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Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:05:25 -0400

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Pinevio is live!

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:26:11 -0400

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

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 06:56:00 -0400

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!

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:12:02 -0500

My Planet is Technology!:

My #interestgraph is Planet Technology! Try @Pinevio Lite #fb #app to find out Yours! #Compete with others!

google.bg

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:00:09 -0400

google.bg

Pinevio: A New Look On Content Discovery

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:07:00 -0400

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

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:49:00 -0400

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!

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:02:00 -0400

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 15^th 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

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:19:07 -0400

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.

Fri, 27 May 2011 09:36:00 -0400

Moments of #TDC11, day 3. More pics here.

Highlights of Thinking Digital Conference 2011

Fri, 27 May 2011 09:26:00 -0400

Pinevio team has attended the Thinking Digital Conference in Gateshead, UK. It was the first time for us both and to be honest, the conference blew our minds away even more then expected. It was professionally organised, the speakers were inspiring and the atmosphere was remarkable. I think it’s our duty to help spread the most remarkable ideas of the conference for the benefit of those who couldn’t be there.

Throughout the course of three days there were many speakers who all inspired the audience in their own ways. In this post I will recap the most interesting talks and ideas on last day of the conference, Thursday (26h of May, 2011).

On the last day of conference there was a wide selections of topics to choose from: entrepreneurship, brain-computer interfaces, cure for cancer, future of the web, uncertainty, 3D art, and more.

I would like to start with a rather philosophical talk delivered by a professional poker player, presenter, anthropologist and economist Caspar Berry. The topic of this talk was – uncertainty of the future. Caspar argued we are frustrated due the unpredictability of the future: in terms of what’s going to happened in a minute, after a month or in 10 years. He raised a though that people have learned to live with uncertainty and that it’s its exactly this frustrating, insecure and mind bobbling feeling which drives us to grow and develop. Uncertainty itself is what makes life interesting and worth living, it’s what makes us look forward to the following day.

Personally, I can relate to his ideas, because the start-up world, which I’m currently in, is built on uncertainty and constant struggle to abandon your comfort zone, work beyond expectations, do something never done before. This is how you can create something valuable and interesting. Yes, this feeling is stressful and can be difficult to manage, but at the end of the day it makes something you do worth doing.

Secondly, I would like to talk about the future of the web and talk given by Allen Cohen, VP at Cisco in San Francisco. This talk has been very interesting for both me and colleague because Mr.Cohen was arguing that context is the future of the web, which is also at the core of Pinevio’s value proposition and ideology. The main point of the talk was that contemporary web systems and applications on lack contextual value for the end user. Therefore, the next-gen web systems have to be more transparent, real-time and contextual.

Lets put this in context.

We can use foursquare to let people know our whereabouts. We can use Facebook to find out what our friends are doing. But if for example we walk in to a conference and want to find who are the VCs I should approach about funding my web star-up or who of them are connected with relevant people, contemporary web systems might find it difficult to help you out. It’s exactly this real time contextual information discovery linking people with computer systems, which will be at the core of the next generation of corporations’ value proposition for the user.

Here at Pinevio we share the vision and believe that technology through real-time communication, transparency and contextual relevance can improve the quality and efficiency of our lives to an unprecedented extent. Its just a matter of who captures public’s imagination with the right value offering first. Next Facebook will be born in this space.

Dr.Vincent W.Li, the co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation, delivered third talk, which has caught my imagination. He was talking about a revolutionary method of treating and hopefully curing cancer. The approach is called anti-angiogenesis. The concept is simple. Both healthy and cancer cells in our body are fed in the same way. That’s via blood vessels. If a certain healthy part of the body is deprived of blood vessels - it dies due to lack of nutrients. The same thing happens to cancer cells if you cut of the vessels supplying it. The process by which body builds new blood vessels is called Angiogenesis and preventing that from happening is called Anti-Angiogenesis. If you cut the blood supply to cancer tumors they can’t grow and die.

However, the really interesting part of the approach is that you can adjust your diet to control your angiogenesis process naturally and basically prevent blood vessels from developing, which also prevents cancer cells from growing. Effectively you can medicate your cancer by eating the right stuff. Even more interesting is this anti-cancer diet includes regular, tasty, everyday products like strawberries, dark chocolate, green tea and a variety of other stuff, which we all love. Furthermore, if you cook these products in a right way, their anti-angiogenesis characteristics can increase sustainably.

This information is a huge breakthrough in terms of the approaches used to fight cancer. Majority of treatments used nowadays look as dangerous as the cancer itself: radiation, operations, transplants. This new knowledge enables us to prevent dangerous cancers from forming in the first place in a way that’s harmless to our body.

The key challenge here is capture public imagination and develop awareness that by eating the right stuff we can prevent cancer. For more information please click here and help spread the word as much as possible.

Lastly, I would like to tell you about a talk, which left the most impression and simply blew our minds away. Tan Lee, co-founder of Emotiv, introduced a revolutionary brain-computer interface. It works like this: you put an elegant head-net with a bunch of sensors, which monitor brain waves, on your head and via sophisticated software you are able to move objects with your…mind! Yes mind! Mrs. Lee showed a life demo on stage with a member from the audience. Application of this is limitless but just to give you a taste of what it means: so far Emotiv has enabled people to drive cars, wheel chairs, create art, operate smart-home systems. All controlled with your thoughts.

Emotiv has opened their API for the developer community to engage and build great software around this brain-computer interface. The plethora of opportunities this creates has especially excited Pinevio team. So if you are a crazy developer and want to build insane stuff get in touch with us. A cloud of start-ups is bound to explode as a result of the potential eco-system generated by the Emotiv. And the best part about this invention is its price – just $299.

That’s the end of our short report on the TDC 11. Please spend some time browsing the links provided in the post. There is so much more exciting stuff these talks had to offer.

Pinevio team is looking forward to the next year’s TDC. Hopefully we’ll also get the opportunity to share our ideas with people across the globe.

P.S. The man behind this event is Mr. Herb Kim . Special thank you to him for making this great event happen and inspiring so many people.

Post by Daumantas

Co-Founder @ Pinevio

Thinking Digital Conference - day 3

Thu, 26 May 2011 02:19:00 -0400

Today Pinevio team is attending the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead!

Please follow our Tumblr updates on all the interesting action happening at the conference.

Also we’ll be capturing our perspective of the conference via the Color photo sharing app to Pinevio’s Twitter!

We wish a great day to all of the attendees! See you soon!

Co-founder - Daumantas

Problems faced by social web surfers

Thu, 19 May 2011 11:59:08 -0400

Dear social web surfers, I’m Mindaugas, one of the co-founders of Pinevio. I will be writing one more section on our blog starting with several problems that socially active web surfers face these days.

Because of the huge number of social networks, blogs, forums, RSS feeds and socially interactive websites in our lives it has become incredibly difficult to select only the most relevant information. My colleague Daumantas has described the importance and the meaning of the interest graph in a couple of previous posts, so I will not get into great detail about that in this post.

Firs of all, let’s start with a situation, that social media expert Tara Hunt has described as “social media black hole”. You might have noticed that links, posts, conversations, tweets, likes, shares and re-shares are getting lost after a short period of time on your social networks main page. A video from YouTube, a piece of music from SoundCloud, or just a funny conversation you had, sink into the bottom of your social actions ocean and sometimes it’s nearly impossible to retrieve it again. We can’t search for it on Google or Bing, because in most cases we just don’t remember the exact name of a link, or post, or conversation that we are trying to find. The question is, how can we organize and manage our historic actions on the social web, so that we can come back to them whenever we want.

There are a couple of approaches to solving this situation. Curation and bookmarking. Both of these approaches require the user to be highly involved in manual processes and some web applications are so difficult to use that you don’t even want to come back to them after first time. I feel there is a need for some sort of cross-hybrid of content curation, bookmarking and influence measurement. Ideally this process should be automated initially and based on social recognition of content. Users would only have to confirm whether they agree or disagree if that content is truly relevant to them. Most likely it should be, because it comes from our own social activity history.

I would like to expand a little bit more on “social content recognition” or as we would like to call it – the Social Equity. For those who are familiar with “Whuffie factor” or social capital, it is not the same thing. Our whuffie represents our influence, reach and impact on on-line/off-line society. Social Equity, on the other hand, is the value and the importance of a piece of content. Let me put it into context: if two unrelated and unconnected Facebook users post the same video on their walls they will most likely get different responses. The will get different numbers of likes, comments and re-shares. It is different because of the IG/SG ratio difference (Interest Graph/Social Graph). We all have different impact on our friends and followers base, therefore my argument is that there is a need to allow social web users to discover more people who have similar Social Equity counts on the stuff that they are interested in. The Social Equity of a number of different users can be accumulated and we get into an area of content spread, reach and virality, but I will talk about this in my later posts, once I have finished describing the problems on the social web.

That’s it for now! Leave your comments and ideas and we can have a discussion. I will tackle another social web problem next week.

Post by Mindaugas, co-founder @Pinevio

follow me on Twitter @kurHOUSEaz

99.5% Social Media experts are Clowns?

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:42:00 -0400

Important Disclaimer! I’m NOT a Social Media marketing expert. I just operate in the space and have an opinion.

Recently there has been a lot of debate on the web around a somewhat controversial statement by an immigrant entrepreneur (this I can relate to), wine expert, best-selling author and the social enthusiast, Gary Vaynerchuk in a TechCrunch interview.

On the big stage Gary called 99.5% percent of Social Media experts, or people who market themselves as such - Clowns.

For those who haven’ heard about it, the story goes like this.

According to Gary, the vast majority of Social Media marketers these people don’t have a thorough understanding of the underlying drivers and process behind the business, which they are consulting o Social Media marketing. Therefore, they can you help you grow Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc follower bases. They can come up with vague and general social media strategies, but those followers are rarely converted into regular retained customers generating sustainable ROI and the strategies are not really working.

As a result, many companies these days are disappointed by so-called SMM experts and start to doubt the whole efficiency of social media marketing. All this you would have understood having seen Gary’s video on TC or the after-interview blog post.

I’ve decided to write about this because Gary raised an interesting point on his response video-blog afterwards. With this straightforward in-your-face statement Gary, or at least he claims so, didn’t want to bullshit on his competition (although he has done a bit of that to be honest).

Instead, he wanted to start a debate around what it actually means to be a Social Media Expert and how should businesses deal with the problem of incompetent candidates. I think this is important, therefore lets continue the discussion.

I agree with Gary. Too many people these days claim to be Social Media experts, even make decent living out of it. I think there are two main reasons for that.

Firstly, social media is a novelty for a lot of business and organizations, especially for those who don’t operate in a tech or digital space. Businesses across different industries are starting to understand that we “need” to get on board the social ship. For many of them it’s a completely uncharted place, therefore, rather reluctantly they tend to seek help from “outside” people who claim to know it. Where there is demand there is supply, right?

Secondly, many of us have faulty pre-conceptions about what Social Media marketing is all about. Well, it’s NOT about getting 10000 followers on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Quora or other social network. It’s NOT about broadcasting pre-designed marketing messages made by some over-priced marketing agency. It’s NOT about doing immediate “push” sale to people who have expressed initial interests.

I think, it’s about developing targeted communities around your product or problem solved by your product. It’s about conversations not broadcasting. It’s about creating value relationships with your customers and retaining them over time. It’s about in-depth understanding of the underlying business marketed via the Social. And it’s a million other things as well.

These misleading pre-conceptions result in businesses apply faulty hiring criteria for SMM experts, which eventually lead to an unacceptable expectation gap and disappointed clients.

A huge number of businesses want outside help with SMM but limited understanding of the space makes them struggle to find a proper expert.

The main point I would like to emphasize in this post is this.

Social Media marketing is difficult. It’s time consuming. It takes a lot of expertise and skill to get it right. Actual Social Media expert has to have an in-depth understanding of your industry, holistic expertise in relevant business process and feel the social media marketing pulse, a cherry on top of the cake. It’s difficult to find these people, they are far from cheap and they rarely market themselves as experts because other people do it for them.

So when you think about it, the best Social Media marketer is a person in charge of the business: co-founder/director/manager/Business owner, etc. Any good business owner should already be an expert when it comes to understanding underlying business processes, customer needs, the industry and all other crucial factors, so all is left is to understand the Social.

I know this might sound somewhat against the market, but if you are not willing to invest significant capital to find real SMM experts, educate yourself. Even though it’s difficult, the Social media is not a rocket science. It’s just new and has to do with people, which always make a tricky

Nevertheless„ my suggestion would be to use all of free resources available on the web to get grips with the principles of social marketing. Then build the strategy, grow communities yourself and only start looking for outside support when you need to take your SMM efforts to another level, and most importantly when you can afford a quality service from real experts.

This way, there will be less disappointing opportunists who diminish the credibility of the entire industry. Business will achieve better ROI because they will invest capital when it’s actually necessary to grow. And most importantly, the quality of social media marketing communications will increase substantially making the whole space a better place to be in.

Post by @daumis2475

Co-founder @ Pinevio

The Social Consumer

Wed, 11 May 2011 11:40:00 -0400

In this post I will define The Social Consumer, describe its behavior and explain why it’s crucial to engage this segment via the Interest graph.

The Social Consumer has been evangelized by Brian Solis and other thought leaders for a few years now as the most important consumer segment in contemporary social marketing. This is why.

The Social Consumer is a person who makes purchase decisions based on peer recommendations on social media.

The Social Consumer is a direct “product” of the social web. These people are socially active on multiple social networks, content discovery platforms, blogs, etc. They constantly share favorite content, let the social graph know their whereabouts via foursquare, favorite videos on YouTube, music sets on SoundCloud, etc. Being a social consumer is all about sharing. A bit of friendly spam hasn’t heart anyone, right?

The Social Consumer will notify the Twitter/Facebook follower/friend base straight away if: an unfriendly bartender gave a poorly washed glass, a brand new Burberry jacket has deteriorated in a month after purchase or someone was unreasonable at work, etc.

The Social Consumer is open, friendly and transparent in exchanging and sharing information with peers. They don’t think twice before broadcasting details of their personal lives online. That’s because they trust their peers, trust the social web and feel the urge to share. Do you know people like that? To be honest, I think I’m starting to become one of them.

It’s exactly this openness, transparency, trust and love for the Social that makes The Social Consumer segment an ideal distributor for various content: marketing content, personal content and/or any other content. As long as it’s interesting, The Social Consumer will broadcast it to the world.

Taking into consideration that they are well connected and influential among thousands of friends and followers, the preferred piece of content can be spread immensely over a relatively short period of time. And all of it is virtually cost free.

Content distribution is just one piece in a huge puzzle of how an engaged social consumer is able to benefit your organization. Direct market research, product testing, product evangelism, brand PR, community management, damage control, etc., etc., etc. The Social Consumer is able to do it all by living normal social lives without extra effort, because this is who they are.

Therefore, I believe that The Social Consumer is essential mediator of a new-wave marketing communications. Engaging with The Social Consumer is the obvious challenge. And the answer to it, in my mind, is to map current interests of the Social Consumer and monitor how it changes to target your marketing efforts accordingly, to achieve maximum engagement. In other words, it’s the Interest graph.

Post by @daumis2475

Co-Founder @ Pinevio

Pinevio’s brainstorm wall at The Difference Engine office...

Tue, 10 May 2011 05:15:14 -0400

Pinevio’s brainstorm wall at The Difference Engine office (January-March 2011)

Pinevio co-founder Daumantas. First days of The Difference...

Mon, 09 May 2011 08:04:49 -0400

Pinevio co-founder Daumantas. First days of The Difference Engine business acceleration programme in the North East of England (January 2011).

The Interest Graph - Part II

Wed, 04 May 2011 07:00:00 -0400

In my last post I’ve tried to explain the Interest graph. Now I will add more relevance to the discourse and talk about why the Interest graph is at the core of contemporary marketing and advertising.

The consumer/user is the most important thing to any good business. People is the reason why the business does what it does, operates they way it operates. Understanding your customer’s needs, wants, expectations, views, etc. is key to provide them with desired products and services. Needless to say that’s far from easy. People are complicated. Consumers, I would say, are even more complicated. Finding out what really drives a consumer to make a purchase decision has always been the challenge of marketing. There are several good reasons for that.

Firstly, consumers don’t know what they want. So marketers have to tell them sometimes. Secondly, their needs and wants are influenced by numerous factors such as fashion, friends, mood, health of their cat, children, Tweets, Facebook updates, answers of Quora, Obama’s health reform, Pirates in Somali, etc. Lastly, consumer’s needs change very quickly, because that’s what life is all about, isn’t it?

Ideally marketers would like to develop profound, complete, accurate, and regularly updated profiles of their target users. They would like to have an insight “lens” into actual aspiration, passions, ambitions, etc. of their target consumers. In other words what they really need is a cross-platform interest graph map of an individual and monitor how it changes over time. This could only happen when people are willing to share all that information themselves.

Luckily, the Social web is an unprecedented environment, which motivates people to share their personal information, attitudes, opinions, interests, beliefs, etc. with the world. By sharing a link on Facebook about Social Media Marketing, Re-Tweeting a post on Bee keeping, blogging about the Interest graph, watching YouTube videos about Italian sports cars, asking/answering Quora questions on travel tips to Spain, listening to classical tunes on Spotify, etc. etc. Every single day we leave a trail of clues of who we are, what we are interested in and what really drives us. This trail is our Interest graph, or to be more precise a sum of multiple interest graphs coming together to portray our interests’ profile.

The amount and accuracy of information we are willing to share online these days is vast. The concept of privacy is being pushed further than ever before, implications of which are beyond the scope of this posts. Now marketers, business people and anyone else who needs to engage with people has got a limitless goldmine called the Social Web at their disposal. All gold rushes have winners and losers. The key to succeeding in marketing on the Social Web will be to efficiently monitor, understand and be able to act upon the cross-platform Interest graph of your target audiences.

Businesses who will use the Interest graph wisely will accumulate extremely accurate, relevant and up-to-date knowledge bank on their target markets enabling them to gain a long-term sustainable competitive advantage over those who don’t.

In my next post, I will take a deeper look at the most important thing for any business. Yes. It’s users/consumers/customers. In particular I will be looking at the new and emerging segment – the Social Consumer.

Post by

Daumis @daumis2475

Co-Founder @ Pinevio

The Interest Graph - Part I

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 07:13:00 -0400

In this post I will try to define the Interest graph, it’s nature and changes on the Web, which have taken the concept to another level.

Phrase the Interest graph is evangelised by new media guru, and recognized writer Brian Solis. In his blog (www.briansolis.com) he dedicated a series of posts trying to explain the Interest graph, show how it’s different from the social graph and underline the importance of it in terms of content consumption, marketing and business.

To understand the phrase better firstly we should define the social graph. That’s a network of relationships based on personal bonds. It’s your family, friends, colleagues, co-workers, people you know, have met, communicated, etc. It’s people you are connected to online.

In contrast, the Interest graph is a network of relationships around particular interests, which needn’t be personal. The subject of interest alone is enough to gather people around it, without the necessity to develop rigid social bonds. The nature of interest relationships is more pragmatic and relevant information around interests is the key motivator to connect.

Even though the Interest graph has been one of the trendiest topics in the Valley and other tech havens during last year or so, it’s not a new notion. Various interest graphs existed online since the beginning of the Internet. They are called – forums, websites where people are enabled to exchange views, opinions, etc, around their interest, without the need to connect further.

So if interest graphs have been there for ages, why all of a sudden people have started to hype and consider it the future of the Web itself? The simple answer is - Facebook. In pre-social media times, forums and other websites were like distant, disconnected islands, populations of which were bounded by the poor connectedness and immaturity of the Internet. Back then different interest graphs were located on different platforms, which rarely communicated with one other, making the broader exchange of information very difficult.

Facebook with us for just 4 years but there are nearly 700 million people on it, one platform of communication. Moreover, that single social platform has penetrated millions of independent websites with Facebook Connect, “like” button; recently “send” button and other options.

The social media has transformed the Web from a dessert of dispersed information, where Google did a brilliant job in putting order to it, to a vibrant and inter-connected space where everyone could be linked to everyone. It’s exactly this inter-connection that has pushed the Interest graph potential to a whole new level.

In the Social web people are enabled to discover information from more sources than ever before, since now we are potentially connected to the entire Web. Now everyone is creating, curating and/or distributing content for others. I would argue that it’s exactly this potential to discover best information from numerous relevant sources that will be driving people to move from more closed personal relationships to open and less binding interest-based relationships.

Facebook has managed to build the social layer on the web. The Interest layer is next!

“The Age of Relevance is here” - TechCrunch.

In the next post I will go into the business side of the Interest graph. What it means for users, consumers and businesses.

Post by Co-Founder Daumis, @daumis2475

Introduction

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:59:00 -0400

Welcome to the Official blog by Pinevio!

Pinevio is a high-tech start-up based in Newcastle, UK. Recently out of the business acceleration program called the Difference Engine, working hard to build a great web app.

Pinevio is a social content discovery platform, allowing our users to discover great content from people with shared interest.

The core idea behind Pinevio is to build the Interest graph, connections with people based around shared interests.

In this blog space the co-founders will be writing about the interest graph, the social consumer (our target users) and problems around managing mountains of social content generated throughout the social web.

Our mission is to help people make sense of the mess that the social web is now!

Please feel free to add your opinions, thoughts and suggestions.

Co-Founder - Daumis