GigaOM » Ben Silbermann

Pinterest takes a “first step” toward working with big brands

Eliza Kern — Mon, 20 May 2013 04:00:03 +0000

Pinterest plans to announce a new type of pin on Sunday that will highlight a large number of major U.S. retail brands, marking the company’s “first step” in integrating images with associated brands, and making it easier to click through links and purchase items. The move could be the start of a change in consumer perception of the site from a place for wishful thinking to a site where one can purchase those wishes. While this is just a first step, and the company said it is not currently making money from the integration, the power of the companies joining at launch suggests Pinterest could become on par with Facebook and Twitter when it comes to attracting sizable brand marketing budgets in the not-so-distant future.

Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s developer page.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

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Pinterest app will start coming pre-loaded on Nook tablets along with Twitter and Facebook

Eliza Kern — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:18:33 +0000

Pinterest announced Monday that the company’s app will start coming pre-loaded on all Nook tablets, along with social apps like Twitter and Facebook. The partnership comes as Pinterest works to build its influence with businesses and has expanded to integrate with other products like Microsoft’s Bing image search results.

Nook representatives noted in the press release that Pinterest had been one of the most-requested apps for the Nook store, which allows customers to download games and social apps. Pinterest also fits with some other features of the new tablets Barnes & Noble introduced last fall: An improved magazine- and catalog-reading experience, and a “rip out the page” feature that lets users save pages from catalogs and magazines to a digital scrapbook.

Pinterest, long known for its innovative design, has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and just took in $200 million in a new round of financing that puts that company’s valuation at $2.5 billion. A February Pew report estimated that about 15 percent of online adults use Pinterest, and the company has been stepping up efforts to provide businesses with analytics tools and specific landing pages just for them. Last week, Bing announced that users would now be able to pin images directly from the search function to Pinterest.

In February Barnes & Noble reported that Nook revenues for the third quarter were down 26 percent to $316 million, even though the company released two new tablets during the year. The company said it expects Nook Media, which it spun off as its own segment last year, to bring in revenues of $2.5 billion for fiscal year 2013.

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How closely knit design and engineering teams put Pinterest on a rocket ship

Eliza Kern — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:24:20 +0000

As businesses increasingly prioritize good design and as we start demanding it in our daily lives, more and more technology companies will face tensions over how to incorporate design principles without compromising on the engineering goals that can also make or break a product or service. It’s a challenge that every company handles differently, and in many cases, one group wins out at the expense of another’s ideals.

But at Pinterest, the social media darling that has seen incredible user growth over the past few year and whose design has copied widely, the designers and engineers have one seemingly-improbable message: We can do both. At least for now, anyway: one of Pinterest’s greatest challenges in turning from web sensation into a viable business will be its ability to adhere to these principles as revenue and profit pressures sink in.

I talked with Pinterest software engineer Joshua Inkenbrandt and lead product designer Jason Wilson this week, and we discussed the recent Pinterest re-design: specifically, how both visual and engineering elements played into the overhaul, and how those tensions play out at Pinterest. The two were obviously passionate about the issue, re-iterating the unique qualities of Pinterest’s internal culture and the crossover between their roles. At one point, Inkenbrandt referred to a feature that Wilson had designed, and Wilson automatically jumped in to correct him:

“It’s the designs that I visualize. We’re all designers.”

But at an awful lot of companies, designers and engineers aren’t finishing each other’s sentences. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Michael Abbott explained the tensions best at our Structure:Data conference this week: “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship… How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Building a culture of mutual respect

It’s not that Pinterest is somehow immune from the tensions that other companies face. In fact, Wilson and Inkenbrandt noted that they think the media has probably underplayed just how much the site has changed over the years and the compromises that are inherent in every tweak:

“With every feature, there’s that tension between it being beautiful and then figuring out how hard it is to actually implement it. So everything you see on the new site has actually gone through that balance,” Inkenbrandt said. For instance, just looking at the main Pinterest grid — which doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much since the site launched in limited beta in March 2010 — you would never know the number of iterations it has gone through.

“We’ve iterated on that 70+ times,” said Inkenbrandt, who just joined the company slightly more than a year ago. Of course, rapid iteration on the web wasn’t invented at Pinterest: Google’s web development strategy in its early years, overseen in large part by current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, blazed this trail for a generation of Silicon Valley engineers and designers.

In the relatively short time Inkenbrandt has been with Pinterest, the company has grown from about 17 employees to more than 100. Pinterest does not release official user stats, but recent ComScore numbers put users of the popular social content pinning site at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is about the same as the number who use Twitter. The company recently raised $200 million in a new round of financing, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion.

So the fact that the company has managed to weather this type of rapid growth without any notable or constant outages (just compare to the number of fail whales in Twitter’s early years), while also remaining one of the most-copied designs on the web at the moment, certainly speaks to Pinterest’s ability to balance both priorities.

It comes down to the company’s culture, the two said, in that the company values open communication among employees and prioritizes the goals of both designers and engineers. Of course, whether this can scale along with the company is always in question — it’s easier to support both when you’re just a 20 person operation. But the two said that heavy involvement from co-founder Evan Sharp plays a key role in fostering that balance.

“Evan himself designed and coded the original site,” Wilson said. “So we know that at the end of the day he understands what it takes to get it done.”

Wilson, who’s designed for companies like Apple, Lytro, and Adobe, said he thinks the company’s efforts to make sure new hires understand the importance of collaborative culture has helped keep the company on that track:

“I’m basically a vagabond in the industry. I’ve worked at a hell of a lot of places. And every place has its way of doing things. When I worked at Apple, it was very design-centric, and things came from the direction of the executive and it’s thrown over the wall at the engineers. And I’ve worked at places like Adobe, where they develop the features and then say, make it look good. And I don’t believe personally — and this is just a personal opinion — that either of those really are ideal. It’s not bullshit to say that here, it’s a total team effort. I can point to a design element, like actual pixel-level design elements, that Josh gave me creative direction on.”

Design and engineering building the new look

Pinterest rolled out its new design to the general public earlier this week, and to the un-trained (or un-Pinterested) eye, the new look wouldn’t seem too different. But two key changes to the look — larger pins, or photos, that come with the content suggestions along the side, and a new way to remain in-stream while scrolling — actually started at engineering problems that were solved by the design team.

The engineering team had long wanted to fix some of the structural issues that had come with the site’s rapid growth, Inkenbrandt said, and one of them was how to suggest more content for users in a way that was both natural and useful. But in the end, it was Wilson’s design team that found an answer to the recommendation engine quest, by surfacing similar pins from boards users had created:

“One of our challenges was how to recommend content,” Inkenbrandt said. “So we’re coming up with like, secret sauce algorithms, where we’re trying to figure out based on content what people might like. And then it turns out that based off the design, just having the actual board where the pin was from, well, that content is obviously highly relevant, usually in the same theme, and can help people find great stuff.”

By showing related content next to individual pins, and then allowing users to navigate to that content without leaving their spot in the stream, also solved another engineering issue with navigation. Wilson said Sharp gave him and the designer some high-level goals for the re-design, and one was to make the overall feel much more lightweight.

“Before, you would look at one close-up and then go back to the grid and then back to the close-up. So we wanted to figure out a way so you wouldn’t have to do that jump. It seems like a simple thing, but if you’re on there for an hour let’s say, and you do that repeatedly, you might do that a few hundred times.” he said. “To me anyway the holy grail to navigation is to get to the user to navigate via content.”

But while Pinterest has been able to balance the priorities of design and functionality fairly remarkably so far, the rubber might be about to hit the road. The company has been nudging its way toward a business model recently, adding features like analytics for businesses and encouraging marketers to the site, which makes sense if the company is going to live up to that $2.5 billion valuation.

But just ask Twitter and Facebook: it’s a lot easier balancing design and engineering when salespeople aren’t breathing down your neck every day.

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Pinterest raises $200 million in new funding, company now valued at $2.5 billion

Eliza Kern — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:57:53 +0000

Pinterest has raised a new funding round of $200 million led by Valiant Capital Management, putting the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion, AllThingsD first reported and Pinterest has now confirmed.

The company said it will use the new funding to develop new technology, continue hiring, expand its user base internationally, and make strategic investments. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital all participated in the round as well.

“Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life,” said Ben Silbermann, Pinterest co-founder and CEO announced in a statement provided by the company. “This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”

It was reported earlier this month that the company was in funding talks that would raise its valuation above $2 billion. Most recently, Pinterest had raised $100 million in May 2012, putting the company’s valuation at $1.5 billion at the time. The May round was led by Japanese site Rakuten, in addition to Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital.

The company allows users to pin photos to virtual pinboards, collecting them in groups called boards around the web. Pinterest has exploded in recent success, especially with women, and has continued to drive increasing amounts of traffic on the web. CEO Ben Silberman spoke at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, explaining that they didn’t set out to target any specific group in building the site:

“When we built Pinterest, we didn’t build it with a specific demographic in mind,” Silbermann said. “We built it for ourselves.”

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Pinterest paves the way for new business platform with brand options

Eliza Kern — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:28:14 +0000

Pinterest announced Wednesday that it will begin offering options on its site specifically for businesses, paving the way for business relationships between one of the fastest-growing social media sites and companies looking to take advantage of their engagement with users on that site. While the announcement isn’t huge for now — the new business option just allows company owners to snag their names, learn some best practices, and verify their accounts — Pinterest makes vague mention of upcoming future options for businesses, and it’s easy to see an analytics or ecommerce option changing the game and making Pinterest profitable.

Targeting brands and giving them more insight into engagement on the platform is exactly what Facebook has done with brand pages and insights, and it makes sense for Pinterest to begin courting businesses, who have already had success using the site. It’s also easy to see how Pinterest moving into branding and analytics would signal death for more than a few startups that are entirely focused on providing analytics for Pinterest (for example, sites like HelloInsights, Pinfluencer, Pinalytics, Pintics, and others.)

In a blog post, Pinterest notes the wide variety of brands already getting good traction, either on Pinterest itself or by making items easier to pin, including Anthropologie, Whole Foods, the Smithsonian, and Amazon.

Initially, the Pinterest business option (which has its own page on the site) allows brands to sign up and claim their names (moving away from the first name, last name requirement), and “secure access to new and upcoming business-specific features,” a Pinterest spokeswoman wrote. The business page currently features best practices for businesses on Pinterest, examples of what other brands have accomplished on the site, guides for adding pinning tools to websites, and new terms of service specifically for businesses. Brands already on Pinterest will be able to convert their pages to official business pages.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, speaking recently at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, said the company is competing for user attention in an increasingly distracted world. The company recently rolled out secret boards, allowing users to pin in private, and Android and iPad apps this past summer. The company is based in San Francisco and allows users to “pin” or mark images to personal boards, liking and comment on images posted by other accounts.

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Want to keep your pins under wraps? Pinterest debuts secret boards

Eliza Kern — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:39:03 +0000

You might think that checking out your girlfriend’s Pinterest board is the best way to find gift ideas for her for the holidays, but now you might have to reconsider that plan. Pinterest announced Thursday that it will be debuting “secret boards,” where users can pin items that are private and viewable only to the people they share those boards with.

Pinterest, a social network that is focused around users pinning beautiful and inspirational photos to boards, has been a runaway success, notable for appealing not just to early-adopter tech geeks in San Francisco, but mainly women all across the United States. CEO Ben Silbermann, who spoke at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference Monday, said the company didn’t set out to build a social network for mainstream America, rather they worked to make a site that revolves around the individual user first.

“When we built Pinterest, we didn’t build it with a specific demographic in mind,” Silbermann said Monday. “We built it for ourselves.”

It’s easy to imagine that Pinterest “secret boards” will have a variety of use cases — pinning photos of potential presents for friends and family, pinning photos of a guilty pleasure (wedding photos when you aren’t engaged, anyone?), collecting photos for your stealth startup, or even pinning photos to a shared secret board for private communication within a group. But the company said it’s rolling them out in time for the holidays, which seems like the most common use case.

Users can go to the top of the page, create a secret board and choose who to share that board with. Current boards cannot be switched to private, since they’ve likely already had public repins. The company has also adjusted its privacy policy to reflect this new addition, which is available on the company’s mobile apps.

Unlike sites such as Instagram or Facebook that are all about building a community among users, Pinterest is much more focused on the individual, Silbermann said Monday, which seems to fit perfectly with “secret boards.”

“Pinterest is a little more self-focused,” he said. “There are other people who are there, but it’s less about saying things and seeing how the community will react to them.”

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Rewind: 5 must see videos from RoadMap 2011

Om Malik — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:34:18 +0000

We are hosting our second GigaOM RoadMap conference on Monday, November 5, 2012 in San Francisco. It has an all-star speaker line-up that includes Perry Chen, CEO and co-founder of KickStarter, Evan Williams of Twitter & Obvious Corp., Kevin Systrom of Instagram, David Karp of Tumblr, Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker, Katia Beauchamp of Birchbox, Ben Silbermann of Pinterest and many more. Our theme for 2012 edition: designing our connected future.

Last year we talked about how connectedness changes everything. We thought it would be a good idea for us to rewind and share some of the conversations from the 2011 event as we work on the 2012 edition.

Jack Dorsey, Square & Twitter

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Tony Fadell, Nest

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Drew Houston, Dropbox

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Brian Chesky, AirBnB

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/Wordpress

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

The complete archives from GigaOM RoadMap 2011.

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The Pinterest-ization of the e-commerce experience

Om Malik — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:00:56 +0000

One of my favorite stores is Richmond, Virginia-based clothing and fashion accessories seller, Need Supply Co. While it is no where close to where I live — that is San Francisco — I still like their online store mostly because I find their website and curated list of items on sale fun to peruse. It isn’t the largest selection, but still, it is engaging. In the past when I visited their website, I had to click through a whole bunch of links to get a better sense of what was being offered. It wasn’t easy and it was time consuming.

So a few days ago when I ended up on their website, I was pleasantly surprised. Gone was the old fashioned way of navigating through the wares. Instead, the site was offering a highly visual, grid-like layout that reminded me of, well, Pinterest. Need Supply Co isn’t the first site that is taking a cue from Pinterest’s design — several larger retailers are being influenced by the grid-style design philosophy that has been popularized by San Francisco-based Pinterest.

In addition to Pinterest, I am also seeing Fashion oriented e-commerce sites take a cue from Tumblr as well. Examples of Tumblr inspired e-commerce sites include Of A kind and Le Coq Sportiff. Tumblr and Pinterest have become the Glimmer Twins of the fashion content platforms and are major sources of attention for brands and products.

A new kind of grid

David Galbraith, an architect and serial entrepreneur who started Wists, a precursor to Pinterest, says that the “UI universe has boiled down to grids and feeds and slideshows, as far as I can see.” (His blog post for GigaOM explains it really well.) And we are likely to be married to those formats for a while, especially as digital information continues to grow exponentially.

He argues that text will be primarily a feed — a theory that was popularized by blogs. Pictures will be in grids while videos and presentations are going to take cue from the slideshows. Today, focusing data into packages that are simply understood by humans is going to be a key challenge of the next generation of the Internet — a topic we are going to be discussing at our RoadMap conference on November 5 in San Francisco. Both Tumblr’s CEO David Karp and Pinterest’s CEO Ben Silbermann will be speaking at our event.

To be honest, grid design is not new and has been around since the early days of the modern web. There was OMG from Yahoo that came to life in 2007. Tumblr had its wonderful archives. Why, even MSN had Wonderwall. (Check out these cool grid designs.) And there was NotCot.

However, Pinterest and its explosive growth has made grid-based designs more accessible to many more people. Many of Pinterest’s users also tend to be those with active interest in fashion, design and products. As a result, these people can influence the purchasing decisions.

Money makers

Today, e-commerce companies are optimizing their websites to benefit from “pinning” and “tumbling” which means they are taking their design cues from Pinterest itself and are starting to resemble the traffic generating engine.

I was reading this interview with Pinterest’s Silbermann on Fast Company’s website and I came across this comment by Leland Rechis, a director of product experience at Etsy.

“Browsing in e-commerce is a more difficult problem than search. Amazon and Google pretty much stink at browsing.”

Michael Williams, who writes the influential menswear blog, A Continuous Lean, and works in the fashion industry, believes that the growing influence of these two content sharing networks is because they are highly visual and as such drive a lot of conversions.

A report from Shareaholic identified Pinterest as driving more referral traffic that some of the other social services such as Google+ and LinkedIn. Pinterest started 2012 at about 0.85 percent of traffic visits on the web and at the end of August 2012 was at 1.84 percent of all visits. Being so visual, Pinterest also drives conversions. Williams said to me in an email: “e-commerce managers would be insane not to adapt their experience to be more like it.”

“Online shopping continues to become more of a rich experience, and the structure and set up of Tumblr and Pinterest lend themselves well to the development of shopping sites,” Williams added. “I also think that customers are more open to a visual shopping experience, and it seems like the back end technology can better support those types of experiences at this point.”

And if there was any doubt about the pinterest-ization of e-commerce, then look no further than eBay, the grandma of all commerce sites, which recently announced a grid-influenced home page. eBay Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges told AdAge that the design (aka The Feed) was a way “to combine the ease of online purchasing with the fun of window shopping.”

Sahil Lavingia, who worked at Pinterest before starting his own company (Gumroad) is of the opinion that the success of Pinterest is leading people to copy the Pinterest’s design, mostly because now the majority of the people understand how these visual grids work. But he cautions that to copy it outright is a bad idea for retailers. Why? Because while grid design is good for quick discovery of goods, it is still important to make the buyer take the final step: shop.

That topic and a whole lot of other design questions will be part of the conversation at GigaOm’s RoadMap conference that I am going to be co-hosting with Katie Fehrenbacher. You’ll hear conversations with Silbermann and Karp, as well as other e-commerce thought leaders like Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp, and Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa. More details on the conference are here. Hope you can join us.

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MIT’s 35 under 35 list covers tech from Dropbox to medical devices

Barb Darrow — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:59:22 +0000

For those who doubt that there’s a lot of young tech talent out there, check out MIT Technology Review’s new list of 35 innovators under 35. This year’s edition includes some names you know — Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, for example. But what’s cool is that it culls names from materials science, biotech, energy and other areas beyond the usual software- and hardware-designing suspects.

Drew Houston CEO of Dropbox

New names — at least to me — include Sarbajit Banerjee, a SUNY Buffalo materials chemist who is designing windows that shield buildings from heat — except when you don’t want them to.

And there’s also Shannon Miller, co-founder and CEO of EtaGen, a startup that wants to bring new life to an old idea — a “free piston” internal combustion engine. The claimed benefit of the engine — which will generate electricity — is that it will use 25 percent less fuel than its predecessors.

Also check out 25-year-old Juan Sebastián Osorio, a former biomedical engineering student from Medellin, Colombia. He’s working on a device that monitors a premature infant’s heart rate, electrical signals from the diaphragm muscle, and blood oxygen measurements to detect problems fast.

Then there’s John Hering, who built BlueSniper technology that hijacked a Nokia smartphone from a mile away. Since then he co-founded Lookout Mobile Security five years ago to devise an app to protect Android smartphones from malicious threats and built the Mobile Threat Network to track these scourges.

But this is just scratching the surface. Check out the full list for up-and-comers in all sorts of high-tech innovation. Tech Review will host its annual Emtech Conference in October.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user erinc salor

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Pinterest cofounder leaves for VC firm Andreessen Horowitz

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:51:00 +0000

It’s official: Following reports yesterday that he was stepping down as CEO, Pinterest cofounder Paul Sciarra confirmed that he is leaving the company.

In a post on Pinterest’s blog, Sciarra writes that he’s been hired as “Entrepreneur-in-Residence” at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Pinterest. With his departure, cofounder Ben Silbermann officially becomes CEO.

Content-sharing invitation-only site Pinterest launched in March 2010 and has grown remarkably fast in recent months, hitting 17.8 million users in February according to comScore. The majority of the site’s users are women aged 25 to 44, many from the South.

In his goodbye post, Sciarra touched on why he thinks Pinterest has been such a success:

[The] best internet services aren’t just ways for people to escape their everyday lives. Instead, those services with longevity — with real “legs — enhance folks’ day-to-day experiences, deepen their relationships, and show them things about themselves they didn’t know before.

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