Pinevio: A New Look On Content Discovery

By Anna Bessonova, October 28, 2011, 1 Comments

Information overload is a big problem online and there are many services that try to solve it: from good old RSS readers to various content discovery platforms like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon or Reddit to social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Two entrepreneurs from Lithuania, Daumantas Dvilinskas and Mindaugas Krisciunas, decided it's time to move content discovery from social to interest graph, making use of all the existing services. That is how Pinevio, a social content discovery platform, was founded a year ago.

The platform works through three steps: first it creates an archive of links you've shared in any social web services (these links are continuously and automatically bookmarked). The information in those links is semantically analyzed and used to create your interest graph (which is accurately re-created as you continue sharing content). Your resulting profile is then matched with people who share similar interests so you can discover new content through them.

The logic of the service is not particularly new but the way Pinevio goes about it is different. Most of the existing solutions require users to put down their interests themselves or follow people based on their professional position or personal relation to the user. That does not always translate into relevant content discovery but often creates a lot of noise.

By semantically analyzing content you've already shared on Twitter, Facebook or Digg, Pinevio can draw a more accurate picture of things you are actually interested in (as opposed to things you *think* you are interested in).

Combining various platforms in one place also has a definite advantage: it ensure you won't miss something relevant from a network you don't follow and saves time from browsing through all the different websites. That said, for Pinevio to be different it really needs to effectively eliminate irrelevant information from your feed and maximize relevance and appeal of the presented links.

Pinevio is still in beta but their Facebook app will be launched in early November. The app would present a light version of the product and include game dynamics like competition on links and their popularity and a score system to drive the audience to use the service. A few weeks after the Facebook app's launch, Pinevio's core product will be unveiled.

Pinevio's founders are both from Lithuania, though they met while studying at the same university in UK. That is where Pinevio was founded yet the team recently got angel investments from the Silicon Valley and Bulgaria. Now the company keeps their development team in Bulgaria and sales in US. Pinevio received altogether $60,000 investments and are aiming to close a $500,000 round within the next few months.

Below is a video pitch of Pinevio: