Pinterest announced two new features today that will help make the site more attractive to potential advertisers. The first is pins embedded with additional information about products, recipes and movies. The second is a Pin It button that is now available on nine mobile apps. → Read More
Pinterest works best on the web, with its big images and pinning from other browser tabs. But mobile is the future and Pinterest needs to play catch up there. Today Pinterest mobile added search suggestions to make single screen pinning easier. Its iOS and Android apps also got basics like notifications and mentions. Pinterest will need to add value, not just port its website, to win on mobile. → Read More
Pinterest is ramping up its international strategy by kicking off a localisation effort in the U.K. today, tweaking the site so that it deliberately foregrounds U.K. content to U.K. users and also adding a British English language setting to make Brits feel more at home. The U.K. is the first part in what appears to be a bigger strategy to target more usage, and more users, outside of the U.S. → Read More
While Pinterest is still rolling out its brand new look to users, it decided to listen to some feedback along the way and make some tweaks. Since the site relies heavily, or completely, on its users pinning things to boards like crazy, some features that were dropped from the new design were re-added due to popular demand. One of the features that caused the community to clammer the most was… → Read More
The Hunt, a site that helps you find items to buy from photos posted on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and elsewhere, is today announcing $700,000 in additional funding, on top of the $2 million it had previously raised from Javelin Venture Partners and others. The new round involves several high-profile investors including Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s (Madonna’s manager) A-Grade Investments, … → Read More
Bing users can now easily share the images they find with their friends on Pinterest. Starting today, Bing’s image search will feature the standard Pinterest ‘Pinit’ button on every photo details page, so the integration isn’t all that deep, but according to Microsoft, this will save avid Pinterest users “some of the hassles they face” when they try to… → Read More
ShopInterest, the 500 Startups-backed e-commerce site that lets you sell from your Pinterest boards, is announcing plans to extend its beta period by six more months while it gets its SMB-focused selling solution off the ground. In addition, the company has launched an affiliate marketing program called the “ShopInterest Sales Network,” which allows sellers’ items to be sold through third-parties. → Read More
Google finally released its personal note-taking app Keep today, after it “accidentally” saw the light of day last week. The product is as expected, a place to save notes, lists or photos on the fly, for safe…keeping. One of the things that jumped out at me after giving it a quick try is that you can switch to a layout that’s very similar to Pinterest, another app that… → Read More
On the back of a new analytics product designed to help brands and others better track how well their pinned content is progressing through Pinterest’s millions of pinboards, today the image-based social network is rolling out a new redesign. This is the new look with bigger pictures and more discovery features that it first began testing back in January, with the proviso that if it proved popular… → Read More
Pinterest Web Analytics, the site’s traffic measuring tool for website owners that was unveiled earlier today, is a foray into services that could help the social network generate revenues some day — for now, it’s free with “no plans to charge,” with the main aim being “help pinners see what content is resonating best on Pinterest”, the company tells me. But the launch raises some questions, too… → Read More
Pinterest has started rolling out Pinterest Web Analytics, a tool that will allow businesses to see how many visitors the content-sharing service is referring to their sites. The first feature, which shows data on how many people have pinned from a site, the number of views each pin has, and how many users have visited a site from Pinterest, is available for free today for companies with a… → Read More
Customer service software provider Zendesk announced a security breach that affects users of Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. Zendesk said that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who have contacted those three websites for support, as well as support email subject lines. Tumblr and Twitter have notified affected users (see below), while Pinterest is expected to the same. A report on… → Read More
Today The Financial Times reported in a paywalled article that Twitter is brokering a deal for investment firm BlackRock to buy up to $80 million of stock from early Twitter employees at a $9 billion valuation. By giving employees liquidity, Twitter may not need to rush to an IPO the way Facebook did to satisfy veteran talent. → Read More
Last week we reported on an SEC filing of a new $30 million raise for SV Angel, for a fund called SV Angel-III Growth P.
We’ve since heard from multiple sources that this $30 million is a Special Purpose Vehicle for SV Angel, specifically reserved to buy secondary shares in Pinterest for existing LPs. We’ve also confirmed with SV Angel co-founder David Lee that this is indeed the case. → Read More
Visual content marketing service Reachli (formerly Pinerly), has raised a seed round from 500 Startups, PNP Ventures, Zelkova Ventures (Early Klout, Fab investors), Philquo Ventures (Fab investor), GVA ventures, and angel investors including William Lohse (invested in Pinterest’s first round), Howard Love (CEO Lovetoknow.com), Saeed Amidi (Plug and Play founder), plus a few others from the… → Read More
Clipboard – the web clipping service that is a little like a cross between Evernote and Pinterest, racking up 1.7 million clips since opening for private beta in October 2011 – has taken a strategic investment from ed-tech company Scientia — backing that will result in joint product development between the two to target the education market with online collaboration tools. → Read More
Pinterest has just made its first acquisition – the two-and-a-half-year-old recipe discovery and sharing site Punchfork. Rather than operate it independently, Punchfork will continue to run shortly but then its site, API, and mobile apps will be shut down so its one-man team can focus on improving Pinterest. Punchfork basically looks like a Pinterest for cooking, and the exit could give hope to… → Read More
A lawsuit filed yesterday by Theodore F. Schroeder claims that Pinterest investor Brian S. Cohen stole the idea for the social sharing service.
The suit, which was first reported in AllThingsD, claims that Schroeder “originated the ideas that led to the popular, ever-growing Pinterest website.” It presents a fairly detailed account of the development of a site called Redezvoo.com, and its… → Read More
Last week, Pinterest began curtailing the number of spammers and fake accounts on its system, in an effort to clear its platform off unwanted elements. At the time, the company noted that this latest big sweep would mainly affect those with larger follower counts, or those who had purchased fake followers. The majority (99 percent) of users would lose fewer than 10 followers, Pinterest said. → Read More
HootSuite, now at 5 million users, built its reputation as an enterprise tool to manage engagement on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ — with Twitter being an especially close partner for the Vancouver startup. But as it pursues its ambition to be a dashboard for business engagement across all of the web, and for more than just marketeers and social media managers… → Read More
NewlyWish, the newly minted winner of the Women 2.0 Pitch NYC Startup Competition, provides a custom multi-merchant online marketplace. Users can choose from and register for goods at brick-and-mortar stores which have largely been excluded from the $19 billion annual domestic wedding registry market. → Read More
Wantster, a site founded earlier this year in Canada that lets users collect images of things they want from around the web and pin them on a central page — a kind of Canadian Fancy – has announced a round of funding: $4 million from Evanov Communications, a Canadian radio broadcasting company. → Read More
Pinterest could turn into an absolute monster for e-commerce, and we’ve been waiting to see what it would do to push that forward. We found out today with the company’s announcement of new tools for the business community. Previously, businesses weren’t all that welcome on the service, since its terms of service prohibited it. For reasons. → Read More
Pinfluencer, a popular Pinterest analytics solution, is today announcing a new Pinterest ROI and Pin-to-Purchase tracking system for marketers and brands, as well as support for integrations with other analytics providers, including Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics. → Read More
This week, Pinterest cracked the top 50 most trafficked websites in the U.S. with its now 25.3 million stateside visitors, but the social photo-sharing site has yet to determine how it will monetize all those pins. However, that hasn’t stopped other companies from using Pinterest’s growing popularity to generate revenue for themselves. Case in point: today, a new startup called Pinbooster is… → Read More
Very Pinteresting, in fact. Last night I asked Facebook why its Collections feature had disappeared, and it confirmed “the test is now complete”. But now it tells me that’s because the product is being built out, presumably for a full launch, not being shut down as I originally published. Facebook will improve Colletions and port it to mobile, but had to shut down the existing version to do… → Read More
Dobango, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through fan competitions on Pinterest, just announced that it has raised $600,000 in seed funding.
The company is led by Devkumar Gandhi who previously founded mobile advertising startup Nexage. (Dobango’s seed investors include John Ostrem, the original backer of Nexage.) Gandhi served as Nexage’s CEO for more than four years, but… → Read More
ShopInterest.co, an e-commerce platform that lets anyone turn their Pinterest boards into online stores, is today announcing a small, undisclosed investment from 500 Startups, via its newly acquired fund Mexican.VC. It’s the first investment 500 Startups has made into the Pinterest ecosystem, says ShopInterest CEO Francisco Guerrero, also the creator of Pinterest analytics platform Pintics… → Read More
Ok, folks, dust off your old web browsers, because Myspace is teasing a brand new design! Yes, the Justin Timberlake-backed whatever-it-is-now has slapped a new coat of paint on something that has already been sold and pushed to the side of the road. → Read More
Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay. Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to… → Read More
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