Pearltrees Launches New TEAM Feature at LeWeb10

Pearltrees, a leading curation tool, launched a new team feature at LeWeb10 in Paris this week. More than a new feature, the "team" functionality makes Pearltrees the world's first real-time collaborative curation community.

With Pearltrees “Team” release, curating content becomes social and immediate and curation becomes a playful, social activity.  

Amidst blogger, podcaster, media and entrepreneur activity and panel discussions today in LeWeb's towering halls (3 in total -- separated by a snow and sleet storm) at a place called Les Docks in the northern part of Paris, Pearltrees' CEO Patrice Lamothe and his team demoed Pearltrees Team to attendees, which they also showed on a touch screen.

The number of possible uses for Pearltrees Team is virtually infinite:

•  Journalists can now team up to curate public interest topics such as the Wikileaks pages to share them with the world.
•  Physicians might team up to curate information on a medical condition like autism for the benefit of their patients.
• Friends can now collaborate to plan a holiday by curating cool locations, hotels, restaurants, etc.
• Experts and interested parties can work together to organize an aggregation of existing content such as a library of videos.

Other platforms focus on friends or followers; Pearltrees is a social curation community where people connect with one another via shared interests. It is the first place where people from anywhere on the planet can spontaneously “team up” to explore and organize the largest library in the world.

Below, Patrice Lamothe demos to Gabe Rivera at a blogger luncheon at Alcazar.

 Pearltrees Team has a number of key features that makes it unique:

• it is the first and only fully collaborative platform: people can team up and curate in real time;
• it is not limited to just a few services:  it is possible to curate anything on the web;
• the unique visual interface escapes the limitations of lists and pages giving users the ability to see everything at once or drill down to a specific interest almost instantly;
• Pearltrees also gives users unlimited curation capacity;
• Pearltrees is completely free.

Pearltrees is currently in open beta, interested parties can sign up today by visiting www.pearltrees.com.

Defrag Explores Tools & Technologies around the Data Deluge

This year's Defrag is all about the "data deluge" and the technologies the industry is building to leverage that situation at the individual, group and organizational level.

Sitting at the intersection of BI, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Big Data and the Semantic Web, Defrag is a unique conference that combines a mixture of traditional panel discussions and speakers with an un-conference informal feel in the middle of the Colorado mountains (the venue is nestled off Interlocken in Broomfield, not far from Denver).

Keynote speakers for this year's conference include:

• Alex Wright (author of Glut)
• Vivek Wadwha (Duke, Harvard and UC-Berkeley)
• Esther Dyson
• Dion Hincliffe (Dachis Group)
• Jeff Ma (inspiration for the movie, "21")
• David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto)
• Paul Kedrosky
• Jeff Jonas (Chief Scientist, IBM)
• JP Rangaswami

To register, take advantage of this special 15% discount: click here and enter VIP1.

The Latest on Stealth & Not-so-Stealth Start-ups

Below is an overview of the latest & hottest stealth (or perhaps not-so-stealth) start-ups in a recent TechCrunch post, which includes an in-depth Pearltree so you can learn more about each company. On the hot list includes Virve, RockMelt, Hearsay Labs, Pearltrees, Quora and others.

Organizing & Curating Events: #Pearltrees Meets #140Conf

I have written about Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference (more known by its now popular hashtag #140conf) on more than one occasion, starting with his first Los Angeles event now more than a year ago. He has since held events in Tel Aviv, London, New York, Boston, San Francisco and other locations, with more on the way, including a small town one in the Midwest.

What I love about his events (and no, I don't work for him :-) is that he pulls together passionate people who know how to tell really compelling and engaging stories rather than pitch them or throw insights out on a panel on the "same ole same ole" topic with the "same ole same ole" people. Let's face it, life is about storytelling. Branding is about storytelling. Kids are about storytelling. Money is about storytelling. And when we perk up and pay attention, its because of a really good story, one with passion and authenticity behind the 'voice.'

I wrote about some of the 'characters' who participated in the LA event in a post last week.

And in the same week, I posted a number of videos of many of the heartwarming storytellers, entertainers and performers who spoke in LA. Just search for 140 conference or 140conf on the We Blog the World YouTube Channel to find them all.

Finding and sifting through content after an event is overwhelming isn't it? It's overwhelming because A) there is simply too much content out there, B) search is not perfect nor is it customized for the way we (humans) think and C) there are simply too many 'channels' and social media outlets where things are posted.

In an effort to get more organized and save time searching, browsing and reading, Pearltrees can be a useful way for you to organize and curate content the way you want to see it. Why count on a generic, broad search engine or a geeky bookmarking service to display your world of interests and passions?

Below is the Pearltree I created just for the 140 Conference in Los Angeles, which includes customized pearltrees for each of the categories I decided to curate. In other words, I created a Pearltree for just women attendees, another for speakers, one for entertainment tweeters, educators and moms who are using social media in interesting ways and so on.

And, notice that I have embedded the Pearltree inside my blog post, which was as easy to do it is to embed a YouTube video. Copy and paste the code baby and you're done. It takes seconds to share it with an audience! Imagine the branding opportunities here.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to customize and share, below is the Pearltree I created at the Los Angeles event that contains only 'women tweeters/attendees', making it a great way to keep tabs on people's activity in one central place.

You can bounce from pearl to pearl faster than you can from web browser to web browser, getting quick updates at a quick glance. It also helps you find content quickly and readily and is a helluva lot more compelling to look at than a long geeky bookmarking list. I did the same thing for speakers.

Below is a Pearltree I created for the entire 140 Characters Conference, which includes links to the schedules of other city-hosted events Pulver plans to have or has had, i.e., Boston, San Fran, Detroit, London and so on.

Below is a screen grab that I took to show you how you can organize your Pearltrees within greater folders/or pearls if you like. My 140 Conference Pearl is within a Pearltree I call Conferences & Events, but you can slice and dice it however you choose, since you, are the curator and organizer, not Google. Here's a link to how Techcrunch Disrupt was curated using Pearltrees, a very effective way to capture the best of (or all of) an event. Refreshing isn't it?

Why Blekko and Not Google!

Below, Blekko's CTO Greg Lindahl tells us why Blekko and not Google and where their soon to be released service will be useful, in an interview I did with him at Techcrunch Disrupt in late September. Still in private beta, former Topix CEO Rich Skrenta is heading up this new venture.

Curation Done Right: Pearltrees' Visual Curation of Techcrunch Disrupt

Alexia Tsotsis has a great post that recaps TechCrunch Disrupt, summarizing the event through human curation. Pearltrees is an incredibly interesting, easy-to-use curation tool that allows you to capture content on the web with a simple click of a button and store/save it under any topic you choose. You can also personalize each of your Pearltrees.

Alexia shares the Pearltrees' visual curation of the event, which allows you to relive the three day information hurricane on your own terms by clicking through any of the available “pearls” or data nodes. Embedded Pearltree below so you can do your own navigation.

Meet Blufr, Answers.com's Multi-Platform Social Trivia Game

Answers.com, just announced its first iPhone application: blufr, a social trivia game based on information from Answers.com.

The app is currently available for free and is downloadable from the Apple iTunes Store.

blufr has been designed to include social and location-based features. By offering registration through a Facebook or Twitter ID, blufr adds a competitive social dimension to the experience: players are ranked among their friends from those services, with the ability to earn awards or badges in their own social circles.

The game offers thousands of edgy, bizarre facts in categories including pop culture, sports, history and more, and challenges players to guess whether the trivia is true or false.

Trivia, or ‘blufs’, include:

• Coffee originated in Ethiopia. 

• Lady GaGa's real name is Sarafina Angelica Giamonti.
• Actor Jake Gyllenhaal's bar-mitzvah was held in a homeless shelter.
• Boxing champion Mike Tyson has a tattoo of tennis star Arthur Ashe.

Players can rank on the leader board by location, among friends, or within categories. A real-time challenge component is planned for future iterations. blufr is currently available on the web and iPhone, with a Facebook app in development. 

 

DEMO Curation At Its Best Thanks To Pearltrees

Pearltrees was THE curation tool at DEMOfall this year. When people think of curation, they often think of museum curators, authors who curate content for a book or educators who curate material for courses. However, if you search, save and later access content on the web, you ARE a curator every day. Right now, there are few tools to do that effectively and the ones that do, i.e., bookmarking services, are limiting and clumsy at best.

Pearltrees not only bookmarks all the weblinks that you visit on a regular basis, but it organizes them into nice, neat and well designed pearls that you can easily access anytime. Here's the really cool part. Since the pearls (weblinks) are pre-fetched or cached if you like, you can go back and move from pearl-to-pearl-to-pearl visiting sites in half the time you would if you went to the web page itself since they are already loaded in the background.

Pearltrees does the work so frankly you don't have to. You can also embed a pearltree into a blog post or a website so you and your readers can fly through your content easily and quickly. The pearls can also be manipulated inside a post and you can increase and decrease the size in a matter of seconds.

Go ahead, try it out. See the embedded Pearltree below of DEMOfall this year. Within minutes, you can get caught up on the conference since it's all there in one place - the exhibitors/presentors, the social media activity, videos, buzz, photos and more.

Use Pearltrees to Browse Web Pages Faster Than Thru a Browser

Pearltrees, a leading online content social curation tool, today announced their latest release: Beta 0.7.3, which has added substantial feature updates and performance enhancements, including the ability to browse web pages faster than through a traditional browser.  

Users can navigate from pearl to pearl (web page to web page) faster than browsing through a traditional browser. Pearltrees has been able to make this possible by pre-fetching content of all the associated links you are browsing, resulting in dramatically speedier navigation. The content loads in the background, so that when you click on the link, the new page (or video or audio) opens instantly, rather than having to wait for the page to load.

Personal customization is also now available, which is a really great feature for anyone who cares about great interfaces and unique design. In Pearltrees, you have pearls that represent web pages and pearltrees that function like folders but for pearls. Now you can visually customize your pearltrees (that contains pearls) using a photo or avatar that was directly related to the topic, i.e., a flower for your Pearltrees on gardens throughout Europe, a $ sign for all your Pearltrees related to the American economy, an airplane for your Pearltrees on travel, a microscope for your Pearltrees about Science and so on.

Personal customization enables users to better identify all the Pearltrees they have in their library visually by ‘icon’ or photo. Additionally, the new release has taken it one step further by enabling users to zoom in and out. Users can now increase or decrease the size of their pearls with a simple button click; simply drag the plus or minus up or down until your pearltrees are the exact size you wish to view them.

Size customization can not only be done within Pearltrees but also within a blog post. If you embed a pearltree within a blog post, your readers now have the ability to expand the window, increase the size of the pearltrees and get a more extensive explanation about what a pearltree is about by simply hovering over it. A useful detail window pops up with additional information about that particular pearltree.

You can also organize your Pearltrees more efficiently. A key part of Pearltrees is the ability to quickly and easily save links to content that matters to you most on the web. Simply click on a link you want to save and you can either add it to a specific pearltree topic/category through a pull down menu or add it to what’s referred to as a “drop zone,” an open window that displays Pearls which you can later file wherever you’d like. (note: this specific feature only currently works in Firefox.)

You can now also expand or collapase your lists. As you start to use Pearltrees more and more, you’ll find that your lists might get long, just as the number of folders in Outlook would grow the more you used it and the more people you kept in touch with regularly.

The new version of Pearltrees allows you to quickly collapse your list and filter what’s visible and what’s hidden, making organization faster and easier.  You can also invite friends and share your content easily and quickly.

Pearltrees solves the information overload problem. With the onslaught of information we’re being hit with daily online, it’s impossible to keep up with content and even harder to discover or curate that content into something that is meaningful and relevant for us. Smart curation online is necessary in the next generation of the web and users are demanding smarter ways to find content and services that help them save time and find their passions and interests faster and easier.  

Lastly, Pearltrees has updated their Firefox Add-On. The free service also supports Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

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.