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Mass Relevance, a startup that brings calm to a crazy sea of social activity, is rolling out a new digital mosaic product today at SXSW that essentially builds an image using tweets, Facebook updates, photos, and even Vine videos.

You may have seen Mass Relevance’s platform and not even known it, as it’s been used several times to help manage the flow of tweets for broadcast television or streaming events, such as President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. The company’s technology allows its clients to manage a list of questions sent to someone on stage or on camera, conduct polling in real-time, display a stream of the best social updates, and much more. In fact, Mass Relevance has even been powering the Q&A sessions at SXSW, which has netted the company compliments by nearly everyone on stage who has used it.

The new digital mosaic (called Dynamic Mosaic) integrates real-time social content from multiple sources — including content from Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Google+ – that automatically curates the stream of activity into something that’s visually pleasing and digestible to an audience. Brands that use the company’s new product have control over the experience, too. That means they can choose to flow sponsored and specific accounts to the foreground to promote messages, sponsors, and personalities. (Check out an example here.)

“Social curation and re-display is still very much a new frontier,” Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker told VentureBeat. “Social integration is typically approached in two ways:  1) Highlighting the content itself, for example a stream of Facebook posts and Tweets, or a photo wall of Instagram content, or 2) … not necessarily show[ing] the content itself, but rather visualiz[ing] how social conversations are trending by criteria like volume, keyword mentions, or geography.”

When I heard about Dynamic Mosaic, I immediately thought of a socially curated mass of content that would be displayed in the form of Abraham Lincoln, but apparently this isn’t the case with Mass Relevance’s new tool.

The mosaic flows from left to right, allowing about 2 seconds for photos to be paused and 6 seconds for automatically played vine videos.

The Dynamic Mosaic is the first platform to really show the market potential of Vine, the short-video social network that Twitter purchased a few months ago. Within days of the acquisition, Decker said, Mass Relevance’s platform was able to source, curate, and re-display Tweets in real-time that had Vine-embedded videos.

“What’s particularly interesting about how they are displayed within the Dynamic Mosaic is the way the experience automatically detects when Vine videos are embedded,” Decker said. “The motion of the experience will slow down to allow the video to play before streaming to the next piece of content — whether it be a Tweet, another video, or photo.”

Decker said there’s a huge opportunity for Vine:

“It’s more about the opportunity that Vine holds for major brands using the platform to create social experiences within their ‘owned’ digital properties. Now, major brands can leverage real-time video sharing gaining fast adoption within the market. The main difference between Vine and other social video clips is really the brevity — you’re only allowed 6 seconds. The short length of Vine videos force the user to focus on creativity with a less-is-more mentality. … What’s more, Vine is easily integrated into a platform and device where consumers are already spending increasingly long amounts of time — Twitter and mobile respectively. The sharability factor is high, as followers can quickly consume and amplify Vine videos throughout the social sphere.

One of the first clients to use the new Dynamic Mosaic will be IMAX, which is planning to show off a socially driven mosaic experience during SXSW’s Film Intermission party, with a video clip of its mosaic in action to go live tomorrow.

Founded in 2011, Austin, Tex.-based Mass Relevance has over 200 clients and has worked on many high-profile media properties,  including Marvel’s The Avengers, American Idol, X-Factor, 80 Plates, and The Voice.

Social curation and photo-sharing site Lockerz has closed its San Diego office and laid off about 30 percent of staff at its Seattle headquarters, according to a TechCrunch report.

Lockerz has offered a Pinterest-like experience since Feb. 2012 with socially curated photos and content. But unlike Pinterest, it offers rewards to its users for sharing content and driving other people to make purchases at the site. Before it focused on this model, the site was a photo-sharing service.

The company lost its CEO and founder, Kathy Savitt, to Yahoo back in August. Yahoo hired Savitt to be its chief marketing officer.

Leilani Augstine, Lockerz’s chief marketing officer, did not explicitly confirm the amount of layoffs to TC, but it did provide this statement:

Today we went through the process of realigning our organizational structure to best fit the needs of our product and business as we move forward. That means that some positions were eliminated and we will be increasing our investment in other areas we see as opportunity. I will not comment on how many individuals were effected or any specific individual… We remain bullish on the opportunities surrounding social commerce. We believe we are in the early stages of a transformational change in the way consumers discover and consume products and content. Our vision remains the same and and today’s changes will allow us to be much more nimble, which is an important component of success in this space.

Lockerz has raised $43.5 million to date from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, Live Nation, and Liberty Media.

And it’s one that many retailers haven’t yet woken up to.

“E-commerce retailers are used to a world in which they have products for sale, put them on the site, sell out, and take them down,” Curalate founder Apu Gupta told me yesterday. “But now all the stuff that people are pinning continues to live on Pinterest long after the products are gone. And we’ve discovered that once a product gets popular, it continues to get more popular.”

During the recent Black Friday weekend, Curalate reviewed a number of top retailers’ websites. The team was shocked to find that 48 percent of their top ten most popular products on Pinterest actually led to dead links — expired pages. The pages no longer even showed the product that had originally been pinned … much less offer it for sale. So when people — interested, eager consumers — see something they like on Pinterest and want to buy it, far too often they are clicking through to the original product website only to hit a brick wall, Gupta says.

And this isn’t just a problem for one or two year old pins. Brands like H&M and Forever 21 are built on rapid inventory turns, sometimes as quick as weeks or months. Even more traditional retailers typically turn their inventory over seasonally, meaning that products pinned just a few weeks or months ago could already have expired.

So what’s a busy retailer to do?

“It starts with handling 404s better,” Gupta said, referring to the error code a webserver engine returns for a page that cannot be found. “But also, if a product sells out … don’t take it down. Leave it on the site, so at least the page is there and consumers can maybe order it … get on a waiting list.”

Even if that’s not possible, there are alternatives.

“Or the page can say say that the product is out of stock, but here are some suggestions … maybe some other things that are on Pinterest from our brand that are getting really hot.”

Technologies to make this easy for retailers are available now, but e-commerce managers need to become aware of the possibilities. That’s what Curalate does, Gupta told me: Identify the products that are resonating with consumers, and highlight them to brands.

“Images are the new currency of social engagement,” Gupta says. “But as images replace words, brands can’t understand that … you can’t do a text search for images. We’re the first to be able to do that.”

As Pinterest continues to grow — and as perhaps 70 percent of its users visit the site to look for shopping inspiration — knowing how to manage old inventory and assess consumer demand in a very visual world becomes more and more important.

According to an SEC filing, Linqia, a stealth startup that describes itself as a pay-for-performance network for advertisers, has pulled in its first round of funding.

The securities and exchange filing shows that the startup has raised $3.4 million. Javelin Venture Partners’ managing director, Jed Katz led the round; his name appears on the Form D. Katz told me, “Becoming part of the conversation is the major objective of social marketers, and Linqia’s platform serves that to them on a silver platter.”

Linqia is a promising startup that has been in stealth mode since 2011, according to Crunchbase. However, this TechCrunch article shows it first appeared on the scene in 2009 when it raised a small seed round in Europe. At that time, it was held by Starfish Community Group. The team was originally based in Barcelona, but it recently relocated to San Francisco. With this first major infusion of cash, it may be time for the company to lift the veil off its technology and show us what it’s got!

From what I’ve gathered from scattered interviews with the media, here’s how Linqia works: If a company or brand wants to target a community or group, they write a pitch, upload social content or other messages, and deliver it to community managers via Linqia’s website. The idea is that community managers (LinkedIn group leaders, forum leads, and so on) have worked hard to build up a dedicated following, exactly the audiences that brands desperately want to reach. So, why not connect the two?

Linqia’s cofounders are Australian entrepreneur Maria Sipka, formerly the COO for XING, the European social network for businesses; and Nader Alizadeh, the former cofounder and SVP of Sales for Lithium Technology.

“Social media has been built on top of social networks, and the two are different,” Scoop.it co-founder and chief executive officer Guillame Decugis told VentureBeat. Decugis says that people want to express themselves in social media, but there’s too much noise. “I think we’re moving back to a web where quality matters again.”

The Scoop.it search algorithm helps you find great content, but it’s the human touch that makes the Scoop.it experience so sticky, because a person can understand the relationship between items and pick out what’s important much better than any machine can.

The term “curation” has been floating around lot lately, and Scoop.it is far from the only company in the space. Startups like PearlTrees and Curated.by are just a few of the dozens of such tools out there. “We’re unique in the sense you have the ability to create a magazine,” says Decugis. Scoop.it gets more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month.

To get a feel for what Scoop.it does, check out some of the great topic pages passionate Scoop.it users have curated on space exploration, violins, street art, tools for learners and scientific discovery. There’s a lot more interesting violin-related content on the web than one might initially suspect, and Scoop.it topic pages are a great way to collect and share this bounty. Decugis uses his own topic page to document the impact of the iPad on the media.

The company is beginning to experiment with a premium model that will allow businesses and others to embed branded versions of their topic page onto their own sites. Insightful, intelligent curation around a topic will demonstrate expertise for a business owner or a guru, and they can also generate pretty strong SEO for themselves. The premium version of Scoop.it will also include an analytics tool that can be accessed for a monthly fee.

Scoop.it has received $10 million in funding from Partech International, Orkos, Elaia and IRDI. Partech is an investor in VentureBeat.

The French startup just announced that it crossed two big milestones in March: It has more than 100,000 users curating links, and it received more than 10 million pageviews. Not only does that show the concept is resonating, but it also suggests Pearltrees could reach the scale where it can build a real business around advertising or by offering premium accounts for publishers.

When you share links on Pearltrees, they show up as little circles called Pearls. (The site can also automatically add links that you share on Twitter.) You then organize those Pearls into larger groups of related content called, yes, Pearltrees. You can use Pearltrees as a way to save and organize content just for yourself, but all of the links are shared publicly, so users can also find others with similar interests, check out their content, and even add Pearls to their own Pearltrees.

Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and it recently enhanced the social aspect with a new teams feature that lets groups of people create Pearltrees collaboratively. Oliver Starr, the company’s chief US evangelist, said that adding social features has led to “a real acceleration in the growth and development of our community.”

Pearltrees has raised 3.8 million euros in funding.