Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe meets us at the door of their offices on rue de charonne in a funky, artsy area of Paris that houses other early stage companies and ad agencies, not unlike San Francisco’s SOMA in many ways.
Coffee waiting? You betcha and hot chocolate too.
He’s not an unknown personality in Silicon Valley so some of us had heard of, tried, tested and demoed Pearltrees before. He knows this so he gets a little creative and we dig a little deeper into their service.
“Building an organization on the web touches on how you organize your stuff in the real world. If you like books, you will likely get a lot of pleasure organizing books into your own library on the web,” says Patrice.
Pause….a nearby church bell rings on the half hour. (Okay, so not quite like SOMA)……
Pearltrees allows you to get in touch with others who share mutual interests around the way you ‘organize yourself on the web.’ “Bookmarking and tagging alone doesn’t allow you to accomplish this,” says Patrice.
Visually it looks a bit like the brain……not unlike a mind map, but that’s not the point of the app, which is all done in flex btw. You can import files from delicious and export as RDF.
Coming out this week, any URL that you tweet will automatically turn into a pearl inside Pearltrees. Pearltrees in a sense becomes your ‘memory,’ allowing you to store useful data by category or by interest — all organized in your Pearl-Tree. (visually displayed the way you think and want to store and view data).
Who uses it? In France, a lot of art and political bloggers use it as a way to visually tell a story or drive people to the web around a particular topic or interest.
One third of their users are early adopter users who are social media savvy and one third are under thirty and mostly women from France and the U.S.
You can embed your pearls on Twitter, email Facebook or directly inside your own blog.
To-date, they have raised roughly $3 million. As for their revenue model? “Either through premium services or advertising,” says Patrice. Their cost per user is very very low however.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
