Slide.ly Is Bringing Ba...

The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that’s the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi , which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The company aims to pick up where Slide.com ( acquired by Google in 2010 ) left off. It’s building a slideshow creation tool for the new age, using sources like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and Picasa, as well as Google Images, photos from your friends or those from your computer. You then mix that content with music from SoundCloud and YouTube and add – you guessed it – Instagram-like effects. Although there’s no space on Facebook to “embed” your glorious creation permanently, as Slide.com’s shows were once pinned on dizzy Myspace pages, the resulting slideshows can be shared to your Facebook Timeline or page, tweeted or emailed. EasyHi , founded in 2010, is led by CEO Tom More, who has 12+ years experience in building Internet apps, but whose personal passions for music and photography made building something like Slide.ly a good fit. “Creative self-expression is in our DNA,” he says of EasyHi, now a team of ten. The company’s value proposition, at first glance, sounds a lot like that of instant slideshow tool, Animoto , photo collection-sharing service Erly , or many others competing in the space with DIY or automated tools that let you make jazzier, more social-infused alternatives to PowerPoint presentations and online photo albums. But More says that his vision extends beyond slideshows. “We look at this space as a mere starting point. What we are here to create is a new way of telling a story, and there’s usually more than one photo for every story,” he explains. “The stories we’d like to help users capture are personal (as many similar services attend to), but are also topical stories that mix your own photos with related media, group stories that combine photos (and soon videos) of you and your friends, fan stories that mesh personal photos and video with your favorite music and local stories or real-time events.” Ah, so that sounds more like Storify , it seems, even if Slide.ly is starting out focused on the consumer photo-sharing space. EasyHi, which already has 500,000 installs of its e-card application, plans to grow Slide.ly’s user base by tapping into its current audience. Once established, the eventual business model is to offer a freemium service where things like custom themes and templates could be in-app purchases. Slide.ly is still in closed beta, but there are 100 invites for TechCrunch readers here . Just use the code “ techcrunch ” when signing up.

Rakuten CEO On The $100...

Rakuten , the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest , valuing the company at $1.5 billion, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model. First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site. There are already some building blocks in place for this. First of all, Rakuten already pins on Pinterest through at least a couple of official accounts: Rakuten Commerce and Rakuten Travel. On the other hand, there is Rakuten’s existing e-commerce presence in the country. Mikitani notes that 75 percent of Japan’s internet population — equivalent to about 80 million people — already have a Rakuten ID — this is similar to an Apple ID, or an Amazon ID, in that there are payment details associated with it. It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest: “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he says. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.” He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.” One other area, TechCrunch understands, is for users logged in with Rakuten IDs to pin images and then use those pins to buy items away from Pinterest, on Rakuten’s own Rakuten Ichiba site. And because Pinterest is so buzzy right now, it can be used as a way of reigniting some of Rakuten’s legacy business. The company has a lot of “sleeping customers,” as Mikitani calls them. These are people who have IDs but are not regular users of Rakuten’s services. “This is a good way of getting them to start using those Rakuten IDs again.” The other area where he would like to see more development is in the area of mobile commerce. Mikitani tells me that already, 25 percent of all Rakuten sales in Japan originate on a mobile device, and that proportion is growing. “There should be a huge synergy with Pinterest there,” he says. “We are going to promote their app using our presence here in Japan.” International growth . The $100 million investment, which was led by Rakuten with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as a number of angel investors, will also give Pinterest the financial muscle to extend its service into new international markets. Pinterest, perhaps above all social networks, has a lot of potential as an international product — one that can work across borders– because while sites like Facebook and Twitter are text-led, Pinterest is focused around images, and therefore less limited by language barriers. Of course, a lot of Pinterest’s growth today and in the future will be non-commercial, but the potential for commerce is very much there, too. (We wrote just the other day about another example, Curalate , which has created a social marketing service for brands to visually track how and where their images are getting used across the site.) Within that trend, Rakuten is looking at how to leverage its Pinterest investment in its international business outside of Japan, as well. Mikitani points out that while Facebook is an “extremely powerful social network”, when it comes to shopping and e-commerce, Pinterest’s image-led service “has stronger potential.” Facebook and Twitter, he says, are about connecting you with your friends and contacts, while Pinterest is about connecting people with the same interests via graphic images. Apart from the fact that products are put right there for you to see, you can also imagine how that social set-up can be developed into a commercial model (group buying is one that comes to mind here). Rakuten has holdings that extend well beyond Japan, and include properties like Buy.com in the U.S., Kobo e-reader and e-books, Priceminister in France — in all, operations based in 10 countries and extending to 17 countries in total. Mikitani says that he is hopeful that the kinds of groundwork it wants to lay in Japan will also be extended to the rest of its footprint. For example, Mikitani points out that Kobo already has a “great partnership” with Facebook to encourage people to post excerpts and read more using Kobo, which it would like to extend to Pinterest, too: “Facebook is why Kobo is growing so fast right now,” he says. “We will see more of Kobo in Pinterest, too, I think.” And buy.com — which is slowly, gradually, getting rebranded as Rakuten — is another site you could imagine could get linked up more closely with Pinterest. But this is not to rule out other partnerships with other e-commerce players. “We are totally open to other e-commerce partnerships,” he says. “Pinterest should work with them.”

Smarsh Acquires Former ...

Disrupt alumni never cease to impress . TC50 finalist Perpetually and its web archiving technology have been acquired by Portland, Ore.- based Smarsh . Though the news hit the Web yesterday, we’re told the acquisition occurred earlier this year. Given Smarsh’s pedigree – which also specializes in archiving digital content, including IM conversations, social media interactions, and email – archiving sites as they change and update is only a natural step forward for the company. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. “Smarsh provides a much more stable environment in which the product will really thrive,” Darrell Silver, Founder of Perpetually, told TechCrunch. “While profitable when it was acquired, with investors and stockholders turning a profit on the acquisition, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster as part of Smarsh.” In a blog post that was published and then subsequently deleted yesterday, Silver thanked the New York tech scene: The Perpetually story proves how beneficial it is to be a tech startup in NYC right now. After many coffees, dinners, drinks, calls and emails in December, it became clear just how much of a support system we now have here. The people who helped make this deal work were VCs, entrepreneurs, family, salespeople, engineers, students and even an ex-Goldman banker. Most had no financial incentive to do so. Many other friends from SF helped for sure, but NYC offered a diversity of talent unavailable anywhere else. He also mentioned that an acquisition wasn’t necessarily on his to-do list when Perpetually launched back in 2009 at Disrupt. “Frankly, we were so young and bright-eyed when launching at TechCrunch50 — only six months after Perpetually was first conceived — that of course acquisition wasn’t the goal,” said Silver. “All we knew was that it was shocking there was no easy way to have a DVR-like way of looking at your website. It seemed like a huge opportunity for something that should exist, so we went for it.” Silver is the only Perpetually employee moving over to the Smarsh team, as he was the only full-time employee at the time of acquisition. Silver originally published the aforementioned blog post yesterday titled “Perpetually Is Now Smarsh Web Archiving.” When asked why he removed the post, though he didn’t give a clear answer, Silver did provide the original copy. After an incredible roller-coaster of three short years, I’m extremely proud to announce that Perpetually has been acquired by Smarsh! The technology as we envisioned it — perfect, interactive archives of any website — is already thriving under its new name: Smarsh Web Archiving. I’ve also joined Smarsh to grow web archiving across its 15,000 customers. We’ve all been sprinting to make today’s announcement possible. Our success today is as much due to the passion of the Smarsh team as it was the Perpetually team and our investors’ risk appetite over the years — all of which paid off nicely. But there’s one group whose impact cannot be overstated: The NYC tech community. The Perpetually story proves how beneficial it is to be a tech startup in NYC right now. After many coffees, dinners, drinks, calls and emails in December, it became clear just how much of a support system we now have here. The people who helped make this deal work were VCs, entrepreneurs, family, salespeople, engineers, students and even an ex-Goldman banker. Most had no financial incentive to do so. Many other friends from SF helped for sure, but NYC offered a diversity of talent unavailable anywhere else. The last three years have been a wild ride, and perseverance has paid off. Next time at 1000x! Both companies are keeping a relatively low-profile with regards to the acquisition. Even the release sent out by Smarsh kept things vague and short: Smarsh Web Archiving leverages the technology acquisition of Perpetually, LLC, the market leader in enterprise Web archiving. Perpetually will hereafter be referred to as Smarsh Web Archiving (clever, huh?) and according to the release it will allow users to “capture, search, preserve, produce and supervise complete websites, individual Web pages, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, audio and video files and other content on the Web.” This includes all interactive elements like YouTube videos and Flash content, and even the links between various pages will remain intact.

News Discovery Site Pri...

Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to “what you’re actually interested in.” Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles. When I first heard about Prismatic, my kneejerk reaction was, “Oh God, another Flipboard competitor.” Making matters worse, the company is building a website first and doesn’t have a smartphone or tablet app yet, which is awfully unsexy. But co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says the company’s is pursuing a genuinely new approach to the problem, which is why it’s sticking to the Web for now and remains invite-only. So what does the bit about “actually interested in” mean? Cross says that if you look at Flipboard and the hordes of competitors, they’re mostly showing you content that’s already in your social stream — on Twitter, that means you’re just seeing headlines from people and publications that you already follow. Some startups claim to take a broader view, but Cross says that if you look at the content that gets highlighted, it’s still stuff from your Twitter feed. (I haven’t taken a close enough look at other apps to back this up, but I can say that the content usually isn’t different enough or better enough to lure me away from Flipboard.) In large part, he says that’s because they’re trying to bolt social discovery onto existing products. Prismatic’s technology, on the other hand, is more topic-based — it looks at what you’ve been sharing on social networks to determine your interests, then recommends topics and publications for you to follow. Hopefully, you’ll start finding content that you would have missed otherwise. The new profiles provide a way to share and find that content. Each profile includes a visualization of all your different interests. You can see co-founder Aria’s visualization Haghighi above — the more you interact with a topic, the larger the bubble. There’s also a stream of stories showing the news that you’ve interacted with recently. This creates a more social way to find new interests to follow and stories to read. It can also tell you something new about your friends. For example, Haghighi and I were acquaintances back when we were both undergraduates at Stanford, but his Prismatic profile was almost a revelation. Given his interest in science fiction and comic books, including a giant profile image of Batman and highlighting content about author China Mieville, I realized that we should totally be best friends. (I’m not sure about that whole computer science thing though.) Some of this information could probably be inferred via Facebook profile and likes, but Prismatic is putting interest information and news-sharing front-and-center — which should also make you feel more comfortable sharing news in a context where you don’t have to worry about annoying your friends. Prismatic profiles have just gone live for every user with more than 10 interests (so I need a few more interests to activate mine). The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, and undisclosed angels. You can request an invite here .

Don’t Call It A Flash S...

Design shopping site Fab.com is debuting the next major release of its platform today, Fab 3.0, which is going live on the U.S.-based Fab.com first. The revamp focuses heavily on improved “social shopping” features, and will soon arrive in Fab’s mobile applications before rolling out to Fab’s European properties later this year. The update offers over 100 enhancements, both big and small, but the most notable changes involve the redesigned navigation, a new feature the company calls “smile pages,” and a major update to Fab’s Live Feed which adds Facebook integration and a number of filtering options, while doing away with Google+ in favor of Pinterest. When you log into the Fab 3.0 site, you’ll now land on a new page called “Featured Today,” which reflects the most popular sales and categories on the site that day. This is the page that appears whenever you click the “Fab.” logo from any other section of the site going forward. The new top navigation is noticeably less cluttered than before, too, as Fab has now ditched ”Stores” and “Sales” from here. Instead, there’s now an increased focus on social shopping features (the “Live Feed”) and the newly added “Search” option, which offers searching by price, category and even color. Sub-navigation directs users to favorite sections like “Art,” “Home,” “Kids,” etc., and to the right, a “live ticker” displays constantly updated trending items. But the removal of “sales” is telling for a service which some still think of as being in the “flash sales” genre – Fab is telling the world that it’s just not that kind of site. There will still be sales, however, they’re just not the reason Fab wants customers to shop there. “From the beginning, we never really thought of Fab as a flash sales site, we thought of ourselves as design,” explains CEO Jason Goldberg. “People appreciate Fab for discovery, or for finding products they didn’t know existed, or for delighting them, and price is not a big deal. We don’t want people to think ‘ sale, sale, sale ,’” he says. As for the discovery features on Fab, they’re getting a big boost today with the updated Live Feed section. This Pinterest-like part to the Fab experience was initially rolled out in December as a part of the Fab 2.0 launch as a way to show a live, dynamic feed of what Fab’s members are buying, favoriting and sharing. As a result of the feed’s introduction just five months ago, 15% of visits to this section now result in a purchase, says Goldberg. The most important change here is Facebook integration. Members will now be able to filter the feed to see just what their Facebook friends are buying, favoriting and sharing. It’s an obvious next step for the company, which has already worked closely with the social network on things like Facebook Timeline integration, Open Graph (implicit sharing) integration, and most recently, adoption of Facebook’s new “actions.” The social shopping angle does well for Fab, which already saw anywhere from 15% to 30% of its traffic come from Facebook any given day, plus around 2% from Twitter, and another 2% from Pinterest. And that’s before today’s introduction of the new Pinterest “Pin it” buttons which were added in favor of Google+ (now dropped). Google+ traffic was practically non-existent on Fab. To give you an idea of context, here are some sites that sent more traffic to Fab than Google+ did: W00t, Bing, Coolmaterial.com, Svpply, TechCrunch, NYT and Goldberg’s blog. Also new to the Live Feed section is a filter by category, color or price option, which just generally improves the browsing experience, as well as support for buying items directly from the feed itself. The final change is the introduction of “Smile pages,” which is just another way to feature popular items on the site, by pulling trending items onto what you can think of as “best of Fab” pages. “How do you help people dig into a site, discover and browse?” Goldberg says of how Fab, now 4 million members strong, has approached these new changes. “It’s like the anti-Amazon. Amazon is the best place in the world if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but you don’t browse Amazon. Fab is like going shopping with your friends, or maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you want the fun of discovering stuff,” he says. The update should be live now on Fab.com.