Pearltrees
Curating the Web with Pearltrees
Pearltrees – Patrice Lamonthe, CEO
The office is located in a historic area of Paris that is experiencing an information revolution.
Why would you organize the Web? One single word: creation. Similar to blogging. We are not a passive community. It’s about building something. It touches the same pleasure as organizing the same stuff you like in the real world, like your books, your office, etc.
Pearltrees creates anything on the Web, providing it has a URL. It’s about creating the whole Web, not just lists. Pearltrees gives you the tools to manipulate Web content.
Pearltrees enables you to manipulate the Web, and pieces of other’s Web content. You create your content on Pearltrees then select other Peartrees users that have similar interests, and organize the Web the same as you.
If people can create Web content, why don’t they have the ability to ORGANIZE IT?
You do not bookmark tags normally, but you CAN in Pearltrees. Lets you CREATE and MANIPULATE Web content. Then, it allows you to COLLABORATE.
Ex: if I want to organize two TG Pearls from my Twitter
Also have bookmarklets. Can type a URL inside Pearltrees. In two days, will be able to Pearl Twitter with a sync feature. If you Tweet something with a URL inside it will be turned into a Pearl and added to my Pearltrees account. Synched. ANY URL YOU TWEET WILL BECOME A PEARL.
If you hashtag something, say #entrepreneurship, it will immediately go into that folder on your Pearltree.
Build and shape your Pearltrees account JUST BY TWEETING. Lets you use Twitter as a bookmarking tool.
Twitter is the first step because it’s where you share content you find interesting. Let’s you Pearl.
All Pearltrees are public (no private currently).
Can copy Pearls into multiple trees.
Many bloggers use Pearltrees because you can use it to build a story with Web content. Very personal to the way you create meaning. Rather than publish a link in a post, embed an entire Pearltree. We are EACH becoming CHIEF EDITORS OF THE WEB. A collection of content with meaning.
Every Pearltree has its own URL. In one click, you can share a Pearltree on Facebook, Twitter, email, embed it on the Web.
Will have an API in late January so open services can build on top of Pearltrees.
You can import from Delicious and export data as an RDF file.
Pearltrees benefits:
* Creates a memory of the Web for you
OpenCalais?
What is a Pearltree? An office.
VISION: to manipulate touch on the mobile screen.
Think: folders on your desktop.
A Pearltrees user spends an average of 12 minutes on site (16 min for FB)
You can access Pearltrees on mobile as well. Read-only access.
Typical users:
Political bloggers, geeks (1/3 – open source), 1/3 bloggers, social media, 1/3 – young, less than 30, not geeky. Majority: women (France and US). 0-3000 US users in 2 weeks.
Funding: $3 million (2 mill Euros). 3 year runway from July.
Will ultimately monetize through premium service and advertising.
You currently cannot manipulate bookmarks, but you CAN manipulate Pearltrees.
Competitors:
Delicious (having the content you like at hand)
Automated interest networks like Glue, Twine, etc for the collaborative aspect.
Do NOT own their IP:
VERY difficult to get all the information represented on the screen in real-time. Very complex mathematics.
Behind the scenes: we have a linking algorithm. “TreeBranch” It’s a related page rank. Crawls the Web by Pearltree groups.
May create a Pearltrees search in 6 months. When you build your Pearltree you don’t need to remember keywords. It’s visual.
Biggest problem/challenge: being new. Also: don’t have immediate results because it’s about building a tree of meaningful content. It takes about 30 minutes to get the first result.
MySQL and Java (prototype in PHP)
PROBLEMS:
Monetization
What PROBLEM DOES IT SOLVE? What use case earns you money?
