“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

In fact, gamification boosts commenting 13 percent, social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and networks 22 percent, and content discovery by a massive 68 percent.

“Sharing and comment are good for business, obviously,” Gigya marketing manager Victor White told me last week. “So having gamification tied in to to sharing and commenting is really valuable.”

Gigya offers social infrastructure services that gamifies sites as well as providing services like social login. According to the company, it touches 1.5 billion users monthly, and half of the ComScore 100 use its services.

Adding gamification to a site, of course, means giving users points, badges, status, and rewards for engaging in desired actions. Done thoughtlessly, it can seem random or manipulative. Embedded intelligently into the core of a site’s purpose, however, it can enhance the user experience and significantly boost both engagement and user growth.

But you have to be careful, White says.

“We have limits in place so users can’t ‘game’ the system and so they don’t spam all their networks in order to level up,” he said.

“Leveling up” is a term from gamer culture, where in order to achieve higher status, gamers must defeat multiple levels or engage in sometimes repetitive tasks. Apparently, some people do this on gamified websites for status, to get some kind of physical reward, or simply to hit the leaderboard.

Commenting and sharing are pretty obvious and simple. But the activity feed is something that many sites have not yet incorporated. It provides a form of social proof, White says, that a site and its content are worthwhile.

“It allows users to see what other socially connected users are doing on the site,” he said. “For example, ‘Victor just shared this article to FB.’ That’s a method of really increasing content engagement, and if you’ve integrated gamification into that, the user has more incentive yet to check it out.”

It also helps brands to identify and target their biggest fans, as they now can tie demographics to actual behaviors. For example, not only does a particular user live in a California and likes the Golden State Warriors, she’s also your top social sharer and has a ton of influence in her online network.

That’s why Pepsi used the solution for Pepsi Soundoff for X Factor and Super Bowl social media promotions, White says. And the social part is critical.

“Gamification needs to be tied to social,” White says. “It’s often thought to be social inherently, but it’s not – there’s a difference between getting a badge, and getting a badge and sharing it. One is social, and one is not.”

photo credit: compscigrad via photopin cc

This company officially emerged out of stealth mode, is within days of shipping its first batch of devices, and announced $6 million in its first round of funding. Connected Data manufactures the Transporter, a piece of hardware that is “online, but off-cloud” for privately sharing, accessing, and protecting files.

The investment was led by a diiptych of gates- Floodgate and Northgate Capital, who are paving the way for Connected Data to distribute their product nationwide.

The Transporter’s $100,000 Kickstarter campaign launched in December and successfully brought in $260,000 from 1,055 backers. Since then, Connected Data signed a deal with a large technology distributor and partnered with national retailers to bring the Transporter to market.

Using the Transporter, people can communicate and shares files with computers and other Transporters from anywhere in the world. It enables communication and global access, while also ensuring security. Traditional hardware storage is not connected to the internet which makes it challenging to share and sync data, while cloud options can be expensive and unreliable for people with large storage needs. The Transporter bridges the gap between the two.

Connected Data was founded in 2011 by “storage professionals” who were frustrated by the available options. Now, there are three versions of the Transporter available. A $199 device with no storage built in, a $299 device with 1 TB, and a $399 with 2 TB of storage.

The team is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Read the company’s blog post. 

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Justin Elof Johnson.

I hop in a car from Lyft, the on-call ride-sharing startup in San Francisco, and I start talking with the driver. She’s a 26-year-old with a Master’s degree and has worked for startups for a few years. A few months ago, she left her job to take some time to figure out what’s next and learn to code.

To make ends meet, she did some research about part-time work. She started out by putting her room on Airbnb and doing a couple tasks a week via TaskRabbit. Now she’s driving her car a couple days a week on Lyft. The combination of these three things is making her more money than she made working full time. Plus, she feels like she’s working for herself without the risk of starting her own company.

Most of the people I meet who are on the supply side of the sharing economy are working between jobs or to using these services to supplement their incomes. Thought these conversations, I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a year where we start to hear about people leaving full-time employment to do a combination of different shared services so they can have a more flexible schedule.

To get a better understanding of these trends, I chatted with several folks from TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Lyft, and Getaround. They are all growing rapidly, expanding to new markets, and on-boarding as many new “sharers” as they can, as fast as they can.

For example, Johnny Brackett of TaskRabbt told me that the company currently has more than 4,000 “Rabbits” on-boarded to their platform and have a waiting list of more then 10,000 people waiting to offer their services to local communities.

Logan Green, CEO and co-founder of Lyft, is tight-lipped about specific statistics involving his community, but he told me that the people signing up to drive for Lyft run the full gambit of backgrounds and experience. He gave me one example of a preschool teacher who is a Lyft driver in her spare time so she can get some adult interactions and a PHD student who drives to get his mind off research for a little bit.

Meg Murray, a marketer at Getaround, said the company has more then 10,000 cars listed for rent on their platform with the average active renter making around $350 per month, and one renter making as much as $1,300 per month.

The average worker for TaskRabbit runs two to three tasks per day and earns $45. A highly specialized Rabbit can make much more per task and bring in as much as $6000 per month.

Airbnb communications pro Emily Joffrion tells me that the company has more than 250,000 properties listed in 34,000 cities across 192 countries around the world. I also got some specific information about San Francisco. Emily tells me that occasional renters in the city can make between $6,900 and $9,300 annually. I also know from experience that at least three friends of mine living in SF at minimum cover their rent by putting rooms on AirBnB. Sometimes they make more.

So based on these numbers we can make some assumptions about what a person should be able to make doing tasks for the whole of 2013. Let’s say this is a woman in San Francisco with no traditional job who is willing to work in the shared economy up to 40 hours per week and has an apartment and a four-door car.

• Renting her apartment out occasionally on Airbnb, she can make: $667/month or $8,000/year
  
• Doing two to three tasks per day on TaskRabbit five days a week, she can make: $2,000/month or $24,000/year
• Lyft told me driving part-time she could make: $750/month or $9000/year
• When not using her car, she can supplement income from Getaround: $350/month and do as needed

Based on these numbers, an individual with no specialized skills should be able to make an average of $41,000 per year. If he or she has specialized skills, the opportunity could be much greater.

Considering people trying to do this get to make and manage their own schedules and effectively be their own boss, this could be an enticing number. I don’t see why it couldn’t be a regular thing to hear people start saying, “I left my job to do tasks on TaskRabbit and drive for Lyft.”

Justin Johnson is an entrepreneur and the founder of Late Labs. You can contact Justin on Twitter (@elof) or hustle@latelabs.com.

Photo via Lyft

Jonah Peretti helped make Huffington Post a success, and now he’s turned BuzzFeed into one of the most powerful new media sites around.

BuzzFeed, founded in 2006, now claims that it has 30 million monthly unique visitors. Compare that to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which has 6.5 million, or the one-year-old Vox Media site The Verge, which has 3.1 million, both according to ComScore.

And BuzzFeed has advertising revenues close to $20 million per year, without carrying a single banner ad. (It focuses instead on selling sponsorships and custom campaigns.

These fascinating data points come from an in-depth interview with Peretti just published by Alyson Shontell over at Business Insider.

How does Peretti do it? By ignoring Google search results and SEO, and focusing exclusively on figuring out how to get people to share the posts Buzzfeed puts up.

Here are some of the pointers BI’s useful interview reveals:

• How BuzzFeed combines algorithms and human editors
• How Peretti managed to run BuzzFeed and HuffPo at the same time
• Why Union Square Ventures almost invested in BuzzFeed
• What Peretti really thinks about his site’s reputation as a purveyor of cat galleries
• What’s next for Buzzfeed (hint: global domination)

Peretti has been unusually open about his strategy in the recent past, telling all for a February New York Times profile as well as a more recent in-depth profile in the Independent (UK), among others.

Read more on Business Insider’s profile of Peretti.

Buffer started as simply a way to buffer or space out your social tweets and shares, with some intelligence that, over time, ensured your updates published at optimal times for maximum engagement. But when HootSuite added auto-scheduling this summer, that specific niche started narrowing.

So Buffer re-engaged with partners, adding a big Twitter client as a partner, plus 49 other developer-partners such as Reeder, Pocket, and Feedly. And now the service is relaunching with a different focus and a different flavor.

“We’ve been working on this for the past six months,” Buffer co-founder Leonhard Widrich told me via email. “We’ve been collecting tons of data of how Buffer was used, how our now 50 partner developers … have gotten usage through our API, and where we see the future of sharing on the social web.”

The result is a refocus as a sharing platform.

Buffer doesn’t want to be a destination anymore; it wants to be a conduit. Content that initially needed to be posted at Buffer’s site or through the app is increasingly coming in via Buffer buttons in browsers or partner integrations. In fact, over 40 percent of the content that flows through the system is already posted via the API, Widrich told me, and that trend is increasing rapidly.

So the actual Buffer app is now refocusing on analytics and some cool social sharing jiu-jitsu. Here are some examples:

Buffer now reveals your top posts across all networks:

With a very cool new user interface, the new Buffer allows you to drag and drop updates from one social account into another:

And, smartly, copy top performing posts from Facebook, for example, to Twitter, to see if they get good engagement there:

It’s a smart upgrade, and it still comes with the benefit of optimum scheduling and release of updates, which should improve engagement with your audience, or just your friends.

But what I really like is that Buffer is adding some real user interface and user experience panache to a social sharing market dominated by HootSuite (which, full disclosure, I use frequently). Although HootSuite does a lot more than simply sharing social updates, its UI and UX leave a lot to be desired.

With 400,000 users compared to HootSuite’s five million, it’s up to Buffer to show that it can compete with the big boys.

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

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

According to Twitter’s blog, the social network is now rolling out a share-this-tweet-via-email feature. Or, as I like to call it, “tweemail.”

If that sounds a little odd from a communications utility that already enables massive amounts of sharing via its own tools on its own service, that’s because it is. But Twitter has a method to its madness, and it’s all about reaching new users:

Of course, you can retweet any of these to your Twitter followers, but sometimes you want to share with another group, like your college roommates or your parents or a friend who isn’t yet on Twitter.

The feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks, Twitter says. A “More” icon will be show up next to the reply, retweet, and favorite buttons. Click it, select email, and Twitter email the tweet, with a comment or introduction, to whoever you wish.

(That does bring up the question: What else will be added with email under the rather nebulous heading of “more.”)

No doubt Twitter will use the email address you send — and the tweemail itself — to market its services to those who are not yet tweeting.

photo credit: factoryjoe via photopin cc

It’s unclear which a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing moron thought this up, but whatever you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, glorifying death — like assassinating a Hamas leader on almost-live YouTube yesterday — and making a game out of war is stupid, wrong, and unspeakably distasteful.

Here are all the badges you can win for participating in this sick game:

I’m going to lay my cards out on the table (stupid, I know) because I don’t want to be mistaken. I support Israel’s right to exist. I support Israel’s right to defend itself. I think that we in the West have absolutely no freaking clue what it’s like to live under threat of terror, rockets, and suicide bombings month after month, year after year.

But it’s not okay to glorify war. It’s not okay to broadcast killings as if they were some sporting match — yay, a goal for our team — or release images of enemy combatants with the word ELIMINATED pasted over top.

You shouldn’t lose your fundamental respect for human life, even in the midst of war, and terror, and death, and destruction.

This is not fun. It is not a game. People are dying. This is not Xbox, this is real life.

War is not a game.

photo credit: mugley via photopin cc; hat tip: ReadWriteWeb

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox just announced a new integration today, and it’s a doozy: Facebook. Starting soon — possibly as early as today — Facebook users can share Dropbox files, pictures, and folders to their friends and contacts in Facebook Groups.

Once you’ve linked your Facebook and Dropbox accounts, you will be able to browse and select files from your Dropbox just as if you were selecting from your own computer and then share them to your group. They’ll immediately show up on your group’s wall, and any updates or changes you make to the documents will automatically be shared to the group as well.

Source: Dropbox

Adding a file from Dropbox to your Facebook group.

This is huge for Dropbox, which in spite of some security missteps has continued to add users at an astounding rate through smart partnerships and bigger, better storage plans.

But I hope they have added plenty of extra storage in anticipation of this integration. Facebook is the mother of all social networks, in the Saddam sense, and if even a fraction of its billion users start using this feature, Dropbox will see a huge influx of new users … and new files.

The feature is rolling out today, and Dropbox says you should see it in Facebook “soon.”

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

Mobli, not to be confused with Mowgli from The Jungle Book, has raised $20 million.

Mobli is a real-time visual media platform where users can share photos and videos from their smartphones. It integrates topical channels and geo-location technology so content is only shared with others who may find it interesting. The app pledges to show users “the world through other people’s eyes.”

It is empathy for the era of social media.

A concert-goer with nosebleed seats could access a video from someone who shelled out for closer seats, and a bride planning a wedding can look at photos of other members on the community for inspiration.

Granted, there are dozens of other, more widely used and established platforms where photos and videos circulate, but that does not seem to stop a team of celebrity investors from throwing in money. According to the statement, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Serena Williams, and Lance Armstrong previously invested in Mobli.

This Series B came almost entirely from Kenges Rakishev, listed by Forbes as one of the 50 most influential people in Kazakhstan.

Which begs the questions, how many influential people are there in Kazakhstan?

It brings Mobli’s total funding to $28 million.

Mobli is based in the urban jungle of New York.

The question, of course, is how.

Working with social infrastructure company Gigya, Indigo sharply increased social sharing and doubled social traffic from all sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest … in just two months.

“We’re going through a massive transformation into becoming the book lover’s lifestyle store,” Indigo director Dave McLean told VentureBeat. “That includes home and lifestyle products.”

As the company works through the transformation from books to the bookish lifestyle, Indigo wanted to engage with clients and invite them into the brand evolution. That’s where Gigya came in. Gigya provides social plugins, gamification tools, and extensive social data that helps sites find and reward top fans.

“We wanted three things,” McLean said. “A tool for customers to become more engaged, insight into which new products where worthy of being pinned, and the ability to reach the global Pinterest marketplace.”

When Indigo launched Pinterest sharing tools in early March of this year, the company saw an almost immediate 78 percent jump in social sharing and 218 percent leap in social traffic.

“It spawned a sharing frenzy,” McLean told VentureBeat.

Indigo credits three things for the instant Pinterest success.

First of all, the site’s core demographic is women in their 30s and 40s, which matches up with Pinterest fairly well. Secondly, the company’s new products were highly pinnable: visual and appealing. And thirdly, Indigo credits Gigya for the tools that made it happen, simply.

But it wasn’t all about sharing. Using the Gigya tools, Indigo is also finding out what content is worthy of being pinned, and feeding that data into the innovation and product development process on a weekly basis, helping the company decide which products to carry and market.

And sales results? I asked Indigo about sales from social traffic.

“We do track sales as a result of social traffic, but so far social referred revenue still represents a small portion of overall revenue,” McLean says.

The company says it’s still early to decide what social commerce really means and how it works.

“We’re in the first inning of a 9-inning ball game,” according to McLean.

But one tidbit of data the company will release: Conversion rates for Pinterest traffic are 50 percent higher than conversion rates from other traffic. That’s not just social traffic but all referred traffic, and that’s a major increase.

This is something we’ve heard before, and it’s good news for Pinterest and retailers, though perhaps not as good for Facebook and Twitter.

Mclean says the company, which also runs 240 physical locations, is still just learning to understand social.

With results like these, Indigo is obviously off to a good start.

Image credit: Stefano Lunardi/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

My phone is full of pictures of the dishes I try at new restaurants, and now these tasty shots have a place to go beyond my SD card. Previously available on the iPhone, Evernote Food launches Thursday for Android devices. Use the app to document your meals in  pictures and words. It will then back up that info to Evernote’s main note-keeping service.

Being a photo-obsessed foodie, I wish this app was around during my European travels, which were full of the best food I’ve ever eaten. Memories of pasta in Italy, pastries in France, and Thai food in London would live on in my Evernote account, not just in my brain.

The app uses your smartphone camera to capture the location, details, and photos of your favorite meals. Using Foursquare data, the app records the location of the restaurant or café where you’re enjoying your unforgettable meal. You can tag each post by cuisine, memorable event, or even ingredients to help you remember the experience and tastes when you want to reminisce (or maybe it’s just me that still thinks about what I ate in a café in Paris when I was 15).

Because we can’t help but share everything we do, especially what we eat, you can share your posts to other social network apps already on your phone. I know I’m guilty of tweeting pictures of my meals.

Food lets you capture each item from a meal and lump them together in one meal note. Once you take a picture and start to tag your meal, the app will display related notes of what it thinks might be related to your post, such as a recipe stored in Evernote.

Evernote Food is available for free in the Google Play store. It joins another app from the company that recently came to the Android side, Evernote Hello.

French pastry image via Flickr user Mike & Anna

Released last year, SQI gave publishers the ability to measure social activity across the Internet. The company’s new tools will let advertisers and publishers figure out where their social weaknesses are, as well as what content is effective and how to gain more user interaction.

Utilizing 27 content categories, including travel, clothing, finance, fitness and others, the SQI Analytics Dashboard shows publishers a monthly social score of their content categories matched up against 1.4 million other sites with more than 15 billion monthly users. Although the patent is still pending, their proprietary algorithm derives raw social traffic scores by evaluating page views, user engagement, inbound clickback traffic and outbound shares.

The tools will allow publishers to better scope out the competition. Publishers can use SQI Lookup to search scores of other publishers within the ShareThis Publisher Network. Any company will be able to see how their social categories compare to others, which should help them make better business decisions.

“Before SQI, online publishers had no standardized way to measure or leverage the value of social activity taking place on their sites,” said Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of ShareThis, in a statement today. “As publishers look for new ways to monetize, SQI gives them the benchmark they need to optimize their content, better engage their readers, attract new advertisers and take advantage of untapped revenue opportunities.”

Photo via nan palmero/Flickr

If you haven’t heard of Fancy, think of it this way: Fancy is to Pinterest as Tumblr is to WordPress. It even has its own verb: to fancy. Users upload images to the site much like at Pinterest, by uploading or using a bookmarklet to identify an image on a webpage. Then friends and followers can see the “fancied” items, follow you, comment, and “re-fancy” an image to post it to their own stream. Fancy is a bit simpler and a little bit more elegant than Pinterest, if that’s possible.

Of course, the analogy breaks down when you look at number of users. Fancy is still closing in on a million users, whereas Pinterest is well into the tens of millions, with over 100 million visitors to the site in January of 2012.

The key update today is commerce. And the big question is whether Fancy is prematurely optimizing for monetization over community and growth.

Buying things on Fancy, whether on the site or the app, is simple: see something you like (or fancy, if you will), and tap it. A buy now button appears; tap it, and you’re ordering the item. The app includes standard shopping cart technology so you can continue your journey through the items that you may or may not have bookmarked, and add additional products.

Users can download the new app here. I have one quibble: it only works in portrait mode, not landscape. Flipboard and similar tablet apps have conditioned users to the freedom to view content as they wish to see it, and it would be nice to have both options.

In a statement, founder and CEO Joe Einhorn mentioned that Oscar de la Renta sold $10,000 worth of product on Fancy in just one week. So Fancy has built an effective social commerce platform. But is it the right decision for the long-term future and growth of the community? Reviewing the app, I have some doubts.

If you look at the Fancy experience, pre-commerce (or even today, on any item that does not have a price tag), it’s much like Pinterest. It’s social, it’s playful, it’s all about discovery and sharing cool stuff.

Adding in commerce changes the equation somewhat. It reminds me of Dan Arielly, who warns in his book Predictably Irrational that mixing social norms and market norms is dangerous.

For instance, take a look at the image to the right. Without the “Book Hotel Now” title and price tag, it’s a great shot of a father, son, and elephant. Wow. But with the price tag … how much different does this image feel?

The danger is that Fancy is transforming art into an ad.

The difference is that between a social space and a store. It remains to be seen whether users will feel as happy socializing, sharing, and creating in a partly commercial space as they did in a purely social space.

App people photo credit: Shutterstock

"Viddy well, little brother. Viddy well." - Clockwork Orange - 1971

If Instagram is worth an eye-popping one billion dollars, who’s to say the fast growing Viddy, which lets users easily record videos, apply filters and share with friends, isn’t on the same rocket ship trajectory.

The company, founded in April 2011, has added nearly 10 million users in the last two months and brought on a boatload of celebrities as advisors and investors. Now reports are flying fast and furious that Viddy is raising a series B of $30 million at a valuation between $300-370 million.

Viddy is one of many apps that have recently seen a huge growth surge thanks to smart integration with the Facebook timeline. The company was coasting along at around five million monthly active users through Facebook until they relaunched their app. With the timeline integration, they more than doubled that number in the last two weeks.

It’s not clear that Viddy is a direct competitor to Facebook in the way that Instagram was. Photo sharing is Facebook’s big feature and mobile was the area it was most concerned about leading into its IPO.

User generated video, on the other hand, is a market that has never really produced a profit. Youtube, despite its enormous size, is increasingly focused on producing professional content in the hopes of turning a profit.

The integration isn’t huge, but it’s perhaps a sign of what Dropbox has been working on since acquiring business-collaboration company Cove and adding its former Facebook execs to the Dropbox staff.

To get started with the new Facebook/Dropbox feature, go to the Dropbox Share page and sign in to your Facebook account. Then pick a folder you want to share, but instead of entering an email address or Dropbox username, start typing a friend’s Facebook name and Dropbox will automatically find it.

Shared folders are usually used to collaborate on projects or share relevant files, but as The Next Web points out, Dropbox’s example in its tweet may reveal that the company is hoping to tap into new sharing situations. Instead of posting a funny picture to Facebook, you could add a bunch of friends to a shared folder and then just drag and drop funny picture after funny picture to the same folder for your friends’ amusement.

Several services have done the opposite, trying to capture Facebook photos and put them into Dropbox. You can use IFTTT, a task-creation service, to pull photos and videos into Dropbox every time you add something new to Facebook. Perhaps one day Dropbox will offer a similar service.

Digg, Trendspottr, and InboxQ have joined the HootSuite App Directory; a collection of apps and social media sites that you can manage with HootSuite. Each app has a unique set of features that you can access with HootSuite’s dashboard.

Those who use Digg, a community that shares new stories and videos from all over the web, can use Hootsuite to view current top stories, “digg” stories, and share content.

Trendspottr tracks topics, hashtags, and phrases that are trending on social networks and news sites. Now Trendspottr users can keep on top of trending topics, search for popular content, and share videos and stories in the Hootsuite dashboard.

Lastly, InboxQ tracks questions that are asked on Twitter about businesses or general topics. With Hootsuite, those who use InboxQ can find questions asked on Twitter about their business and respond to them directly.

The company also announced integration with click.to, an extension used to share information on social networks rapidly and efficiently. You can now share content directly to HootSuite from click.to, no copy and paste required.

The final announcement HootSuite made Wednesday was that its Engagement API is now open. Developers can use the API to connect more services to Hootsuite (Google+ anyone?). The company will be releasing more details on how to access the API in the coming days.

Much of this dynamic has been enabled by technology that allows us to create and form virtual networks in a very efficient way. By connecting with one another online, the speed and scale of the network can grow so quickly that it is impossible to know each other on a personal level. All we can care about is, does a person have what I want, and can I trust them to give it to me.

But would collaborative consumption work in China? China is a rapidly developing economy and society. However, in my opinion, it still has some obvious obstacles to fully implementing collaborative consumption models. A major part of how collaborative consuption functions is “Can I trust them to give this to me or not steal/ruin what I am giving them?”

But in China, this is exactly biggest problem — the lack of trust.

There are already some well-known companies based on the collaborative consumption in the U.S. Airbnb is a website that allows people with a spare room or empty home to rent it out to other people for a fee. It was a take-off of Couchsurfing.org, a non-profit social network that connected backpackers with lend a spare beds and couches for free. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, Getaround is a car sharing site that allows people to rent their cars to people when they are not using them. Taskrabbit is a site that allows people to sell their spare time to other people. For example, if I need to someone to pick up my dry-cleaning or do my grocery shopping, I can find someone available on Taskrabbit. Lendingclub is a site that matches money lenders and borrowers. Skillshare is a site that allows people to teach people their skills.

There are a lot of new models like this that are changing society from hyper-consumption to hyper-utlization. It makes sense for us to maximize the value of our things, so they’re not wasted. Sharing things means we don’t always have to own something, but can instead borrow it from someone else. This makes it cheaper for someone who doesn’t need it all the time, and generates extra money for the person lending it out.

Rachel Botsman gave a TED Talk in 2010 and explained that this model of sharing helps the world by extending the term that is often used for environmental protection “reduce, re-use, recycle” and now “re-distribute.” The implications of this are massive. It can greatly reduce the need to manufacture or produce as many things in the world, thereby saving the environment or using up tons of unnecessary energy, electricity, money and other resources. However, the collaborative consumption model might worry existing companies because they will no longer be able to sell as much. (I guess its payback time for all the companies that purposefully manufactured products to last less time that they potentially could, just so we’d have to buy more.)

Again, a pre-cursor to us using such sites or collaborative consumption platforms is trust. However, the Internet over the past ten years has already started to build-in mechanisms that solve such issues. There are ratings, reviews, comments, background checks, and scores. Botsman points out in her talk that, since we spend so much time online, we are leaving traces of our personality and credibility everywhere. Instead of people needing a credit history to prove they are reliable, all the transactions, comments and interactions they’ve made online will form the value of our “social currency.”

You can see it on the streets here in China; people don’t really trust one another. Usually it is the foreigner that is told to hold their bag in front of them, in case they are robbed. But in Beijing at least, I see Chinese people holding their bags in front too. There are so many people in China that the range of characters and trustworthiness immensely varies too. Even Chinese people tell me there is a trust issue here. When stories stick in people’s psyche about people cheating each other at the market or government officials being corrupt, it makes you wonder, who can you trust?

In the e-commerce space, trust is an issue that has had to be resolved for tech companies to function properly. Alipay, the payment gateway of Alibaba (the PayPal of China) solved much of the problem by working as an escrow system. Money is paid through Alipay, the goods are delivered, and when goods are received the money is released to the seller. China needed this system before it could really grow into such a huge e-commerce industry. However collaborative consumption and e-commerce are different, whereby collaborative consumption has a stronger focus on the person.

I know friends who are working on collaborative consumption models in China and have the vision to unlock the full potential of assets, reduce waste, and save the environment. This is a great mission and should be pursued in China. However I think that it will be a challenge to make it widely embraced in China, at least now.

This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner based in China.

Barter image via ShutterStock

Copy and paste is so 2011. Or so says Click.to, a new app for Mac and Windows that lets you copy content and send it exactly where you want it to go with one click — no pasting required.

With Click.to, you can send email attachments, publish content to Facebook, save text to Evernote, upload images to Flickr, search products on Amazon — the list goes on and on. You can even create custom actions to send content to nearly any website or computer application.

Say you’re reading an article online and come across a phrase you’d like to tweet. Instead of copying the phrase, navigating to Twitter and pasting the phrase in the new tweet field, all you have to do is copy the words and click on the Twitter button from the Click.to menu that appears. On an even simpler level, you can copy any word or phrase and use Click.to to go directly to Google to look it up.

Every time you copy text, images, or files, Click.to displays a menu of icons for the websites and services where you can send the content. Click.to is very customizable; you can choose which icons pop up, which are icons are hidden in an extended menu and even where on the screen Click.to displays its menu.

Productivity is Click.to’s main goal. It cuts down on the amount of clicks and browsing needed for the most common computer tasks we all do. The app even tracks your number of “Missed Opportunities” — the number of times you copy, click and paste content instead of using Click.to so you can track how click.to increases your productivity.

Click.to was released in July 2011 and since added 17 official partners to its service including Amazon, eBay, Skype and Evernote. The company is in talks with other websites and services for partnership opportunities. Click.to is currently available as a free download for Mac and Windows, with Android and iOS apps set to be available in the next few months.

Want to share memories with your significant other without sharing to your entire social network? Or maybe show videos and photos to your best friend and no one else? Meet Ourspot, a new website that creates a space to share videos, links, notes and memories between you and one other person.

“Most sites on the Internet are egocentric. With Ourspot, we want to make everything relationship centric, focusing on the relationship between two people,” Ourspot founder Sam Yam told VentureBeat in an interview. ”Originally the site was designed for romantic couples to be entirely private and share personal intimate details. As we kept building on it, we decided to open it up to everyone.”

Ourspot was originally meant for couples to record their relationship as it grew. In the same way that some people (this writer included) keep boxes of ticket stubs and love notes, Ourspot collects and stores memories, photos, videos and links that have meaning in a relationship. Beyond the romantic aspect, it can be used to share and gather information between any two people: best friends, siblings or colleagues.

Facebook and Google+ give you control over what you share with your friends and followers, but neither are designed to share information with just one other person. Ourspot aims to create a space where memories and relationship details can be shared without the worry of others seeing, perfect for intimate romantic details or secrets between friends.

The website launched Tuesday and is open to anyone. You can connect with your Facebook account and Ourspot will create spots for you and your significant other, as well as your closest Facebook friends. In the coming months Ourspot plans to release an iOS app for sharing pictures and other details on-the-go.

Renters can now review a space’s potential for productivity with categories such as noise and Wi-Fi strength. There are rankings for “coolness,” which include the overall vibe of the space and the neighborhood. A community category wants to know what your co-workers were like, and if there was a potential for networking. Loosecubes has also added Facebook comments to the profiles of particular spaces, and a feature that will show who the regulars are at a particular location.

“Through shared workspace we’ve seen a lot of really great relationships formed both personally and professionally, co-founder Anthony Marinos told VentureBeat. “Because the vibe is more open, sparks fly.” Marinos says creating community is just as important as helping businesses rent out excess space.

Services such as Getaround (rent out your car) and Airbnb (rent out your home) have helped popularize the idea of collaborative consumption, another term for sharing for profit. There are lots of things in our garages or closets we own but never use, and there’s a good chance someone nearby could use them. With smartphones and social networks it’s easier than ever to connect to a pool of people who can harness the idling capacity of all that stuff. And now office space is no different.

Loosecubes has more than 1,300 listings spread across 534 cities worldwide, and its inventory has increased by 150 percent in the last six months, according to Marinos. Loosecubes’ website now lists an inventory worth more than $50 million, co-founder and chief executive officer Campbell McKellar told VentureBeat. And in New York City, where the company is located, there are more Looscubes locations than Starbucks. Loosecubes recently surpassed rival Regus in the number of office locations it offers. Marinos says that the average number of weekly reservation requests has increased by 600 percent since April.

Loosecubes is ideal for businesses that have extra space and want to make money renting it out. It’s common for new startups to rent desk spaces from a larger company until they get funding, or until they hire more people and outgrow the situation. Generally these arrangements are formal and somewhat longterm. Loosecubes makes it possible for entrepreneurs to rent space only when they need it.

Perhaps best of all, Loosecubes has a sweet portfolio of well-known companies renting out spare office space. As hard as it may be to get your resume in front of the decision makers at today’s hot startups, with Loosecubes you can work alongside Silicon Valley stars such as HotelTonight, Task Rabbit and Rickshaw Bags in San Francisco. In New York, the roster of Loosecubes office spaces includes Weldbilt Studio and the DUMBO Spot, both of which are in Brooklyn.

To date, Loosecubes has raised $1.2 million from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and friends and family.

Netflix users in Canada and Latin America will soon be able to see what streaming videos their Facebook friends have been watching, but those of us in the U.S. will have to wait a bit longer due to a 1980s law regulating wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings hit the stage at Facebook’s f8 developer conference today to announce the news, which could fundamentally change the way Netflix users get recommendations. But while it’s a big shift for the company, enthusiasm about the social integration was dampened by its unavailability in the U.S.

“We won’t yet enable it for U.S. members due to a 1980s law that creates some confusion over our ability to allow U.S. members to share what they watch,” Netflix’s Tom Willerer wrote today on the company’s blog. The company points out that new legislation (H.R. 2471) has been introduced that will allow consumers to share their viewing data. To help the legislation along, Netflix has launched a campaign asking its subscribers to email Congress in support.

Netflix killed off its homegrown social features some time ago, and since then it has relied entirely on its algorithm to recommend content to viewers. In 2009, the company awarded a $1 million prize to a team of statisticians who created an algorithm that best its own. But now, Hastings seems to realize there’s some value in listening to your friends.

At F8, he talked about how Netflix would constantly recommend the TV series “Breaking Bad” to him, but it wasn’t until he saw a friend watching it that he felt the urge to start. “Watching content ‘because my friend did it’ really trumped [sic] ‘because the algorithm,” Hastings said.

The Facebook integration will start rolling out in Canada and Latin America before the end of September. Once available, subscribers only need to connect to their Facebook accounts from Netflix’s webpage. The company stresses that your viewing habits will only be shared if you connect to your Facebook account, and the feature can be turned off at any point.

The emerging “sharing economy” consists of businesses dedicated to changing the very way in which we live. Tools to improve efficiency, lower cost, and encourage collaborative consumption now serve as the driving force of these companies, creating a whole new kind of economy.

Arguably, the most significant progress thus far has been made in the workplace.

The work environment is undergoing significant change. We used to be a nation of office workers. We committed our lives to single companies, and went to work in the same location every day.

Things have changed. We’re now a group of 1 billion mobile workers, and growing. Mobile workers are catalyzing major changes in how we do business.

Mobile and cloud computing technologies have made roaming connectivity and real-time collaboration not only possible, but commonplace. There is a steady and continuing shift toward shared workplaces, both public and private.

Most importantly, we have a collective mandate for sustainability and efficiency, both environmental and economic. We have laid the foundation of a new sharing economy.

Not A Temporary Change

The New York Times recently reported that the percentage of temporary workers hired in the private sector has increased drastically, with many companies now organizing around short-to medium-term projects that can be doled out to temporary or contract workers.

Progressive companies realize they will benefit from offering employees flexibility with where they work. Plus, more companies want their workers closer to their customers in order to serve them better. This results in having more workers outside the corporate facility.

And it’s mutual. Today’s employees demand that business practices adapt to their way of living and doing, blurring the lines between home and work. Mobile workers don’t want to work in their car, or an endless string of coffee shops.

We want access to quiet offices, connectivity, and the ability to have productive meetings, as we want and when we want.

The very idea of location itself is evolving in the minds of today’s workers. We don’t necessarily think of a workplace as a fixed, physical location. Instead, many companies today are born virtual, with no physical headquarters.

One Place Does Not Fit All

In parallel, there is an increasing supply of office space available to solve the needs of mobile workers. The challenge is most people don’t know how to find the space, or access it.  There is plenty of capacity — it’s just a matter of matching needs to ability, in real-time.

Marketwatch recently published an article titled: “Say Goodbye to the Office Cubicle.” It pointed to rising corporate office vacancy rates, as high as 30% in central districts.

Those vacancies shouldn’t be understood as a lack of demand for office space. Workers still need space. Employers still need space. The space just needs to be more flexible, especially in terms of where it is available, as much as when.

For many organizations, the traditional 5-7 year lease is, frankly, daunting. The commitment seems too long and the cost too high. But these companies still need space and resources to scale their businesses.

What we want — and need, frankly — is a more fluid and flexible approach to corporate real estate that is on-demand, at our service and placeless.

But in order for such an approach to be sustainable, and accommodate new work styles, both sides of the equation must receive mutual gain – those with excess capacity, and those in need of a place to work. Each side receiving even further gain with the introduction of new marketplaces, transaction service providers, vacancy locators, middleware and more.

To say the least, mobile work behaviors are creating a giant market opportunity and many ambitious companies have already started seizing the opportunity to fill the needs created by it.

There’s A Marketplace For That

At the highest level, technology has enabled new, powerful marketplaces to be created that match needs of customers with availability of valuable assets, of which office space is just one example.

We are learning how to share and how to rent things. There are now marketplaces for all sorts of sharing – cars, chores, lessons, goods, space and more.  AirBnB, which has amassed a $1B valuation, has created a marketplace for lodging, leveraging unused space in homes.

Peer-to-peer networks that match supply to demand have established a new norm for getting things that we want and want done. We already have more ready access to the sharing economy than you probably realize. This is similar to the way Ebay ushered in the birth of P2P online marketplaces for exchanging consumer goods.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said that everything that can be social, will be social. I think that everything that can be shared, will be shared.

Big changes are afoot, in how companies are started, how they are managed, and how they are operated. Seeing the hidden opportunities all around us is quickly becoming core competence for employers and employees alike.

Excess capacity of many kinds has sat on the sideline for too long, and we’re only just starting to understand how to leverage it in new ways.

Our culture is starting to reinforce notions of capacity sharing and mutual economic gain as normative, even mainstream behavior, even despite some high-profile mishaps. We can expect even more innovation in the months and years to come.

Tod Francis is a managing director at Shasta Ventures and has 25 years of experience working with consumer-driven companies. At Shasta, Tod is an investor in LiquidSpace and his investment focus is on technology-enabled companies serving consumers.

Top photo: Pell Studio/Shutterstock

This is one of those ideas that took me a few minutes to wrap my head around. After all, it’s perfectly easy to share links with your friends and connections on social networks already, with or without the help of link shorteners such as Bit.ly. But Bo.lt co-founder and chief executive James Roche pointed out that what you share doesn’t have your personal stamp.

When you “Bo.lt” a Web page, on the other hand, the service creates a fully functional, fully editable copy. Bo.lt offers simple tools to edit any portion of the website, say by removing an image or changing some text, and if that’s not enough freedom for you, it also allows you to go in and directly rewrite the HTML. Then you can share that personalized version of the webpage with friends, family, or customers.

From a professional perspective, Roche told me, the goal is to “take IT out of the process” and allow marketers to edit webpages themselves. As an example, he showed me how a real estate agent might edit a home listing that they sent to their client by skipping over the photos they don’t like and highlighting the most appealing image. Houseplans.com already uses Bo.lt to create pages for the 31,000 different house plans it sells and to customize those pages for various audiences.

But not everyone who uses Bo.lt will be a marketer, Roche said. If you’re just a regular Web user, you might want to personalize Web pages before you share them with your friends, sometimes in serious ways (say if you were buying a house and wanted to share the listing with your parents, but you wanted to hide the price first), and sometimes in less-than-serious ways (for example by inserting your photo into a news story).

So how are website owners going to feel about all this copying and editing? Roche said it should ultimately benefit them, because their ads still get served, and it still counts as a pageview in services like Google Analytics. And visitors will be more motivated to share content that they’ve customized — as he put it, they will have “skin in the game.”

And if publishers aren’t convinced? Roche declined to lay out a specific course of action, but he said he will ultimately side with consumers and their freedom to share. And he did note that Bo.lt will, for now, be excluding Web pages with financially sensitive information.

San Francisco-based Bo.lt has already raised $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital. The basic service is free, but the company will charge for professional features like sharing pages with your own URL rather than Bo.lt’s.

Honestly, I’m surprised Facebook didn’t see this coming. The feature was announced on its developer blog on Friday, and it was accompanied by several other platform improvements. Much like the company’s failed Beacon feature, which shared Facebook user activity from external sites, sharing such personal information as user addresses and phone numbers seems like a good idea from a developer perspective, but it’s the sort of thing that freaks out general users.

Either the company was blind to the potential for user uproar, or it figured it could sneak in the feature without users noticing.

Purdy points out that users have to explicitly choose to share their personal information with third parties, and they can always see what information they’re sharing via Facebook’s Application Dashboard. But he agrees the company needs to do more to explain the process to users:

Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.

We’re not free of the feature yet, but at least Facebook’s requests to share your information will likely be improved over the coming weeks. In particular, I suspect Facebook’s “Request for Permission” dialog box, which currently pops up whenever you choose to share information with third parties, will get some sort of facelift.

Image via Massimo Barbieri

Once might say that search is one of Reddit’s most important features, giving users the ability to find the various pieces of content posted by users and share it with their social networks. According to a post in July, Reddit fixed its search issues by using IndexTank, a website search tool.

While fixing search may have helped with growth numbers, many speculate that a major factor was the ongoing struggle by competitor Digg.com. The company appears to have had a competitive advantage in the beginning, but changes and unsatisfied users may have added to Reddit’s success. Just a few months ago, Reddit reported seeing an uptick in page views as well as other numbers.

Growth may also have been seen from a successful “secret santa” campaign the company recently launched for the holidays. Created by a user, redditgifts.com matches anyone interested in giving gifts with a random Reddit user. More than 17,000 Reddit users from 90 countries were exchanging gifts as of Christmas Day.

Reddit, which is owned by media company Conde Nast, has about 10 employees. It has staff in San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Back in June, we covered the Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup Libox, which aims to let you play your media on any device, and easily share media with friends. Now Libox has released a free iPhone app, and after playing around with it for a few hours, it’s clear that the company has created something that practically every iPhone owner would find invaluable.

The company already has a very capable mobile web version of its service available (accessible by heading to Libox.com on your smartphone), but its new iPhone app offers an even more refined user experience. Menus are more responsive, media loads faster, and the app also allows you to add media directly from your iPhone to your Libox library (making it accessible on any computer that can access the web, and other mobile devices).

I used the app to play music and video on both Wi-Fi and 3G connections, and for the most part it performed flawlessly. Load and overall response was certainly faster on Wi-Fi, but I was surprised at how well the app functioned over 3G — especially considering the erratic AT&T data speeds near my apartment. Compared to the mobile web version, media loaded much more quickly, and the app also has the advantage of being iOS 4-ready — meaning that you can multitask while playing your media, something you can’t do at all with the web version.

The app works well enough that it’s now my go-to choice for streaming media from my desktop — which has over 80-gigabytes of music, and hundreds of gigabytes of video. The company is planning on releasing iPad and Android apps next.

Libox was founded by entrepreneur and engineer Erez Pilosof, who previously founded Walla!, Israel’s largest web portal. Oren Nauman, formerly CEO of Mobival, serves as Libox’s deputy CEO. Thus far, the company has received over $2 million in seed funding by Israeli firms Evergreen Venture Partners and Rhodium.

Libox is aiming to do the impossible: The Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup wants to help people manage their digital media collections by making any media file — be it a picture, song, or high-definition video — available across multiple devices, as well simplifying the age-old problem of sharing media files with friends. And, to make things even more complex, the company wants to do this for free, with no file sharing limits.

After working on the problem for two years, Libox is launching today a public beta of its service for anyone to try. Having used the service for several days now, I can attest that it works as advertised.

The core of the Libox service is an attractive application that runs on Windows PCs and Macs. You can add any media files you like to the software’s library. Once there, it’s instantly accessible from any other computer running Libox’s software, or via Libox’s web-based interface (which also offers a mobile-optimized version for smartphones). You can easily share any files in your Libox media library with friends on the service.

Your files are never uploaded to any servers. Instead, they’re initially streamed directly from the computer that first uploaded the file, and then streamed from any subsequent devices that access the file. Libox describes its technology as “a patent-pending combination of distributed, grid and peer-to-peer networking technologies along with highly sophisticated analytic algorithms.” The service basically creates private clouds between devices with Libox’s software — which allows Libox to share the burden of storing and sending files across multiple devices. Because of this unique networking technology, Libox is able to offer free and unlimited media sharing, as well as complete privacy for users.

The company also puts an emphasis on quality — any file that you share will be made available in its highest quality whenever possible. Libox’s service automatically optimizes the size and resolution of the media depending on the device accessing it. When offline, Libox allows users to view content they’ve already streamed from the service. Users can also download individual files directly to their hard drives, as well. Currently, Libox can handle pretty much any media file format you throw at it, including popular video formats like Matroska, Divx, and Xvid.

Libox plans to monetize by partnering with content companies to deliver media via its service. For example, it would be a great way for movie studios to make high-quality movie trailers available to consumers in a distributed fashion. The company is also planning to release its open API later this year, which would allow developers to release apps using its platform. Android, iPhone, and iPad Libox apps are expected later this summer (those devices can still view content via the web interface).

The company was founded by entrepreneur and engineer Erez Pilosof, who previously founded Walla!, Israel’s largest web portal. Oren Nauman, formerly CEO of Mobival, serves as Libox’s deputy CEO. Thus far, the company has received over $2 million in seed funding by Israeli firms Evergreen Venture Partners and Rhodium.

With Facebook users sharing more than 5 billion pieces of content a week, it’s becoming clear that people are finding more photos, articles and videos than ever before through friends.

A Palo Alto-based startup called Sharetivity is trying to tap into that. It simultaneously shares content to all of your social networks and selected email contacts, while bookmarking it at the same time. It’s like social bookmarking service Delicious but aims for a more mainstream audience because it rests on top of powerful existing social networks.

The startup uses a browser plug-in (which may present a hurdle for new users) that lets people select multiple pages and share them with one click. They can pass content along through as few or as many social channels as they want. There’s also a discussion board where you can comment on shared items from friends.

While there might be a small subset of users that want to organize and save their shared content with specialized services like Sharetivity, Delicious, or the very visual French startup Pearltrees, I suspect that a mainstream audience may want to stick with existing basics like Facebook. Browser plug-ins are also an extremely difficult approach because you have to convince new users to go to your site, install the app, and then actively use it.

The company has raised angel funding and hopes to secure marketing partnerships to bring in revenue.