Varshavskaya is basically the embodiment of the service she created, which helps people share and discover products to buy.

Wanelo CEO Deena Varshavskaya

Wanelo is mostly used by young girls and women — 90 percent of users are female, and 60 percent of them are 24 and under.

Items that do well on the site, according to board member Ann Miura-Ko: Things with sparkles, anything turquoise, and booty shorts. And Squishables, of course.

Founded three years ago, Wanelo (a portmanteau of want-need-love) had 1.3 million unique U.S. visitors in January 2013, according to comScore. (By comparison, Pinterest had 32 million.) But the majority of Wanelo’s usage now comes from mobile, which isn’t included in that count, according to a Wanelo rep.

Perhaps the most important feature of Wanelo is that everything is for sale. Where on Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter it might be gross for a brand to promote its products without sprinkling in some stories and inspiration and more personal posts, Wanelo is all about products. If users report that an item is no longer for sale, the site hides it from search and community pages.

Another contrast: While a trial with affiliate links pissed off Pinterest users who felt the site was exploiting their activity, Wanelo explicitly sends all product referrals through VigLink so it can get a cut of sales.

“On other platforms, buying products is not the intent, so users may feel exploited,” said Varshavskaya. That’s not the case on Wanelo. “On our site, we get overt complaints when people post blog links [instead of direct links to products].”

Wanelo last year raised $3 million from investors including Miura-Ko’s Floodgate, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures and Josh Kopelman’s First Round Capital. After quick growth it has been a hot fundraising target in the past few months. (It’s pretty easy to see why if you search the company’s name on Twitter.)

Wanelo’s “Things I want as gifts” page features a background of flying cats.

As a sole founder, Varshavskaya is particularly compelling, according to Miura-Ko, because she’s so authentic. “I meet a lot of dude entrepreneurs trying to replicate the experience of girlfriends going shopping,” Miura-Ko said.

Varshavskaya, who is from Siberia and previously founded and ran a user-experience design firm in Los Angeles, is different from the usual startup dudes in other ways, too. Sure, she can talk your ear off about how the future of shopping is aggregated, personalized, social and democratized — but she’s not some drone.

Varshavskaya personally writes the iOS release notes for new Wanelo versions, leaving little Easter eggs, like an announcement that it was one of her employee’s birthdays, so everyone should send him an email. He got hundreds.

At company meetings, her employees attested, Varshavskaya frequently stops to ask, “Are we having fun?” She admitted this was true, explaining, “We take our fun very seriously.”

Another example: Where other Wanelo sections have normal white backgrounds, the “Things I want as gifts” part of each user’s account features a background of flying cats. Each release comes with a new type of cat, with past versions including Grumpy Cat and astronomer cats. The current version (see above) is a rotund cat that definitely resembles a Squishable.

How, pray tell, does a startup get that sort of stickiness? For Learnist, a visually oriented educational app, the answer is simple: Eliminate the biggest barrier to entry, the sign-up process.

Don’t misunderstand me here — sign-ups are obviously important (and they still exist in the app). But the company plans to launch an update to its iOS and Web apps on Thursday that aims to eliminate the arduous, usual upfront process of onboarding users, letting first-timers begin to use the service without needing to immediately sign up to get going.

The idea is pretty simple. Learnist is a Pinterest-cum-Twitter social teaching application that lets users curate different types of lessons in a stream-like feed of content. Instead of forcing its users to hand over all their info off the bat, the app asks you to pick a few topics of interest to follow — people, places, things, ideas and the like — and Learnist will auto-populate a stream of content for users to peruse as they explore the app. From there, it will suggest more things to follow, or more data to add (like your address book or Facebook account, which could help you find more friends on the service).

Think of it as fast-tracked personalization, without the immediate hassle of the sign-up screen.

That, coupled with the new content offerings from partners like Discovery and, as of Thursday, the BBC, will likely fill newcomers’ streams with enough material to keep them engaged and — hopefully — coming back often. At that point, the company thinks, a user will get the value of the service and will be willing to sign up.

Those are the good, “sticky” sign-ups for Learnist, the ones that turn casual visitors into repeat users. All it has to contend with are the myriad other content streams out there seen on Facebook and Twitter, as well as the other edtech startups that occupy the space. Ideally for Learnist, lowering the barrier to entry will make it that much easier to at least give the product a quick spin.

Sign-ups TBD.

“Recommendations are an ancient thing; it’s different than reviews,” Stoll said in a recent interview at the headquarters of his startup, Luvocracy. “It’s part of the way we think. It’s someone you know and trust saying: ‘Go get that.’”

Luvocracy CEO Nathan Stoll

For his grandmother, selling cosmetics door to door was never about the money, Stoll said. It was about the satisfaction of knowing that her recommendations worked.

Even though there are lots of websites for finding pretty pictures of products people like — Pinterest, Wanelo, Houzz, Fancy, OpenSky — Stoll thinks he has arrived at a new angle on social shopping.

The invite-only site, which Stoll created with Beauty.com co-founder Roger Barnett, aims to create a marketplace around recommendations. It “closes the loop” on social recommendations by making everything on the site directly purchasable, Stoll said. New items are personally vetted by a team of “shopping assistants.”

Here’s how it works: A Luvocracy member recommends a product. Then shopping assistants find the best price and availability for the product and publish it on the site. Other users, who are following the person or the category, find the product and buy it. The original recommender gets a cut.

Eighteen-month-old Luvocracy is actually more established than you might think. Stoll previously co-founded the social search service Aardvark, whose acquisition by Google brought him back for a short second stint there, after he was an early employee who worked on products like Google News.

Today, Luvocracy employs some 25 people in downtown San Francisco. It has been written up in fashion magazines. It hired Christine Martinez — one of the most popular Pinterest users, with 5.5 million followers — to recruit a community of early users. It raised venture capital funding. (Stoll wouldn’t disclose the details, but sources said Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins led the company’s Series A round and sits on its board.)

Still, most companies that do social shopping and recommendations can tend to be kind of gross. They pollute your Twitter feed with junky celebrity endorsements, and take way too much advantage of whatever Facebook permissions you give them.

While Luvocracy doesn’t seem to be up to those usual tricks, the site is not shy about the social stuff. For instance, the default setting is that any time someone visits the page for a product you recommend, you immediately receive email asking you to elaborate on why you love it.

Christine Martinez’s recommendation of pencils with quotes from the movie “Mean Girls” has been one of the more popular Luvocracy items to date.

But the key features are ensuring that everything is buyable, and rewarding people for the value they create, said Stoll. “What we’re trying to build isn’t just a shopping site; it’s an economy,” he said, just a little grandly.

Luvocracy is not set up as a get-rich-quick scheme, but rather a way for people to feel their taste is validated, Stoll noted.

Active “tastemakers” who are chosen by Luvocracy can expect to earn up to 10 percent of purchases. Everyday users can earn up to 4 percent.

Martinez added that she likes that active Luvocracy users get to create a sort of static living store of everything they’ve ever recommended. She also argued that recommendations also tend to be high-quality, because Luvocracy users can choose from any product that’s sold on the Internet, rather than just a set catalog based on affiliate relationships.

I’ve ordered one thing from Luvocracy so far: A clothes-cleaning gadget recommended by a friend who was also trying the service. At first, I was disappointed to see that the Luvocracy checkout process slapped on an $8 shipping charge. Plus, no product showed up at my door for at least week. Then I got an email apologizing that the product was backordered. I was ready to blow Luvocracy off as a prelaunch startup that needed to work out the kinks, badly.

But then it got much better. A follow-up email arrived saying Luvocracy had found the same gadget in stock in Japan. This version had Japanese text on the packaging, but a shopping assistant had checked to make sure it was compatible in the U.S. And I would get a significant savings from the Japanese store — nearly half off. So Luvocracy was sending me a refund.

I don’t have my purchase in hand yet, but I gotta admit that’s not a bad first experience.

According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

It’s a logical move when you look at the data. In November 2011, one-fifth of posts uploaded to newsfeeds were photos. Today, every other status update is a photo. My math friends tell me it that it’s hard to meaningfully show percentage gains when you start with a really big number. Even with my quantitative limitations, I have to believe Facebook qualifies. Last year it told investors (as part of its IPO roadshow) that users were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day, and from that very large starting point photo activity just jumped 150 percent in 15 months. So much for the law of large numbers.

If you’re a brand, though, it’s not the fact that photo-enabled devices will soon outnumber humans on the planet, or that we’re piping all those pictures into social media. The important trend is that consumers are looking at them. In other words, your art-directed fashion spreads have a lot more competition these days.

There was a time when professional photography had a monopoly on our attention. When mass media meant national magazines, TV networks and big-city newspapers, only deep-pocketed corporations could afford access to large audiences. Back then it made economic sense to build your story around professional-grade photography: A single print ad would reach millions of readers, so a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on art and photography chewed up only a negligible percentage of a campaign’s costs. And for a few generations, this approach worked great.

It turns out, though, that cost-to-produce and magnitude-of-consumer-delight don’t plot analogous curves in an Excel graph. In fact, it’s hard to find a direct correlation between the two. A photo that captures something important or interesting or timely wins our attention — regardless of who took it or how much it cost to make. It also turns out the spans of our attention are shrinking. Google economist Hal Varian observed as far back as 2010 — before SnapChat, and back when we uploaded a mere 30 million photos to Facebook every day — that we pay less attention to stuff when we consume it online. “The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.”

So corporate storytellers need to master a new narrative technique. It’s as if they need to shed those florid sentences that played so well in Victorian novels and dial it down to the Hemingway-esque. The good news: This new approach to storytelling still employs a language in which brands are fluent: Photos. There are three ways that brands should modify their visual storytelling.

One, feeds move faster than print magazines, so you need to tell your story in a series of frequent episodes, anecdotes and updates — not the grand gestures of Ogilvy or Draper. Photos are the currency of social media, but it’s a currency doled out in nickels, not twenty-dollar bills.

Two, let photos do more of the talking for you. Humans process visual information much faster than we process text. And when we’re online (remember those stats from Hal Varian), we navigate more quickly from story to story. If you’re going to capture attention in a digital landscape, you have to do it fast. So steal a page from the playbooks used by Pinterest, Flipboard, USA Today’s new design or the NYT’s TimesCast: Use visual content instead of words to invite consumers into the story.

Three — need I say it? — let them interact with your story, let them re-mix your assets and choose their own adventures. Let them steal your photos so they can more easily share them with friends. Let them explore inside your images to find links to products, deals and related links. And let them contribute their own. If the Web conversation is going visual, encourage them to talk to you in the local dialect — images snapped on their phones looking for a place to be uploaded.

Chas Edwards joined Luminate, the worldwide leader in interactive images, in 2010 as chief revenue officer and head of publisher development. Prior to Luminate, Chas served as publisher and CRO at Digg, and before that he was the co-founder (with John Battelle), publisher and chief revenue officer at Federated Media Publishing (FM), a next-generation media and publishing company that develops content marketing strategies for leading brand marketers. He blogs at http://ChasNote.com and @chasnote.

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

1.) This Is the Site Likely Responsible for the Recent Major Tech Company Hacks

2.) Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)

3.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

4.) Confirmed: Pinterest Completes $200 Million Funding at $2.5 Billion Valuation

5.) NFC: What You Need to Know

6.) I Love You, Man: Gates Lashes Himself to Ballmer Over Microsoft’s Mobile “Mistake” (Video)

7.) For $19, an Unlimited Phone Plan, Some Flaws

8.) Tesla Owners Hit the Road to Prove Long-Distance Can Be Done

9.) Why Google Made Its Own High-End Laptop, the Chromebook Pixel

10.) When Mayer Called Yahoo’s Mobile Revenue “Nascent,” She Wasn’t Kidding (And Here’s the Actual Number She Left Out)

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

No passwords were involved in the attack, said the companies, who are alerting their users tonight.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane disclosed the security breach in a blog post on Thursday. Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest then alerted affected users via email.

The identities of the affected companies were published by Wired, and they each have independently confirmed to AllThingsD via email, though Zendesk declined to identify them directly.

In addition to users’ email addresses, associated subject lines of the three social media companies’ support emails were compromised. Tumblr warned users that because subject lines could include their blog addresses, hackers may be able to associate their emails with their blogs.

A Zendesk spokeswoman said to expect more detail soon, while a Pinterest spokesman noted, “There is an ongoing investigation by authorities.”

San Francisco-based Zendesk is used by some 25,000 companies. Other customers include Sony Music, Disney, Vodafone, Groupon and Kickstarter.

Pinterest, the popular social scrapbooking site, has completed a massive $200 million funding, which values the company at $2.5 billion, according to sources close to the situation.

There have been reports that the funding was coming, but now it is done, in a round led by Valiant Capital Management. Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also participated.

Update: Pinterest confirmed the funding and released this statement from CEO Ben Silbermann: “Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life. This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”

Pinterest’s last round was in May of 2012, when it raised $100 million from Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten.

It’s likely that the San Francisco-based Pinterest will use the money for further product development, as well as to accelerate international expansion, to further expand the scope of its impact and reach.

While it sounds too simple to be so valuable, consumers have flocked to the free site on which they “pin” photos of their interests and share them widely. Usage has exploded and has also become an increasingly key driver of traffic across the Web.

It now has close to 50 million unique monthly users worldwide and has quintupled its employees to 100 in the last year.

Such growth has become invaluable to many doing business across the Web.

As an article in The Wall Street Journal, which had also flagged funding efforts, recently noted:

Businesses said they also have gravitated to Pinterest because “pinned” content has a different life cycle than what is posted on Facebook and Twitter. Brian Madden. executive director of social media for Hearst Corp.’s Hearst Digital Media, said content that Hearst puts onto Pinterest can resurface months later when people continue to discover it. In contrast, posts on Facebook and Twitter tweets produce “a lot of initial interaction” before fading.

“The longevity of content [on Pinterest] is very valuable to us,” said Mr. Madden. He adds that in December, Hearst got more online traffic through Pinterest than Facebook and Twitter combined. Overall, 3% to 5% of traffic to Hearst’s various brands was through Pinterest that month, with about 1.5% from Facebook and 1.5% from Twitter, Hearst said.

I have a call into Pinterest and await confirmation about the funding.

The talks are fluid and a deal isn’t finalized, said one of the people.

The San Francisco company, which has exploded onto the Internet scene with its gridlike design, last raised $100 million in May 2012 in a funding led by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten Inc.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In the past year, we’ve seen several niche social media networks blow up around images, music and ideas — Instagram, Spotify and Pinterest. But what happened in the digital video space? Many mobile video start-ups entered the scene this year, yet despite the increasing demand among consumers for Web video, none of these companies could crack the code on the most critical element of digital video: Discovery. But as content multiplies at an increasing rate, 2013 will finally be the year that the future becomes clear on the next advancement in video.

• Online video consumption hits a historic inflection point, doubling in 2013
  We are at the threshold of the second digital video revolution spurred by better and more affordable hardware and connectivity. Smartphones are in the hands of nearly one billion across the globe, and tablets, or “the second television,” are blowing up. The iPad alone has climbed the ladder of adoption three times faster than the iPhone and Gartner predicts tablet sales will hit 13 million in 2012, with this number expected to triple by 2016.

  Couple the rapidly increasing penetration of tablets and smartphones with LTE connectivity, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that consumer appetite for video will grow, transforming mobile video consumption into a daily habit. This will ignite a digital video revolution that mirrors the shift from dial-up Internet to broadband. The revolution that happened on desktop years back is about to transpire on mobile, as 2G and 3G are traded up for LTE networks on smartphones. Even with its incredible user adoption, the broadband’s impact on desktop video will pale in comparison to the more accelerated mobile video craze that’s about to kick off.

  In the last three years we’ve seen about a 140 percent increase in the amount of video content viewed online. comScore’s Video Metrix from April 2009 — when total video views hit 17 billion — sharply contrasts with 40 billion videos viewed across Web on November 2012. As consumption of video continues its march from the living room and desktop to smartphones and tablets, I predict that demand, production and consumption of video will double, and video views will hit 80 billion per month by the end of 2013.

• A newcomer will challenge YouTube for the other half of video consumption
  Declining hardware and distribution costs coupled with a steady increase in consumer demand for video has provoked a huge surge in production of pro and semi-pro video. Because of this increase in more professional-grade video, we have seen a major shift in where people are going to find digital video content.

  People are still watching just as much video — but they are now looking to different sources on the Web. In the past five months there has been a 34 percent drop in the total volume of video consumed on YouTube compared with the rest of the Web. YouTube views peaked in June 2012 at 18.3 billion, but have since declined to 12 billion on November 2012. comScore’s Video Metrix measured total Web video views in June 2012 at 32.9 billion; fast-forward to November 2012 and total video views across the Web hit 40 billion. While YouTube lost about six billion views within that five-month period, the other half of Web video shot up by 13 billion. As online video fragmentation increases in 2013, so will the need for a newcomer that aggregates YouTube and the second half of the Web’s video under one roof.

• TV networks and the top content creators will be forced into unchartered distribution and economic models
  Big media has seen the rapid shift toward Web and mobile consumption, and sites like Discovery.com, Disney, MTV and CNN continue to produce more online content. Now the real challenge becomes the fight for more audience, monetization and market share. These content creators and their advertisers won’t be satisfied with the results they get within their own silos, and will start looking for a way to expand their reach while still maintaining control over their videos.

  We have seen that relying on social networks like Facebook and Twitter for viral spread is not enough. At Twitvid, we saw major brands with over five million followers post videos to Twitter and receive only a few thousand views. Even major television networks such as CBS and ABC are struggling with this issue. ABC’s Modern Family and Glee, which previously only distributed episodes to Hulu, are now opening distribution to anyone as the effort to reach viewers continues. But no one has found a sustainable combination of large audiences and ability to drive traffic and revenue back to content creators.

  In 2013, studios and networks will be eager to experiment with new disruptive models, and expect to see a new breed of startups that can cater to their desire for both large audiences and strong control over content.

• All of this will lead to a new opportunity in video discovery that resembles something more like Spotify and less like Instagram
  Digital video is currently plagued by the lack of any real means of video discovery capable of meeting the needs of a social, mobile world. I’m confident that in 2013, someone will solve video discovery through social content aggregation — not just from YouTube, but from the exploding long-tail of semi-pro video. Many have pointed to an “Instagram for video” as the cure-all for the video space’s current state of disarray. But this is much bigger than that. Instagram focuses on user-generated content, which as Socialcam and Viddy proved this year, is not the way to win in the long term. Digital video is insanely larger than just user-generated content. The long-tail of video content is where consumer eyes draw the brands, and ultimately, revenue.

  In the same way that Spotify, Instagram and Pinterest successfully solved discovery for music, pictures and ideas, new models will emerge aiming to figure out a way to tap into this massive new world of video and somehow find a way to weave it all together.

What other predictions do you see for the world of digital video in 2013? Please submit your predictions in the comment section below.

Mo is the CEO and Founder of Telly, a social video network for discovering and sharing the best videos. You can follow him on Twitter @maladham and on Telly.

The Philadelphia-based company, which applies image recognition to track pictures posted on Pinterest on behalf of brands, has now raised $3 million in Series A funding led by NEA with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures (the three also provided seed funding for the company, back in 2011, when it was doing something completely different, an “Airbnb for parking and storage” called Storably).

Curalate’s investors, of course, aren’t putting more money in based on the name alone. They’re pleased to see that in the year since Curalate launched it has signed customers including the Grammys, Whole Foods and Gap.

Curalate provides both analytics and marketing tools. It tells brands which pinned content referred what traffic, and helps them run Pinterest contests.

CEO Apu Gupta says the company’s approach of using image recognition is better than those of keyword-based competitors, because only 10 percent of Pinterest posts include the name of a brand explicitly. Plus, as much as 48 percent of the most popular Pinterest pins are linked to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

“Our software reads the pixels in the image,” Gupta said. “We ignore the URLs, we ignore the words, and we say, let’s match up these images like a giant game of memory.”

Okay, but Pinterest itself just introduced commercial accounts in November and, at the time, the company’s platform manager, Cat Lee, told AllThingsD that the company definitely planned to go more deeply into analytics. The company also doesn’t have a clearly defined platform strategy or formal relationships with many of the people in its ecosystem, including Curalate. Isn’t competition from the platform itself a big risk?

Gupta and his new board member, Patrick Chung of NEA, had a few answers for that. First of all, if you look to Twitter as an example, even though it offers basic analytics, there has still been room for Radian6 and Buddy Media.

Secondly, as Chung put it, Curalate doesn’t just exist flat on Pinterest’s platform — it “creates a layer of data that doesn’t belong to anyone but Curalate and its customers.” And third, Gupta said, Curalate will soon integrate Instagram tracking and analytics.