, join Vator TV and register your company and then get the word out for your friends, customers and fans to vote.

Geo-Loco Event: Social Media Week San Francisco

Kevin Marks from BT Group hosts a panel of Foursquare mayors, geeks, thought leaders, investors and entrepreneurs to discuss the future of geo-location services and technologies in San Francisco this Wednesday night, February 3, 2010 as part of Social Media Week.

Magic Sauce Media, my newly branded gig, and Traveling Geeks are proud sponsors of the event, which will be held at 930 Montgomery Street, #301 in San Francisco. The event is part of a global Social Media Week conference, held simultaneously in six cities around the country.

The panel includes:

MG Siegler, Techcrunch

Robert Scoble, Rackspace

Jeremy Toeman, Stage Two Consulting

Matt Galigan, SimpleGeo

Tom Coates, Yahoo Fire Eagel

Catching up with Intruders TV in Europe

Catching up with Intruders TV in Paris in December during LeWeb.