Exciting news for avid crafters and single (but wedding-obsessed) twentysomethings: Pinterest, the virtual inspiration board, is out of invite only mode. Let’s all bake an elaborate cake in celebration and then scarf it down, feel terribly guilty and punish ourselves by looking at fitness boards. Read More
Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!
This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.
“I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!” That was NASA’s @MarsCuriosity rover tweeting after successfully landing on Mars after a nerve-wracking but thrilling journey. Here’s one of the pics that Curiosity sent back and here’s a video that vividly describes what Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror probably were right before landing on Mars. As Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted, it was a reminder of what it feels like “to boldly go”! Read More
Today, social e-commerce site The Fancy* announced that they would begin giving credit to users who curate and share products that lead to a purchase. That’s right, you can now get paid for those aspirational impulses.
A unique referral code will be appended to every item you share, and if someone purchases that product after clicking on your link, The Fancy will provide you with 2 percent of the price of the item sold 30 days after the purchase. All of your credits will be tracked and displayed on a comprehensive dashboard.
With this move, the company is basically providing a monetary incentive to become a power user. (We sense a lot of coltish, wavy-haired fashion bloggers squee-ing into their iPhones right now.) Read More
We haven’t thought about the prolific For Dummies series since a college programming class when our professor had us buy Flash for Dummies (thanks for the vote of confidence). So imagine our surprise when this tweet popped up in our Twitter feed and we learned that there is an entire canon of For Dummies texts that go as niche as niche can go. Here are some of our favs, since it’s the evening before 4th of July and no one is reading the Internet anyway. Read More
We tend to think of Pinterest as being pretty straightforward: See pretty picture/thing we want, pin it, repeat ad infinitum. Hence the free-and-clear path to monetization.
But the Daily Dot reports that a particularly aggressive “transmedia” publisher, BeActive, wants to use the platform as a storytelling medium. The company is taking Beat Girl, a novel, and turning it into: Read More
Pinbooster cofounder Dave Weinberg has been working feverishly to get a platform for sponsoring pins on Pinterest launched before any competitors do.
He’s not aware of any specific competitors right now. But given the nation’s Pinterest obsession—he gets a Google Alert every hour with 50 new Pinterest news articles—he’s sure others will have the same idea. “I just have to imagine that there is some kid somewhere coding in the mid of the night trying to come out with something great as quick as he can,” he told Betabeat this morning. “Someone’s going to build something.”
It would appear that for now, Pinbooster has the market for sponsored pins cornered. The site, which will allow advertisers to commission pins from power users, officially launched today. Read More
This morning, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg joined high-end photo-sharing site The Fancy under the name “zuckd.” I guess you could say: fancy recognize fancy? In that time, the Facebook CEO has already amassed more than 102,000 followers. He’s also following some fellow Facebookers, such as Dave Morin, the CEO of Path, and Serkan Piantino, who will head up Facebook’s engineering office in New York. (Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes sits on company’s board.)
A few months back, we described the aspirational site as “kind of like Pinterest, but all about the money.” The Fancy is growing fast and has a plan to turn anything users share into a chance to buy.
Zuck has also registered for Twitter and Google+ and Pinterest itself, but naturally, his presence on a young site is bound to jump-start the rumor mill. Read More
As anybody in the music business can tell you, every crew needs a suit. And Pinterest just picked up a high-profile one to handle any legal issues that might crop up. Business Insider is reporting that the company has hired Michael Yang, Google deputy general counsel, to serve as as their head of legal. As Read More
Local digital scrapbooking startup Fancy may not be as well known as Pinterest. But on one corner of the Lower East Side, the New York site endorsed by Kanye West is dominating its behemoth competitor. This photo popped up on Instagram featuring the founder of Instagram itself, Kevin Systrom, along with Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner*, who is invested in both companies, and magician David Blaine, because of course. The trio is leaning against some graffiti commissioned by The Fancy and drawn by Tats Cru. In a nod to the graffiti culture’s tradition of spraypainting over a rival’s tag, the wall features Pinterest’s red logo covered by “FANCY” in bloated letters. The full image is below. Read More
