Pinterest said today it’s acquired Livestar, the mobile recommendations app founded by Microsoft alum Fritz Lanman, who is also a noted angel investor who has backed the likes of Square, Getaround, and, as it happens, Pinterest.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but this seems to be an engineering acqui-hire situation. We’re told that only Livestar’s three person engineering team will be joining the company as part of the deal, and the service as it is will be shutting down immediately. Lanman himself will not be joining Pinterest full-time, but he will continue in his role as an advisor to the company post-acquisition. From here he will be moving on to a yet-to-be-announced new project, we’re told.
Livestar was founded in 2011 and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt this past fall. The service was meant to provide personalized recommendations from your friends and authoritative sources from around the web, and was aiming at disrupting the likes of Foursquare, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes. The company had reportedly raised $2 million from investors including Hadi and Ali Partovi, Peter Chernin, Paul Buchheit, WME, and Ray Ozzie.
Here is the announcement from Livestar itself:
“Our goal at Livestar is to help people find great recommendations from friends, critics and strangers with similar taste. Over the last two years, the Livestar community has shared millions of ratings and reviews. Today we wanted to let you know that we’ll be making our next move: the Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest.
If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s an online tool that helps people discover things they love and inspires them to do these things in their everyday lives. We think this is aligned with what we’re doing here at Livestar. While we are excited to join Pinterest, we are sad to also announce that Livestar will be shutting down immediately.
We are so thankful to all of you. We hope you discovered great recommendations and enjoyed sharing your own experiences with your friends and others. We have put all your reviews in the attached spreadsheet so that you can take them with you.
Thanks again for your support and contributions to Livestar. We will miss Livestar dearly, and we will especially miss reading all of your great reviews. We hope to see you on Pinterest soon!
Best,
The Livestar team”
Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site has experienced rapid growth in recent months.
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