That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said. Currently, users can only store one set of photos in iCloud through a feature called Photo Stream, which is designed to sync those photos to other Apple devices, not share them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A growing number of start-ups are providing easy ways to share videos taken from a smartphone, enabling people to add music and text and to share the results on Facebook or another social network.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s a video of an interview I did last week with CNN, on whether there was a bubble in valuations of start-ups in Silicon Valley.

Of course, the report was prompted by the mobile photo-sharing phenom Instagram’s recent sale to social networking giant Facebook for $1 billion.

My conclusion: It’s not a bubble exactly, but it is bubble-ish.

Enjoy:

If you want a quick analysis of why Facebook would pay $1 billion for popular photo-sharing service Instagram, please ignore the obvious financials that just don’t add up at all and have most of the typically unshockable digerati shocked by the sheer amount of the price.

Actually, it’s pretty simple: Photos. Photos. And, oh yes, mobile photos — lots and lots and lots of them.

Astonishingly, Facebook users already upload an average of more than 250 million images daily, making it the most popular photo-sharing service on the Web.

But it’s not the best by far and not the most mobile, which is Facebook’s biggest weakness — that has been accomplished many others, especially Instagram, the favorite of power users who scoffed at Facebook’s weak tools. (The horror of no filters!)

Now — instead of all those billions of juicy digital photos snapped by an ever-growing legion of smartphone users loading up to the beautifully designed Instagram mobile app and living on the servers of the small San Francisco-based start-up — Facebook has now captured all these memories for its massive social networking site.

And while $1 billion seems an awful lot to pay for that privilege — Twitter is quaking with “OMG!” and “Wow!” and “WTF!” tweets about the acquisition — this is apparently priceless for Facebook in a deal that went down quickly and quietly in recent weeks.

That and the fact that the huge sum prevented Instagram from being scooped up by Google.

It’s a clear signal from CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — who rules all product efforts at the company — of his intent to dominate all innovations that have to do with owning the social experience.

Because while many Instagram photos quickly made their way onto Facebook — sharing on the service, as well as on Twitter, was a big part of the app’s offering — the future of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is tied to having control over key elements of the user experience.

Of all of those — communications, status updates, content linking — it has been photos that have become perhaps the most important part of Facebook, almost since its beginnings.

Photos are what allowed Facebook to grow so quickly and what made it more than just a blue sea of text and links to consumers. Its new Timeline depends on big, pretty photos, and Facebook even recently announced that it would allow full-screen viewing of high-resolution photos on its Web site, a pricey endeavor.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that Zuckerberg would pay up for Instagram, too — he knows a good entrepreneurial success when he sees one and apparently has the power to convince start-ups that he can make their bigger dreams come true.

Whether or not Instagram ever makes money is perhaps beside the point at this moment in time, as Facebook is poised to go public at 100 times the amount it forked over for Instagram.

But that it considers such a purchase worth as much as one percent of its expected valuation says a thousands words. And most of those words are “mobile” and “photo.”

As Ben Jacobs noted on Twitter: “Kodak goes bankrupt and Instagram is worth a billion dollars. 2012, y’all.”

Indeed. And, I have no doubt if Zuckerberg could figure out a way to shove all those Kodak moments from analog snapshots onto Facebook easily, he’d have paid up for that, too.

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service, for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking giant posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Facebook.

Photos are critically important for Facebook, which has been slow to innovate in the fast-growing mobile arena in the important consumer space. By contrast, Instagram has taken the arena by storm, with its delightful and elegant app and the motto, “Fast beautiful photo sharing.”

Consumers have responded (including me — it is the only non-communications app I use many times a day). The San Francisco-based company — with only 13 employees — had 30 million Apple iPhone users before it came to Google’s Android last week, where it got more than a million new users in just 12 hours.

Still, despite all the usage, Instagram had not articulated a plan for, you know, making money. Now, that will presumably be Facebook’s problem to solve.

The Facebook acquisition has been kept very quiet, with its CEO Kevin Systrom working on it in conjunction with new fundraising efforts that would have valued the company at $500 million. Liz Gannes reported on this effort last week, which was poised to close, in fact, before the Facebook deal was struck over the weekend.

Until now, Instagram has received Series A funding of $7 million led by Benchmark Capital just over a year ago, when it only had 1.75 million registered users.

Seed investors include Andreessen Horowitz — which did not follow on later — and Baseline Ventures. Also in the Benchmark round: Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, former Facebooker Adam D’Angelo and Chris Sacca.

In a blog post titled “Instagram + Facebook,” Systrom promised no change, except for the $1 billion mountain of cash:

“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network … The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love.”

Zuckerberg also promised that Facebook would keep Instagram independent, and that such a large purchase would be rare for the company, which is set to go public soon.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Here is the full press release from Facebook:

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — April 9, 2012 — Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

In addition, the company has added former Skype and eBay exec Michele Don Durbin to its team as vice president of marketing, as Eye-Fi eyes more international growth.

The capital infusion from NTT DoCoMo means Mountain View-based Eye-Fi is going deeper into mobile, after having originally made its footprint in digital cameras without Wi-Fi connectivity.

In April, the company said, NTT DoCoMo’s 59 million mobile subscribers in Japan will be able to use Eye-Fi to share photos between their digital cameras and mobile devices without needing to upload them to a computer. Eye-Fi will introduce a series of applications for both iOS and Android that will allow users to have an Eye-Fi experience without the card, Eye-Fi CEO Yuval Koren said.

“As you think about Eye-Fi and how we’ve evolved, we’re thinking about it as a service first and a device second, especially on connected handsets and smartphone platforms,” Koren said.

The partnership with NTT DoCoMo marks the second in Japan for Eye-Fi. Last fall, the company struck a deal with KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile operator, for unbundled app distribution to its mobile subscribers.

Eye-Fi’s focus on mobile comes as the company is facing a possible change to SD card standards that could increase competition for the start-up. In January, the SD Association, which represents more than a thousand companies that determine and promote SD standards, announced plans for a new Wireless LAN SD standard for full-sized and micro SD/SDHC/SDXC cards. Eye-Fi said that this proposed new standard violated Eye-Fi’s intellectual property.

A spokesperson for the SD Association told AllThingsD that there are no updates on whether the new standard has been approved, and that the Association is still following its normal process of evaluating disclosures received during the IP disclosure period.

Eye-Fi’s Koren would only say, “As far as we can tell, they are taking a serious look at the IP question that we’ve raised, and we look forward to their response on that.”

Data from the popular photo-sharing service shows the number of mobile photo app users who use the apps at least once a day doubled to 42 percent, up from 20 percent midyear in 2011.

Meanwhile, only 64 percent reported using digital cameras to capture the majority of their images throughout the season, down from 82 percent a year ago.

Anecdotally, this means more bad news for camera makers, as they become increasingly threatened by smartphones with decent image-taking capabilities.

The Photobucket report also points out that pets were, shall we say, very present in this year’s holiday cards. Some 41 percent of respondents used an image for their holiday cards; among pet owners, 58 percent included Fido/Rudolph in the photo.

The surge in smartphone use didn’t apply to just pictures: Capturing videos on mobile devices also saw a jump during the holidays. A full 80 percent of survey respondents took video using a mobile device at least once throughout the season, up from 59 percent in Photobucket’s summer sampling, while 50 percent of respondents used a mobile device to record video daily or multiple times a day.

While already-avid users of mobile photo apps increased their usage this past holiday season, a substantial 43 percent of respondents indicated they have yet to try a mobile app for taking photos.

Photobucket says it gathered responses from more than 2,200 survey participants, and culled data from Photobucket’s more than nine billion image uploads for the report.

(Photo courtesy of HollyLovesArt/Flickr)

What is new, though, is that start-up cloud service SugarSync is now available on Samsung’s new “smart” TVs.

For Samsung TV owners, having SugarSync as part of AllShare Play means that they can upload media from any device — not just a Samsung PC or Samsung smartphone — and then wirelessly access it through the TV. And they can access uncompressed media, so if they’re storing high-resolution or HD media through SugarSync, that’s what they’ll get on the TV. It’s not clear which specific models of Samsung’s smart TVs will have SugarSync as part of AllShare, but Samsung has stated before that the service will be available on TVs, PCs, smartphones, tablets and digital cameras.

For SugarSync, it’s a first step into the TV market, as well as a leg up on its direct competitor, Dropbox, which currently doesn’t have a presence in TVs. Dropbox, which claims 50 million users, declined to comment on whether it is working with manufacturers to get its app on smart TVs. The Dropbox app can be accessed through browsers on smart TVs, but it seems like some Dropbox fans have been itching for a dedicated app on television sets.

One of the features that sets SugarSync apart from Dropbox is the five gigabytes of free storage space offered to new customers (though Dropbox does offer 5GB of free storage to HTC mobile phone owners). Keep in mind that a single two-hour HD movie can take up approximately 10GB. But SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies says its cloud-sharing service on TVs is meant more for short home movies and photos, rather than feature-length movies or other file types, like work documents.

Still, if you’re storing lots of home movies in your account — think of all those videos you shoot on your smartphone — that 5GB of space will fill up pretty quickly, which means you’ll be prompted to upgrade to a premium SugarSync account.

It’s not the first partnership SugarSync has forged with hardware makers, and Yecies said the company is exploring more. Last year, Lenovo said its Think-branded laptops would ship with SugarSync on them, and Fujitsu began including SugarSync on its ScanSnap scanners. SanDisk has also created an app for Android smartphones that automatically dumps media from the phone’s memory card to SugarSync, in order to free up space on the device.

Overseas, the company has also partnered with carriers Korea Telecom and France Telecom Orange, as a cloud service offered with mobile or broadband Internet service.

SugarSync launched under Yecies in 2008, after having previously operated under the name Sharpcast. While the start-up says its customer base grew sixfold last year, it declined to say how many total users it has, except to say it’s in the millions.

“TVs are a big step for us, in terms of convergence,” Yecies said. “All the devices are coming together, people are starting to understand the cloud, and the reality is it’s really becoming mainstream.”

In case you’ve missed the sky-high predictions for the cloud market, research firm IDC sized the cloud sharing and sync market at $724 million in 2009, and projects that it will grow at a compound annual rate of 28.2 percent, to over $2.5 billion in 2014.

Airbnb, the San Francisco online vacation rentals start-up, said it has hired a key former Yahoo lawyer, Belinda Johnson, as its new general counsel.

The legal issues at Airbnb are both interesting and challenging, all around the new arena of global sharing or, as the company calls it, “collaborative consumption.”

Johnson is one of several recent major hires by Airbnb, which has been adding more seasoned execs to its team of late. Other recent key Airbnb hires include Monroe Labouisse as head of trust and safety and customer service, and Vivek Wagle as head of content.

Johnson left Yahoo several months ago as its deputy general counsel, after a long tenure there working on a wide variety of issues.

Among other things, she oversaw legal strategy for Yahoo’s global products, and worked on deals like its search and advertising alliance with Microsoft. Johnson came to Yahoo from its Web 1.0 acquisition of Broadcast.com, where she had served as general counsel.

She attended both college and law school at the University of Texas.

Even Gowalla CEO Josh Williams isn’t pretending a deal for Facebook to buy the location-sharing company isn’t happening, as you can read below in an email he sent to his investors.

Both companies declined to comment on a story on Friday and over the weekend. CNN had the scoop about the social networking giant acquiring Gowalla, which I have taken to calling Not-Foursquare.

That’s because — despite its often clever approach and innovation — it never caught up with the leading social location service.

Gowalla, which changed its approach several times, had been for sale for some time, said several sources.

The Austin-based start-up has raised just under $11 million from a range of investors, including Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners and the Founders Fund, along with a batch of well-known angel investors.

But let’s put this one to bed with the email that Williams sent out after the CNN story broke Friday, which was read to me tonight, so I might not have all of it perfectly and it is missing a sentence about I-will-smack-the-leaker):

Subject: Rumors and speculation

CNN just broke the news that Gowalla has been acquired by Facebook. This story was leaked from an unknown souurce.

The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumors and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.

But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon. Until then, I am so very grateful for what you have done to make Gowalla a success.

The second confirmation email has apparently not yet been sent, but I will try to get it when it is, along with the price.

So, until the official official yes, here’s a video interview I did with Williams in April of 2010 about the location “wars”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-gowalla-ceos-non-denial-denial-email-to-investors-about-facebook-acquisition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111130/social-networking-users-say-they-want-more-control-over-their-info/ http://allthingsd.com/20111130/social-networking-users-say-they-want-more-control-over-their-info/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:00:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=148463 Online privacy is not just for wonks any more. Lots of people say it’s important to them — especially when researchers come asking.

Not everyone is turned off by complex privacy settings, or so they say. Sixty-one percent of social networking users interviewed by Harris Interactive said they’d share more if they could control who could see what they share.

And a significant portion — 20 percent — said they currently opt to share all their photos by email instead of on social networks because they’re worried about privacy.

That study was paid for by the privacy-focused social network and blogging tool Posterous and included about 2,000 respondents. It’s timely, given Facebook just agreed to 20 years of privacy audits.

Meanwhile, an Alcatel-Lucent-sponsored study of about 5,000 Americans found that 70 percent of respondents had ignored friend requests in order to limit who could see their online posts.

That “Identity Shift” study broke out particular age groups. For instance, 85 percent of “empty nesters” and retirees said they’re comfortable sharing information if they have control over who sees it. Among teenagers surveyed, 58 percent said they’d posted statuses, comments or photos about themselves or their families that they later regretted.

The Alcatel-Lucent study found 75 percent of people said they interact with people online that they’ve never met.

Meanwhile, participants in the Posterous study said they’d only met 55 percent of their Facebook friends in person.

Image via Shutterstock/Péter Gudella.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111130/social-networking-users-say-they-want-more-control-over-their-info/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111125/circling-the-tv-ads-google-hawks-itself-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111125/circling-the-tv-ads-google-hawks-itself-video/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:34:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=147434

Google, which doesn’t do a lot of this kind of advertising, has posted a commercial on television for its social networking effort, Google+.

The search giant has done it before for its Chrome browser and other products, but it’s a rare occurrence. So, here’s the ad, which pushes the motto: “Sharing, but like real life. That’s a plus.”

The reference is to the onerous method of sorting all the various people in your life into “circles” as part of the service. While many find it exhausting (me!) to constantly be defining social relationships, it is apparently now a marketing plus.

Get it? Plus!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111125/circling-the-tv-ads-google-hawks-itself-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111120/how-facebook-fired-up-techmeme/ http://allthingsd.com/20111120/how-facebook-fired-up-techmeme/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:59:28 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=146058

Spotify song sharing is like the new FarmVille, and its auto-sharing turned out to be an unpleasant surprise for folks who didn’t quite understand just how frictionless Open Graph sharing would be.

CNET’s Molly Wood, from a much-discussed Friday article entitled “How Facebook is ruining sharing”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111120/how-facebook-fired-up-techmeme/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111115/digital-marketing-start-up-thismoment-raises-7-3-million-from-sierra-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20111115/digital-marketing-start-up-thismoment-raises-7-3-million-from-sierra-ventures/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:30:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=144127

Thismoment, the San Francisco-based digital marketing platform provider, said it has raised $7.3 million in its first institutional venture round from Sierra Ventures.

Before this funding, the company raised $4.25 million since 2008, when it was founded as a content-sharing Web site.

The company, which serves brands and agencies with its Distributed Engagement Channel platform, said it is aimed at “managing content, conversation and creative assets across earned, owned and paid media channels.” That means marketing “initiatives across Facebook, YouTube, brand sites, rich media ad units, mobile devices, tablets and digital outdoor placements,” as well as a platform to manage these social marketing campaigns.

Sierra’s Mark Fernandes will join the board. Other investors include private equity firm Fenway Partners, as well as well-known digital execs Shelby Bonnie, Jason Hirschhorn and Mika Salmi.

Thismoment said it will use the new funds to expand operations in the U.S. and also add them internationally.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111115/digital-marketing-start-up-thismoment-raises-7-3-million-from-sierra-ventures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111108/too-much-information/ http://allthingsd.com/20111108/too-much-information/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:59:13 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=142002

If you project forward 10 years, each person will share about 1,000 times more things per day than they are now.

— Mark Zuckerberg to reporters on a recent recruiting trip to Harvard

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111108/too-much-information/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111108/snip-and-save-or-put-a-pin-in-it-two-ways-to-share-web-faves/ http://allthingsd.com/20111108/snip-and-save-or-put-a-pin-in-it-two-ways-to-share-web-faves/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:15:30 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=141990 I remember something better if I write it down and I draw maps when I’m giving directions. I’m a visual person.

This week, I focused on two websites made for people like me: Pinterest and Snip.it. If you see content on the Web, you can opt to “pin” those things to a pinboard on Pinterest, or “snip” them to a specific collection on Snip.it. There are plenty of companies that save websites or lists, but Pinterest and Snip.it display content in a pleasing, easy-to-digest manner that can be shared with others.

Pinterest is a favorite site of design enthusiasts and do-it-yourselfers. The site launched in March but is still only accessible by invitation, though you can get an invitation at http://j.mp/vMMaau. Snip.it, which launched Tuesday, encourages more sharing of news content and user opinions in a format that resembles a personal blog. People add content to these sites by clicking on a browser tool.

The trouble is many of us already suffer from social-network fatigue. We keep up with Facebook and maybe one other network, like Twitter or Google+. But maintaining our presence on these sites and browsing through shared content can feel like a chore. So are Pinterest and Snip.it worth the additional commitment?

A look at Snip.it founder Ramy Adeeb’s collections of stories he is following.

Snip.it focuses on sharing stories from the Web about social and political issues, technology, business and travel. And it displays these stories with categories listed at the top of the page. The headline, original sharer’s commentary, time of sharing and source for each story are posted along with an image from each story. This adds up to a lot of text and makes the site look cluttered.

And sharing news with friends and creating mini blogs as Snip-it encourages, is something I do with Twitter. Though Twitter isn’t nearly as visually arresting or as verbose.

Snip.it users can log in via Facebook or create an account. If they use Facebook, Snip.it will scour past shared content on Facebook to share on Snip.it, thus starting accounts with shared collections. The site asks users to select a few topics they care about and then leads them to related collections, to which they can subscribe and see on their Snip.it home pages.

The coolest feature is a banner running at the top of the browser as you’re reading an article someone shared. This banner contains other stories shared by the person whose article you’re reading. This gives people the ability to read curated collections of related stories.

A pinboard of Quirky Little Things at Pinterest

Pinterest is easy on the eyes and is packed with clever ideas for the home (storing folded sheets in their matching pillowcases), fashion (the trick for tucking jeans into boots) and recipes (making egg sandwiches in muffin pans). It’s available as an iPhone app, and an iPad app is in the works.

Pinterest displays pinned content from people I follow, including people who Pinterest suggests share interests with me, on one seemingly endless page of images. Scrolling through these images has the elegant feel of paging through a glossy, high-end magazine with the ability to pin any of these images to my own pinboards.

Co-founder Ben Silbermann describes Pinterest as uniform enough to browse, but still serendipitous.

Each pinned image displays the name and tiny thumbnail of the person who shared it, as well as comments from others and the number of likes and re-pins it got. The text is small and doesn’t distract from the page. Once in a while, images are repeated if several people you follow all re-pin an item, but Mr. Silbermann says this will be fixed with collapsing pins.

When I started using Pinterest about two months ago, I was quite sure I wouldn’t keep it up. But I check it every day and have started using it to make visual reminder lists, like “To Read” and “Brunch Spots I Forget About.”

Of my 25 Facebook friends who use Pinterest (the site can mine Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Gmail to find people you know who are on the site), just two are men. I think there’s plenty on the site that would appeal to guys, but it’s understandable that a site with images of ruffled pea coats and Balenciaga purses has more appeal to women.

With its attention to artistry and design, Pinterest is a welcome respite from those busy websites that try to push too much at you at once. Snip.it tries using the same format with different content, but looks congested—at least for now. As a new site, it could quickly improve.

Write to Katherine Boehret at Katie.Boehret@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111108/snip-and-save-or-put-a-pin-in-it-two-ways-to-share-web-faves/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111101/clearspring-buys-data-science-start-up-xgraph/ http://allthingsd.com/20111101/clearspring-buys-data-science-start-up-xgraph/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:00:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=138517

Clearspring, the social-sharing company — in an effort to increase its business as a marketing analytics player — has acquired XGraph, a data science company.

Clearspring declined to provide the price it paid for XGraph, but said the deal was in cash and stock. The start-up raised $3.75 million just over a year ago.

The combined company has 85 employees — 70 at Clearspring and 15 at XGraph.

Execs at the the McLean, Va.-based company said the purchase will increase value to advertisers and publishers via audience targeting and data science. Clearspring is best known by consumers for its AddThis social-sharing tool, which provides a lot of detailed user data.

Clearspring raised $20 million in funding in May. At the time, the company said it planned to spend its new cash on acquisitions that leveraged data and built audiences more efficiently.

The New York-based XGraph focuses on modeling and monetizing the Web’s social graph.

“We get a lot of data points every day and making sense of them is something we have already been doing, but XGraph fits the bill to go even further in the multi-graph use of data,” said Clearspring CEO Ramsey McGrory. “It puts us in a position to be the market leader for the application of data.”

Key Compton, CEO and co-founder of the three-year-old XGraph, noted that the industry has become data-driven in new ways.

“People are connected to each other via social connections in a multi-graph platform,” said Compton. “I think there are some really interesting opportunities to access the data.”

Here’s the official press release for the deal:

Clearspring Acquires XGraph to Create Largest Multi-Graph on the Open Web

Company accelerates growth by deepening data team and technology

McLean, VA and New York. NY. — November 1, 2011 – Clearspring, provider of the largest social sharing and analytics platform, AddThis, announced today it has acquired XGraph, Inc., a leading data science company focused on modeling and monetizing the web-wide social graph. Clearspring’s massive reach and proprietary real-time data processing capability, coupled with XGraph’s audience technology, create the largest multi-graph platform on the web — mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The investment in XGraph’s data science capabilities marks another step on Clearspring’s rapid growth trajectory. XGraph’s team has deep data science expertise with applied backgrounds in advertising, sociology, mathematics and computer science. Their unique technology dynamically organizes users by shared connections and interests. XGraph’s team and platform will drive Clearspring’s existing efforts with publishers, advertisers and agencies forward while also setting the stage for new innovation.

“Clearspring is at the epicenter of two major shifts online — the web becoming social and personal, and advertising becoming data-driven and accountable. The common thread in both changes is data. To compete in this new world, companies will not only need the ability to access and process big data, but also have the ability to activate that data to create value for consumers, publishers and advertisers,” said Ramsey McGrory, Clearspring’s new Chief Executive. “The combined company has the people, technology and data to enable our clients to stay at the forefront of these changes. 2012 will be a breakout year for Clearspring.”

For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, Clearspring will immediately be able to provide the largest multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the open web. By using this technology to identify a brand’s core audiences and finding millions of other connected and like-minded people online, the company can now drive more efficient spending and increased campaign performance. Clearspring also plans to leverage this new capability to deliver publishers unique audience insights, monetization capabilities and actionable data products in the coming year.

“Most companies only capture one dimension of how we’re all connected, whether it be our friends or people we share with — a single graph approach. XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as brand affiliations, intent and more — a multi-graph approach,” said Key Compton, XGraph’s CEO. “We’re truly excited to leverage our technology to unlock the value of Clearspring’s massive data set and help publishers and advertisers truly harness the power of the web-wide interest graph.”

XGraph is headquartered in New York with an office in Silicon Valley. All XGraph employees based in New York will join Clearspring’s office there. Clearspring plans to keep the office in Silicon Valley. The combined company will have 85 employees nationwide.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111101/clearspring-buys-data-science-start-up-xgraph/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111021/zite-doctors-up-the-ipad-for-multiple-personalities/ http://allthingsd.com/20111021/zite-doctors-up-the-ipad-for-multiple-personalities/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:47:32 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=135693

When I first bought my iPad, I thought it would be a household device, but by the time I had my Twitter push notifications and my Angry Birds high scores up and running, it was pretty clear who it belonged to.

So I was interested to see that personalized news reader app Zite today launched a new version that allows users to have multiple profiles.

CNN-owned Zite justified its new “Sybil” features with a survey in which one third of iPad-owning respondents said they shared their devices. (The research was conducted as a poll on Ask Your Target Market with 330 participants.)

Support for multiple users seems particularly helpful for an app like Zite, which learns over time what kind of stories each user is likely to enjoy. Of course it might be even better if Apple offered a multiple user feature on the iPad as it does on other devices.

Various developers have released and mocked up multi-user tools for the iPad. Berg London designer Matt Jones wrote last year, “The individual nature of the UI and user-model of the iPad seems so at odds to me with its form-factor, the share-ability of its screen technology and its emergent context of use.”

Also, its price!

Image credit: Matt Jones

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111021/zite-doctors-up-the-ipad-for-multiple-personalities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111006/new-valley-trend-sharing-for-profit/ http://allthingsd.com/20111006/new-valley-trend-sharing-for-profit/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:00:23 +0000 Shayndi Raice http://allthingsd.com/?p=129461 A growing number of Bay Area Internet start-ups are deploying a new business model that is based on an old idea: sharing.

The model is known as “collaborative consumption,” under which a company gathers people who want to share or rent out their property or provide services to others online, with the company taking a cut of any transaction fee.

Since 2008, local start-ups have sprung up to allow people to share goods like cars or baby clothes, or services like putting together Ikea furniture or picking up groceries.

There are no figures on the number of companies based around the idea. But in just three years, a handful of collaborative-consumption companies have snagged lofty valuations and triggered a rush of venture capital into the concept.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111006/new-valley-trend-sharing-for-profit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/ http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:08:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=123388 Facebook, as expected, will launch a set of tools and partnerships today that is aimed at socializing users’ activities all over the Web.

What does this all mean? Lots and lots more sharing, and probably a good amount of oversharing, that’s what.

It’s infinitely easier to consume something than to make an active decision to share it with other people. Facebook’s new real-time “ticker” stream of everything users read, watch and listen to (and also tag, friend and like) could turn every act of online consumption into something that’s now shared with friends.

Now Facebook users won’t necessarily have to endorse or recommend something by liking it, or exert themselves to come up with a witty comment. They can just keep reading, watching and listening as they always have.

Or they can head over to Facebook, see what their friends are doing at that moment, and join right in.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positing since at least 2008 that every year Internet users share twice as much information as the year before.

He’s about to give this so-called “Zuckerberg’s Law” a big push.

It’s not hard to imagine Facebook sharing more than doubling after the f8 launches. Millions of tiny little actions are going to move from implicit to explicit. You can start to see why Facebook enabled its “ticker” news feed earlier this week (that’s the dizzying real-time stream that many users have been complaining about). There’s going to be a ton of information flying by.

Of course, many people no longer trust Facebook and its endless revisions and privacy incursions. It seems inevitable that people will feel exposed and exploited when everything they read, watch or listen to is shared.

So we’ll all be watching to see how Facebook and its partners control the privacy settings on this one. At the very least, there needs to be a very prominent and easy-to-use incognito mode.

But at the same time, what Facebook is doing isn’t new — it’s just turbocharging passive sharing with its social network. For instance, Last.fm, which “scrobbles” and shares users’ music listening item by item, was founded in 2002.

Later, in 2009, the Huffington Post built one of the most involved Facebook Connect implementations to date, in which participating users share every single article they read on the news site through Facebook. This functionality is basically what Facebook is going to be enabling and pushing to a mass of content sites now.

(In fact, Facebook had already built a version of this real-time automated sharing tool for “canvas” apps that run within Facebook, having launched a “games ticker” in August.)

Another thing to look for Thursday is how Facebook handles the contextualization of this flooding stream, since Web users consume mountains of content these days. Every once in a while I look at my own browser history and I’m shocked at how many pages I visited in the span of a few minutes.

According to sources, Facebook has built some interesting new interfaces around chronological views, consumption histories and item grouping.

We’ll make sure to look for that, and we’ll also be listening for whether Facebook addresses how advertisers and sponsored stories fit into the ticker.

On that note, team AllThingsD will be at f8 Thursday (tune in at 10 am PT here and/or to the Facebook live video stream) and will provide coverage and analysis throughout the day to overshare our content, too.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Related posts

• The Big Picture of Facebook f8: Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion
• Facebook’s f8 2011: This Is Your Life
• Big Media Hands Over Its Locks and Keys to Facebook
• What Facebook Has Announced So Far: The Timeline — And Verbs
• Get Ready, Facebook Apps Will Ask for Your Permission Only Once
• Facebook Gets in the App Discovery Game with “Graph Rank”
• Live: Facebook Answers Some Questions About its New Social Order

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110906/facebook-updates-help-users-share-better-with-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20110906/facebook-updates-help-users-share-better-with-others/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:03:19 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=117423 On a recent vacation to Aruba, I had to smile when I saw that each of the computers in the hotel business center had Facebook.com saved in their Internet bookmarks. Even people in a tropical paradise are anxious to check Facebook.

For all of Facebook’s popularity, many of its users are still nervous about how to maintain their privacy on the network. Google’s rival social network, called Google+, answered the call for easier sharing control: Each post clearly shows which groups of friends will see it, and these groups are privately named by users.

This week I’ll dig into the latest updates on Facebook, which aim to ease the process of controlling one’s profile and privacy. An upcoming Facebook developer conference in two weeks is expected to reveal additional changes.

Show Me the Viewers

One of the interface changes on Facebook is its more obvious way of showing users who will see their posts. Facebook takes a page from Google+ by better revealing sharing: It uses a drop-down menu beside each post that, by default, checkmarks either Public, Friends or Custom, and sharing can be changed with each post. The Custom setting can exclude or include certain groups, but people still must open it to adjust customized sharing. With Google +, though, all groups with whom content is shared are constantly visible underneath the post.

Facebook’s own blog hints at future improvements to this sharing awareness, saying that this drop-down menu will grow to include smaller groups of people with whom you may want to share so as to make it easier to choose the audience you want for certain posts, which sounds a lot like what Google+ offers.

Now, you can change the sharing settings associated with a post after it publishes to your profile. In the past, a post’s sharing settings were permanent once it was published, and changing it required deleting the entire post and re-posting with different sharing settings.

Location, Location, Location

A handy new feature in Facebook is the ability to add one’s location to each post. This feature was once limited to the Facebook app on mobile devices. Adding a location to a post like, “heading off for lunch with friends,” gives the post more contextual information. By tagging the photos I share on Facebook from my recent vacation with “Aruba,” I save myself the trouble of creating an Aruba album or adding a caption to each photo that says where it was captured.

Tag, You’re It

When Facebook first enabled tagging people in posts, a method used for mentioning someone so other people know that person is with you, numerous friends asked me how to do this since it wasn’t obvious. Before now, the way to tag someone was by placing the “@” symbol before a friend’s name while mentioning that friend in a post, or simply typing his or her name. Now, a small symbol below the window where users type posts shows an icon of a person with a “+” symbol. Clicking on that lets users type other people’s names to add to the post.

Facebook now lets you tag people in photos and posts even if you aren’t Facebook friends with them—and vice versa. Previously, you could only tag people if you were already Facebook friends.

Also, any post or photo in which you’re tagged by someone who isn’t a Facebook friend must first be approved by you. And Facebook takes this a step further by now letting you opt to review and approve any tag someone else tries to add to one of your Facebook posts or photos.

Before, any other Facebook friend could tag you or other people in your photos without your say-so. This content tag review isn’t on by default, so to turn it on, select Account (in the top right corner of your Facebook page) and then Privacy Settings. Next, edit the settings in How Tags Work and turn Profile Review on.

My Profile, My Way

One of my favorite new features is that it’s now easier for me to tweak my own profile page to include content I want on it. For example, a friend tagged me in one of her photos and one of my eyes was closed. Rather than un-tagging myself from my friend’s photo, which totally unidentifies me in the photo, I can now just remove the photo from my profile.

To do this, I clicked on the icon that appears at the right side of each post and selected Remove Post in the drop-down menu. This lets my friend keep the photo tagged with my name, but the photo doesn’t appear with my profile. The same is true for non-photo posts that include my name.

The Change-Up

Not all new features in Facebook will be well received. A former feature that let people click a “Link” button in a post to add a URL is gone as part of an effort to streamline the network. People can still share links in posts by pasting a URL into a post, but this doesn’t automatically remove the long URL, like that “Link” button did. Facebook is weighing whether to add the link capability back in posts.

Facebook isn’t currently as good as Google+ when it comes to showing users exactly which groups of friends will see their posted content. But many more people use Facebook—and social networks work best when the people you want to socialize with are using them—so Facebook currently maintains its go-to social-network status. With Google+ nipping at its heels, Facebook will surely further improve the way it displays sharing options.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

	BEFORE	NOW
Tagging people in posts	Type ‘@person’s name’ or just type the person’s name.	Select icon below text box to tag people; @ and typing name still work.
Add link to post	Click ‘Link’ to add Web link without also displaying long URL.	‘Link’ button is gone, so must paste URL into post.
Sharing with certain people	Groups of people with whom posts were shared couldn’t be changed after posting.	Sharing permissions for any post can be changed after posting.
Tagging people who aren’t friends	Impossible	Can tag other Facebook users even if they aren’t a friend. They must approve this tag.
Remove photo or post from profile	Only possible by untagging oneself.	Drop-down menu beside a tagged photo or post removes it from profile, keeps name tagged.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110906/facebook-updates-help-users-share-better-with-others/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110823/five-questions-with-facebooks-chris-cox/ http://allthingsd.com/20110823/five-questions-with-facebooks-chris-cox/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:02:35 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=113067 Facebook often sends product managers and marketing team members to do WebEx briefings with journalists about new features. So it’s somewhat noteworthy that the social networking giant trotted out its resident forest-through-the-trees seeker, VP of Product Chris Cox, to pitch the press on what’s essentially a set of responses to user complaints that Facebook is launching this week.

In an interview with AllThingsD on Monday, Cox tried to paint Facebook’s latest round of tweaks to user profiles and sharing settings into a bigger picture. He also fought off questions about the sensitive topic of competition with Google+.

“I see this as a big advance,” Cox said of the new features, which will roll out to users starting this week. “One component of what you’re sharing is the content, but the other component is the audience. I just think that’s an exciting, high-level idea.”

Here’s a lightly edited write-up of our conversation.

AllThingsD: It seems to me that Facebook has had a mentality of asking users to opt out rather than opt in to being tagged by other users, starting with photo tagging and including recent launches like Facebook Places. And the idea seemed to be a philosophy about encouraging social sharing and spreading, which sometimes freaks people out because they didn’t necessarily give someone else permission to use their name. But now you’re changing how photo tagging works so users can keep themselves from being tagged. Is that a change of philosophy?

Chris Cox: We’re still really focused on tagging being easy to understand. We do think it’s important that people can tag anyone and anything, but on the flip side, your profile is yours, so this is an attempt to get the balance right.

You’re fixing a lot of the most common complaints about Facebook. But that’s also what Google+ just did.

These changes have been in the works for six months. Part of the process for making changes like these is to [run them by] regulatory and legal and special interest privacy groups. It’s not the kind of thing where we can respond to what Google’s doing in a month. This really is not at all about Google in any way, it’s about trying to iterate.

You’re also yet again changing a lot of the Facebook interface, moving things around that people have been accustomed to using every day — though I know you said you’ll be making special efforts to explain the new stuff to users. But just about a year ago you guys had done a major privacy revamp and said people could rest easy that those settings would remain consistent for a while.

We continue to read user feedback, and clearer controls was still at the top of the list. As long as it was at the top of the list we couldn’t stop working on it. And we’re incorporating a lot of the stuff we did last May into this. We’re not reverting; I see this as a big advance.

People are figuring out how they want to use this stuff at the same time as you’re building it. But I think there’s a growing cultural awareness, or skepticism, that anything you put online could get into the hands of someone who could use it against you, regardless of the privacy settings.

As long as email has been around, you can cut and paste anything. Nobody can guarantee that something you write in email won’t get anywhere. And it’s not just the digital world; if you throw something in your trashcan, it could get out. Replicating and distributing information is getting easier, not just on Facebook and not just on the Internet.

That kind of advice on balance is good in terms of getting people to think about what they’re sharing. On Facebook we can show you: this is who’s going to see it on your profile. That we can guarantee. We can’t guarantee that someone won’t copy and paste and mail it to your boss because we don’t have control over the desktop and we don’t have control of snail mail.

If you had to pick, what would you say is the most important part of this week’s release?

In each post, now, is communicated the audience. And that’s what the Facebook product is, it’s a sharing tool. One component of what you’re sharing is the content, but the other component is the audience. I just think that’s an exciting, high-level idea.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110823/five-questions-with-facebooks-chris-cox/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110823/facebook-makes-sharing-more-granular/ http://allthingsd.com/20110823/facebook-makes-sharing-more-granular/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:00:10 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=112880 Facebook will attempt to address some perceived weaknesses of its interface by making content sharing more precise and visual in a redesign that launches this week.

The obvious comparison is to Google+, the new social network that’s gunning for Facebook by making sharing more granular.

And indeed, Facebook’s new user profile redesign (which is rolling out to one percent of users starting this Thursday) includes a dropdown menu beside new status updates that allow users to post content to individuals, groups of friends or the general public. It looks exactly like Google+.

But let’s not go overboard; Facebook isn’t borrowing the greater Google+ anatomy, like “Circles” of friends and a mix of asymmetrical and mutual relationships.

Instead, Facebook is making a huge number of tweaks to its profile design, many of them aimed at addressing common user complaints.

Facebook seems to realize that the Google+ comparisons are inevitable, but VP of Product Chris Cox fended them off. “These changes have been in the works for six months,” he said in an interview Monday (see the full Q&A here).

“It’s not the kind of thing where we can respond to what Google’s doing in a month,” Cox said, explaining that Facebook had spent considerable time reviewing the changes with regulatory and privacy interest groups. “This really is not at all about Google in any way, it’s about trying to iterate.”

Still, as we’ve previously reported, Facebook is currently in a self-imposed “lockdown” mode to buckle down on shipping new products, partly in response to the launch of Google+.

Some of this week’s changes are subtle but significant shifts, like giving users the ability to use a setting that prevents a photo of themselves — which were uploaded and tagged by someone else — from showing up on their own profile pages until it’s been approved.

Unwanted photo-tagging had previously been one of users’ most common complaints, Cox said Monday. Now, users will be given the option on any such photo to remove the tag, or ask the poster to take down the photo, or block the user entirely.

“We do think it’s important that people can tag anyone and anything,” Cox said, “but on the flip side, your profile is yours — so this is an attempt to get the balance right.”

Another new setting allows users to tag people in photos who are not their friends, so users don’t feel obligated to friend new people just because they met them once at an event and posed for a group picture together.

Just to give a sampling, yet another new feature gives users the option to add place tags to their status messages so they can mention a place they were when something happened in the past. Meanwhile, a semantic tweak changes the descriptor from “everyone” to “public” so users can better understand the potential impact of their content. And the sharing category “friends of friends” has been deemphasized in the new interface as some users found it overly broad and confusing (I know I did!).

That level of extreme detail and seeming haphazardness is common throughout all the new changes, making them too intricate to describe fully here.

Suffice it to say, the main theme is that Facebook is bringing its privacy options off of its nearly hidden settings pages and into the context in which users share content.

The new sharing tools will be available on Facebook’s Web site, its mobile site, and its iPhone and Android apps, but not versions of the social network developed by other companies like the BlackBerry and Motorola Blur interfaces.

This launch seems likely to ruffle Facebook users’ notoriously sensitive feathers given its little tweaks affect so many parts of the Facebook experience. But at least based on the press briefing, it’s not obvious that any one change will be controversial or dramatic. Cox said Facebook has put considerable effort into materials aimed at helping users get accustomed to the new features.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110823/facebook-makes-sharing-more-granular/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110727/pixazza-changes-name-to-luminate-launches-image-apps-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20110727/pixazza-changes-name-to-luminate-launches-image-apps-platform/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:00:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=103038

Pixazza is dead. Long live Luminate.

Well, from a brand perspective, at least, as the image advertising start-up changes to an easier-to-say name and also launches a new platform for image applications.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up — which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb — aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

The new name for the company that called itself “AdSense for images” pretty much speaks for itself.

In addition to Luminate’s previous sharing, commerce and advertising apps, the company will offer information, navigation and public service apps, which you can see below

Luminate says its interactive images are viewed three billion times per month.

Here’s the official press release for the name change, as well as the image app platform:

PIXAZZA, INC. REBRANDS ITSELF AS LUMINATE, INC.

New Name Better Reflects Vision For Making All Online Images Interactive

Company Enables Images at Rate of 30 Billion Image Views per Year

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011 — Pixazza Inc., the worldwide leader in making images interactive, today announced its new company name — Luminate, Inc. With its new services and the introduction of a groundbreaking new platform (see separate release: Luminate Launches World’s First Platform for Image Apps), the company opted to rebrand itself with a name that better reflects its bold vision of making every image interactive.

“We started the company to change the web by offering information relevant to online images, engaging consumers in a novel way while offering advertisers and publishers additional revenue streams,” said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate. “We’ve since developed the technology and scale to enable images to do even more. Moving forward as Luminate, we will continue to elevate the role of the image and dramatically improve the web experience.”

Rapidly scaling to accommodate the new demand for interactive images, Luminate now reaches more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

Its publisher network also has grown to more than 4,000 publishers, and the company enables images at a rate of 30 billion image views per year. This is significant because just as page views are commonly used to measure web site traffic, Luminate tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves up a Luminate-enabled image. It is a clear marker of audience interest.

The name change and announcement of the Luminate™ platform for image apps, comes on the heels of an innovative partnership with Hearst Digital Media. The company’s explosive momentum has also been a draw for top talent including CRO and head of publisher development, Chas Edwards, formerly of Digg; Terry Murphy, CFO, formerly of LiveOps. Luminate also added Elliot Schrage, the Vice President of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, as a strategic advisor to the Luminate Board.

Please visit www.luminate.com to learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers, publishers and advertisers use and interact with online images.

LUMINATE UNVEILS WORLD’S FIRST PLATFORM FOR IMAGE APPLICATIONS

Company Brings Images to Life with Image Apps Designed to Create Rich Consumer Experience

Luminate Transforms Images Into a Canvas to Shop, Share, Comment, Examine, Curate, Search and Socialize

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011, Luminate, Inc., formerly known as Pixazza, Inc., today unveiled a groundbreaking new platform for image applications. For the first time ever, consumers can launch applications within the individual images on their favorite websites.

With this exciting new platform, Luminate opens a new world of image apps, breaking down a wall and bringing flat, static images to life. Online images become more than visual stimuli — they become a gateway for accessing rich and relevant content across the web. The apps available on the Luminate™ platform will allow consumers not only to conduct their favorite everyday online activities such as shopping, sharing, commenting and navigating directly from the images, but can also facilitate entirely new services made possible by the development of apps specifically for images.

“Image apps transform images from static pixels into interactive experiences,” said Luminate CEO Bob Lisbonne. “Just as phones evolved from merely voice calls to smartphones with apps, now consumers can enjoy relevant apps inside every online image. The explosive use of images fueled by mobile, social, and cloud computing trends sets the stage for Luminate’s pioneering new image apps platform.”

How It Works:

When a consumer sees the Luminate icon in the corner of an image, it indicates that the image is interactive. Consumers simply mouse into the image and choose from a variety of image apps. They can easily share an image or specific points within an image with their friends, discover statistics about their favorite athletes, see where to purchase similar products to those featured in a photo, uncover the latest information about a particular event, reveal geo tag or Wikipedia information, read more content about the people or places featured in an image, listen to music or see a movie trailer related to an image.

Image Applications:

Image applications will span a number of key categories including: Commerce, Information, Social, Organization, Advertising, Navigation, Public Service, and Presentation. Luminate’s platform currently offers such applications as: unique Twitter Share, Facebook Share, and Email Share apps that give consumers the power to select precisely what they want inside an image and share it with others; an information app called Annotation that allows publishers to quickly and easily tag any spot within an image and add information relevant to that image; a commerce app called Products, which enables consumers to mouse over the image and interact with tags on the picture; and an Advertising app that offers publishers a seamless way to place relevant advertisements within an image.

Luminate plans to roll out new applications frequently to address the varying needs of consumers, publishers and advertisers. Its platform is designed to ultimately enable the development of any conceivable app that is relevant to a particular image. It is this capability that will help define the future of web images.

This cutting edge platform for image apps comes from the company that pioneered the use of images as real estate for delivering ecommerce and advertising three years ago as Pixazza, Inc. With the introduction of the new platform, the company has been rebranded as Luminate, Inc. (see separate release: Pixazza, Inc. Rebrands itself as Luminate, Inc.) as it takes the next step in executing its vision to make every image on the web interactive.

The Luminate Approach:

What makes the Luminate platform so compelling is its breakthrough ability to link images with applications and content beyond the website where the image is viewed. To create the best possible consumer experience, Luminate focuses on all of the data relevant to a particular image or part of an image. Luminate has long employed a unique recognition system that combines visual algorithms with human crowdsourcing. With its new platform, the company has multiplied the sources and ways to uncover information about images. In addition to the data derived from its team of experts, the company can avail itself of information from end users and publishers with the goal of creating a richer, more immersive experience for the end user. Luminate has the most sophisticated system in the industry for tagging relevant content.

“The reason images remained stagnant for so long is because it is remarkably difficult to contextualize their composition and link them to other pieces of relevant content across the Internet,” said James Everingham, CTO of Luminate.

“We were the first to develop the technology to overcome these complexities, turning images into an even more valuable asset. With our platform and the introduction of image apps, we believe that the entire Internet can become connected in a more meaningful way.”

To learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers interact with images, please visit www.luminate.com.

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