Teacher-turned-entrepreneur Adam Bellow has launched Educlipper, a tool for kids to save and share content from the web.

Educlipper is a “virtual pinboard” of sorts — students can use it to clip news articles, YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, online courses, essays, or any other form of multimedia content. The idea is to curate a digital learning portfolio that you can share with peers and teachers independently of Facebook and Twitter.

Students can sign up outside of class, but thousands of teachers are already using it to augment their lesson plans. Bellow has also found that educators will share online content with one another.

Going forward, Bellow will determine how to make money by potentially selling the service, and it’s building out the functionality so students can create personal profiles. He envisions Educlipper being used more broadly by young professionals and college students, but he’s presently concerned with building a “safe environment for kids.”

Educlipper has been in private alpha for over a year, and Bellow claims that 25,000 teachers and students have already adopted it. Bellow said the idea has taken off because educators “requested it.” Prior to starting the company, he sent a survey with ideas for ed-tech tools and asked teachers to vote for the most viable.

Bellow has built a reputation for his blog Edutecher, which has spiralled into an in-depth resource for ed-tech reviews. He was inspired to launch the site after working as a technology integrationist specialist in a school district. “I’m not in this as a serial entrepreneur,” he said. “I’m trying to solve a very real pain point for teachers.”

Bellow is looking to raise a first round of funding after securing a $600,000 seed round from Learn Capital and Western Technologies, an early investor in Facebook.

Pinterest blocked traffic from Amazon and other websites on Black Friday last week, according to Pinfluencer, a Pinterest analytics service. Socialtimes reported today that extra holiday traffic — and suspected malicious activity — prompted Pinterest to refuse queries from the sites.

Update 9:38PM — Pinterest PR gave me the following statement:

During the holidays, we believe a third party was using Amazon Web Services to scrape our site so we temporarily blocked a specific traffic source, which is a common measure taken by web services. Some legitimate services may have been affected momentarily, but we do not believe that traffic to or from Amazon.com or other Amazon properties was impacted. 

Pinterest drives massive referral traffic that can drive impressive sales for online retailers. And though its growth has slowed in 2012, and the site is virtually ignored by small and medium-sized businesses, it is still on track to be the fourth-largest source of referral traffic on the web.

Amazon added Pinterest buttons to its website earlier this year (although it can be a massive where’s-Waldo exercise to find the social sharing buttons on Amazon’s busy pages). Presumably so many product pages were being viewed and shared by shoppers, Pinterest’s automated danger signals were activated.

The blockage lasted for 15.5 hours, from 11:30 PM on November 23th to 3PM on November 24th. Since Pinfluencer tracks pins, repins, likes, and comments, its services were affected as well.

I’ve contacted both Pinfluencer and Pinterest for more details, and will update this post as those companies respond.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

Go to Rodworks.com today and you’ll find a company that prides itself on offering a vast selection of unique iron works and home decor. The small store peddles picture frames, racks, and designs you can’t find anywhere else. Step on into the company’s web site, read some decorating tips, have a look around, select what you like, and buy.

A year ago, however, you couldn’t do that.

Back then, it was a boutique shop with a handful of stores in Utah, Nevada, and Colorado, that didn’t even have an online shopping cart. It didn’t need one, really. Its small following of customers could swing by the shop, or just pick up the phone and call in an order.

Source: Rod Works website

What Rod Works’ website looks like today.

Everything was manageable and humming along just fine until someone wrote a blog post. On Halloween 2011, Lindsay, the self-proclaimed “gal that runs a DIY blog,” was doing what she always does — sharing her stories of home craft projects. This time, the mother of three boys and author of the Country Girl Home blog posted about her newly fashioned “hand crafted” sofa table.

This particular DIY article set the wheels in motion for what truly illustrates the power of social media for business.

I was first made aware of this story by the folks at Avalaunch Media, a firm that knows quite a bit about social media marketing. Speaking at the SES Conference in San Francisco, the session topic was Pinterest as an effective marketing tool. True to subject matter, these guys told the story spot on.

Lindsay’s blog post picture was pinned to Pinterest, and then re-pinned over and over.

Someone mentioned that the rod she posted could be purchased at Rod Works. A veritable crisis arose, and the company had to react. Rod Works was literally bombarded by Pinterest users, and forced into opening their online store in February 2012.

“We got emails daily for months from Pinterest users, so we eventually opened up our online store in February,” said a company spokesperson. “We quickly sold hundreds of the frame rods and now sell many other unique items daily.”

The moral of the social media story is this: good products that generate a good following have the potential to explode in popularity with the right social channels. Craftsmen and artisans around the world take note, sharpen your Pinterest pinning skills, and brace yourselves for the potential of something remarkable.

Andre Bourque (SocialMktgFella) is a social media marketing and inbound marketing specialist. He is a frequent blogger on social media marketing trends, technologies and events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rod image via Country Girl Home; Rod Works image via Rod Works

Popular social network Pinterest has finally brought its addictive photo-driven service to Android devices and the iPad, a sign it wants to seriously step up its game in mobile.

Pinterest launched in 2010, but it didn’t start gaining traction until late last year. It eventually became the third-most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter in April. Last week, the company ditched invitations and opened registration for anyone who wants to sign up on the spot.

First up, let’s talk Android. Pinterest users have been requesting an Android app for a long while and there were even rumors that Pinterest would launch the app at Google’s big I/O conference in July. But now it’s here and it looks great. The app maintains Pinterest-on-the-desktop’s feel, but shrinks the experience into two columns. When you tap a photo of something you want to see bigger, it fills the screen and gives you the option to repin, like, or comment on the pic. (You can see more photos of the Android app in the gallery below.)

“Android owners have been very vocal with their requests for an app — every product announcement we’ve recently made has resulted in the question ‘What about an Android app?’, the company wrote in a blog post. “We were listening, and our custom-designed Android app makes it simple and fast to pin, so that the time you spend on Pinterest is as productive as possible.”

Now let’s look at the iPad app. As you can see in the photo above, the iPad application also sticks to the Pinterest style its users have come to enjoy. It emulates the browser experience with a four-column layout. In the top right-hand corner, you can tap the menu button to access people you follow, search, and categories like animals, art, and design.

“iPad owners may have the best Pinterest experience yet,” the company wrote. “The app offers users new ways to engage with pins, whether swiping the screen to resume browsing after viewing a board, or using the embedded browser to see what others are pinning from their favorite sites.”

While the mobile releases today mostly focus on Android and iPad, Pinterest also updated its popular iPhone app. The company claims it has made “improvements to stability and performance.”

San Francisco-based Pinterest has raised $138 million to date, including a $100 million mega-round led by Japanese web retailer Rakuten. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital.

Pin-board social network Pinterest will soon launch new profile pages and an iPad app, important steps that will help the company solidify its status as 2012′s hottest startup.

Pinterest launched in 2010, but in the past six months it has seen astronomical growth and now counts as one of the top 10 social networks. According to recent comScore data, Pinterest users spend an average of 89 minutes per month on the site, which easily beats Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Only Facebook users spend more time than Pinterest users, with an average of 405 minutes spend there per month.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at the South by Southwest Interactive conference that the company is working on an iPad app and redesigned profile pages. The upcoming iPad app is especially important because the company only offers an iPhone app at present. Silbermann said the new profile pages will have better discovery abilities and that users should see them by the end of this week.

The Pinterest team also has plans to release an open API and will add the ability to pin content from sites like Hulu, Vimeo, and Netflix.

What are you looking forward to most from Pinterest?

Lockerz, a social commerce site that debuted its a self-expression platform earlier this month, said today that it will guarantee that no other online site will be able to match its prices.

Lockerz is similar to popular online pinboard site Pinterest, which lets users organize and share content and information they love. But Lockerz has put a monetization spin on Pinterest’s business model by offering rewards to its users for sharing content and driving users to make purchases at the site.

“We took our time — a little bit longer than Pinterest — to really come out with a full commerce solution,” Lockerz chief executive Kathy Savitt told VentureBeat.

The company recently announced its new “Locker” look, which allows users to curate “decals,” or the equivalent of a Pinterest Pin, on its website. Those decals can be categorized into groups such as makeup, clothing, and gadgets to be shared around Lockerz and other social networks. The incentive to share these decals is to get points. These points are similar to an arcade ticket. The more you earn, the bigger the prize you can buy at the gift shop. In Lockerz’s case, the more points you earn, the bigger the discount you get off of a “high-end product”. You earn points for each “grab” you get — a grab is when someone shares content you’ve assembled into your Locker.

The website includes a Lockerz shop, where you can use you points on inventory Lockerz has bought outright from retailers. Five-hundred points guarantees you at least a 50 percent discount off any item in the store. Brands in Lockerz’s shop include BCBG, Ella Moss, Xbox 360, and SkullCandy. With today’s low-price guarantee, users can be sure that if they purchase an item on Lockerz and find it cheaper somewhere else, the company will reimburse them for the price difference plus 10 percent.

“I think there are a lot of social companies that try to add commerce, and a lot of commerce companies that have tried to add social. We’ve tried to take a different path,” said Savitt.

Lockerz wants to be the big name in “social commerce,” where people buy products that they’ve seen their friends discuss online. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for years that people are more likely to buy products if their friends have recommended them, and Facebook recently added new features to take advantage of that trend, such as the ability to “want” or “buy” something as opposed to just “like” it.

Seattle-based Lockerz launched in 2009 and currently has 20 million users. It has given out 3 billion points to be used in its store since its launch. Pinterest, on the other hand is rumored to have as many as 13 million users in the 10 months it has been open. If Pinterest finds a way to make money off its users and finally takes its website out of invite-only mode, it will pose a big threat to Lockerz, and potentially to its low-price guarantee.

Lockers image via Shutterstock