Pinevio is live!
Guys thank you very much for your pacience!
We are proud to announce that Pinevio beta is up and running.
It was launched at Startup Monthly Vilnius conference last weekend.
Enjoy! And please don’t forget to leave feedback.
Try Pinevio now!
Exclusive passkey:12340
Sincerely Yours,
Daumantas, Mindaugas & Martynas
The Pinevio team
Startup Monthly Vilnius 2012
Pinevio team is very happy to make this amazing international event happen with guests from the Silicon Valley and a community of young local entrepreneurs.
We say thank you to everybody who is helping us do all this magic and for all participants.
Congratulations and thank you!
P.S. We are going to launch Pinevio Beta during this conference. Follow our updates.
My Planet is Technology!
My #interestgraph is Planet Technology! Try @Pinevio Lite #fb #app to find out Yours! #Compete with others!
(Source: app.pinevio.com)
Pinevio: A New Look On Content Discovery
Publication about Pinevio in Arctic Startups!
Great narrative of product vision and value.
The Business Hero of the Technology Revolution
As I’m sure all of You know a week ago the world has lost one of the greatest icons of contemporary times – Steve Jobs. During his 56 years he has achieved immense accomplishments profoundly changing the way we consume media, use technology, communicate with one another and “View the World” (B.Obama).
For Pinevio founders like many aspiring “wanna-be” entrepreneurs out there, Steve’s philosophy of life, built on the foundation of Buddhism, was a source of inspiration and influenced us to pursue the entrepreneurial path of life. So it wouldn’t be right not to take a step back and give our humble view on why Steve was such a remarkable genius and express tribute to the person, who I believe was the Greatest Business Hero of Post-industrial times.
When remembering late Mr.Jobs many of us talk about him as a product visionary who built great futuristic products. Aesthetics genius who focused on designing the best user experiences possible. Aspiring and tenacious leader who from 1997 to his death in 2011 has grown Apple into the mighty global empire. Uncompromising boss who’s management style was both demanding and ruthless. Mind-blowing presenter who’s conferences became a true work of art and were hugely anticipated and many other epithets all of which are true. I believe that among all of these different talents one trait came to the top and enabled all other to shine bright. He was a great business model visionary.
Recently my co-founder has discovered a piece of statistics describing what’s at the core of majority successful contemporary corporations.
“11 out of 27 companies born over last quarter of the century made there way to Fortune 500 over last 10 years through business model innovation.”
Significant proportion of all major business empires and majority of technology ones grew their wealth by inventing new ways to make money or revolutionising existing ones. Among all great business innovators during last decade – Steve Jobs’ start was shining brightest. Thanks to him, business model innovation has become the cornerstone upon which all other breakthrough innovations were built at Apple. And the business guru who envisioned them already back in the 1997 was none other than the Business Hero himself.
To understand better what Steve has done to change the way Apple (and the whole industry) make money let’s take a look at few business back-door examples which are often underemphasised when discussing the true greatness of the late Steve Jobs. To my mind it’s exactly these business accomplishments that have played a crucial role in building Apple to what it is now and were the brainchildren of the CEO.
Let’s start with the iPod – iTunes eco-system and the so-called 99c business model. Arguably the iPod was the first milestone product propelling the return of Apple. Why was it such a success? At the time of the iPod launch there had been a variety of different mp3 players in the market: Sony, Samsung and other’s where fighting in a highly fragmented market. There were many value offers but none of them was able to win the market. Then the iPod came long. Yes, the UI interface was more intuitive and product design more appealing, user-friendly to the average consumer. Yes, the memory it had enabled us to carry 1000 songs, which is an entire music library for majority of us, anywhere we go. And yes, Apple were and still are gurus of marketing. However, what made the iPod the definitive music player and over a course of a few years won it market leadership was a rigid and well-developed eco-system of hardware and software, led by the revolutionary iTunes and the 99p business model.
So what was so revolutionary about iTunes and why it enabled Apple to take such a fragmented market so quickly? There have been other music stores prior to iTunes right?
Mr. Jobs had an ambitious goal to make every song on iTunes cost 99c and to make to extremely easy for users to purchase them. We all know how iTunes work so they have cracked the 1-click buy system by releasing a first truly-user friendly online music store.
However, what was substantially more challenging, and this again goes back to the business genius of the CEO. He was able to sit down all the major record labels by one table, pressured the ones who wouldn’t an negotiated the 99c business model by leveraging a strong eco-system of the iPod. Steve has shifted the power from content creators to content distributors – the technology companies.
Astonishingly he has managed to do that time and time again. With the MacBook by leveraging cheap Silicon deals and not only securing a long-term supply of materials but substantially increasing product margins and therefore profitability. Steve has turned the tables once more with the publishing industry and the iPad, and left Apple in a strong position to repeat it with cloud services and the iCloud. Mr. Jobs was what J. Schumepeter would call an Agent of Creative Destruction, changing power structures in the market and enabling revolutionary business model innovation.
All of us who are foolish enough to think we have the capacity and tenacity needed to change the world will miss Steve, it doesn’t matter which industry or area we are trying to do it. He was without a shadow of a doubt an iconic entrepreneur who worked relentlessly to shift the power relationship in the market by making it more dynamic, open and better for both users and innovating businesses. That’s why I will always remember him as the Business Hero of Technology Revolution.
The best way to make a tribute to the legacy of this inspiring individual is to foster the principles of this business values by applying them to many more industries and changing them for the better. RIP Steve, it’s now our moral obligation to keep Your business values alive.
Post by @daumis2475
Co-founder @Pinevio
Information Overload. We need next-gen of Book-marking and Curation!
Today I’ve started developing a next-gen of Pinevio product pitch, which seamlessly led to writing a new blog post. In this post I’m taking a fresh and more optimistic look at a very old, Omni-existing and maybe slightly mundane problem of information overload. Looking from a macro perspective, it’s this problem and various smaller issues associated with it that require a product like Pinevio to exist. It’s why we work on it.
Information overload is a one of the oldest problems ever, which dates back to Gutenberg’s first written book in the 15th century. At that time it was the greatest liberator of knowledge, because it made the knowledge easy to store and share than ever before. The incubation period took some time but eventually the book had become the symbol of knowledge.
At precisely the same time when the book has become a mainstream commodity easily accessible for pretty much everyone the problem of information overload had risen to surface. So people tried to solve it by inventing (or re-discovering to be more precise) book making, curation by building libraries, archives, etc.
After 600 years the Web came along.
It took the web approximately 15 years to mature enough and as a result only 4 years ago we all have witnessed the birth of second greatest liberator of people – the Social Media. In a very short period of time Social Media has transformed the online world from a fragmented, poorly connected dessert of data into a vibrant, dynamic and pseudo living (social) space for knowledge creation, curation and distribution.
In 4 years Social Media revolution had impacted as many people as the book has managed to in 6 hundred years. That’s the power of contemporary technology.
The Social Media revolution’s impact on content creation, curation and distribution is vast.
· 3.8B pieces of content shared on the Facebook alone per week;
· 1B Tweets per week globally
· 30% of aggregate content sharing online happens on Facebook and Twitter
· Average Facebook user likes 9 things, makes 25 comments and become a fan of 2 FB pages per month, and that’s a very conservative stats
· It’s all global: Brazil, Spain and Italy are leading in Social Media adoption with over 70% of populations actively on social networks
For more incredible info-graphics please click here.
Inevitably, the by-product of the content distribution revolution power by Social Media is an unprecedented information overload.
The origin of the problem now is similar to the one 600 years ago. A disruptive new technology has enabled people to spread information cheaper and easier than ever before. Only now the scale of the problem is even more enormous.
Interestingly enough, the approaches used to solve the problem now are similar to the ones used in the olden days. Online book marking (delicious) and content curation (Pearltrees) platforms are built to solve the online information overload problem, because it sort of worked a couple of hundreds of years ago, right?
I think they will struggle in the long run.
The problem with contemporary book marking (delicious) and content curation (Pearltrees) platforms is that they require too much user involvement. People have to remember to bookmark, spend time curating, bundling, sorting, etc.
In this time-deprived world, this approach enables only a limited number of early adopters, innovators and enthusiasts to engage in these time-costly activities online, which makes it very difficult to breach the product innovation adoption gap. Therefore, contemporary book marking and content curation platforms struggle to reach the mass user.
And without the masses involved in tackling the problem, it’s very difficult to achieve tangible results.
Considering the unprecedented scale of the problem we need a more holistic, integrated and automated approach to dealing with the information overload on the Social Web.
Luckily enough, Social media provides not only questions but answers as well.
Due to the nature of Social media everyone now leaves a behavioral trail on various social networks on a daily basis. This behavior history is recorded to the tinniest details, every single day, 365 days per year. It’s exactly this metadata around your Social Media behavior, which has potential to make the book marking a more automated process and fundamentally help tackle the major problem of information overload.
It works like this.
By sharing, liking, tweeting, posting, etc. you express personal relevance of the content to you and book mark it without actually doing anything else than living your normal social lives online.
So all we need to do is take your daily social behavior history on the web, analyze it to find out if you expressed positive or negative attitude to a piece of content and then find what the content is about.
Once we have this info we can then automate the curation of content based on interest and deliver it back the user in a clear and user-friendly format, with an option to add more personal contextual meaning. It’s effortless, cost-effective and build from ground up to utilize the potential of Social Media.
And that’s Pinevio.
Ups! I think I gave away a bit too much. I should stop talking now, in order not to spoil it for all registered beta testers who can’t wait to start testing Pinevio at the beginning of July. For all the people who haven’t registered yet, please leave your email here and share it to the Social Web.
P.S. Pinevio would really appreciate any comments, remarks or general thoughts on our posts!
Post by @daumis2475
Co-founder @ Pinevio
Modern Bookmarking
Hi to all who read this blog! Finally found a minute between writing business plans and creating our awesome web app to sit down and pour some of my thoughts about social content discovery. Writing a blog post for me is still a bit of a challenge. It seems that there are so many thoughts in my head, but expressing them in writing or even in saying out loud is not that easy, so from now on I will use this blog as an exercise to learn articulate my ideas and thoughts.
In my last post I started talking about problems, or issues, I should say, socially active users face on the social web these days. I briefly touched the topic of how to manage and organize our private social streams with all that content from the historic perspective.
We are all aware of the fact that the number of locations on the social web, where we interact with information, expressing our interests directly or indirectly is ever increasing. Once again, there is a problem, there is no single location that would securely “pull” all your interactions and organize them according to your own preferences. Something like your personal “interest buckets” or “interest drawers” is necessary to store our most interesting, most relevant and most socially recognized social content.
In my opinion, most of us have multi-dimensional interest profiles. Our social graphs are very different from one social network to another. We use Facebook for one purpose, that is not necessarily the same as in LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Flickr, or Tumblr, or whatever. Let me illustrate this with an example from a popular social media addicts or I should say social media geeks game “EmpireAvenue” (EA). For those, who don’t know is a social media exchange game, like a Wall Street for your social activity on the web – the more you interact the higher your shares go up. Before I joined this game, I considered myself to be a socially active web surfer and found it difficult to keep track of my favorite, most popular content, that I interacted with on various social media channels. But…. Here are my stats: 40 actions on EA this week, 2 today; 31 Facebook posts, 33 comments and 19 likes this week, 3 posts today; 30 tweets this week, 2 today; 2 upload sets to Flickr; 15 actions on YouTube this week, 2 today and 3 blog posts. However, here are the stats of my recent “purchase” on EA: 424 EA this week, 44 today; now here it get’s really important! 285 Facebook posts, 92 comments, 248 likes this week and already 38 posts today; 642 tweets this week, 102 today and 201 actions on YouTube this week. And there are thousands of people like that, not all of them are on EA and maybe not all of us are so active on the social web. It doesn’t matter, my point is that we interact with a huge number of social content on various social media channels on the daily basis, I don’t know how about you, but let me guess, you can’t really find what you liked, or commented on or tweeted after a couple of days, especially if that actions was not on your profile, but on your friends profile. So what then? How can you find that song you listened to with your friends last summer by the sea? How can you find that video clip you watched with your date on the firs date? How can you find that link to a blog post about great discovery in genetics about human DNA, when your friend doesn’t believe you? How can you bet with your mates who was the first to post that awesome video about wingsuit jumping in Norway? How…? How…? There are millions of “hows”
To conclude I just want to say, that nowadays any interaction on the social web is modern bookmarking. And as far as I know there is no single tool that would allow us to “store” our own best stuff in one place. Trust me, I do know all the best social news channels, bookmarking tools, content curation tools, etc. I’m not writing this post to criticize what they do well or bad. I’m just saying there isn’t a tool that would gives us complete control over our social web lives. The social web vault, that’s how I would call it.
That’s it for today. Feel free to share your thoughts on our blog and our posts.
Post by Mindaugas @kurHOUSEaz, co-founder @Pinevio
Moments of #TDC11, day 3. More pics here.
