Pinterest Acquires Team From Hike Labs, Including Google Reader, Blogger Veteran Jason Shellen

Microsoft Will Remove “Do Not Track” As The Default Setting In Its New BrowsersPinterest today scored two notable new hires with the acquisition of a small, two-person startup known as Hike Labs, which had been developing a mobile publishing application called Drafty. But Pinterest says this was not a technology deal – rather, the company was interested in gaining the expertise of Hike Labs’ co-founders Jason Shellen and Mike Demers.
Shellen, you may recall, was a founding team member at Blogger and Google Reader as well as a co-founder at Thing Labs, acquired by AOL in 2010*. Meanwhile, Demers previously founded app development platform 9Astronauts and was the CTO at a Q&A startup YouSaidIt. There, he developed a visual blogging site and an app-building service for people to build their own communities around interests, notes Pinterest.
Demers also worked at other startups including Captureproof, Mixbook, Yobongo, and more, as well as at Amazon. And Shellen spent time at AOL as VP of Product, AIM and Messaging before leaving to co-found mobile email app Boxer before starting Hike Labs.
The two will now bring their experience in developing content and community tools to the Pinterest product and engineering teams, the company says.
Pinterest isn’t yet revealing what specifically the new hires will work on, but Shellen, who was CEO at Hike Labs, will be joining the popular social bookmarking service as a product manager and Demers, previously head of engineering, will join Pinterest as an engineer. Their general focus area going forward will be on working to improve upon Pinterest’s core vision of building a discovery engine.
Shellen says Pinterest approached Hike Labs while they were working on their blogging app Drafty, and they decided to listen.
“The more we talked about their vision of building a discovery engine, the more aligned we seemed to be,” he explains. “However, I was even more impressed with the people at Pinterest. I know a handful of Xooglers who work there and they are all working hard building great products and a company culture with values I could stand behind,” adds Shellen.
Working on Pinterest’s discovery engine is something the founders can lend their experience to, having both built communication and community products in the past. The insights they’ve gained over the years by doing so will be useful to Pinterest as it works to improve its products focused on helping users discover new Pins to save and take action upon.
Today, Pinterest users find new Pins on the site in a number of ways, including by browsing their Home Feed or diving into various categories, following users who share their interests, and searching using the main Pinterest search bar, which also became more search engine-like last year through the launch of guided search on the web.
And more recently, as Pinterest has been ramping up its efforts with its advertisers, the company has been working to better position its site not as the time-waster that some of its users think it is today, but one that’s able to reach consumers at that moment when their online browsing is about to transition from being in the inspiration or planning phases, and shifts to become shopping. The idea to be a discovery engine is about capturing users intent to purchase, and then getting the right brands in front of those users at just the right time.
Pinterest’s potential to understand users’ intent is what may make it a challenging competitor to Google’s search engine, which has been selling ads against users’ queries (their intent) for years. Pinterest just comes in earlier – connecting with users around ideas and plans. And when the users are ready to buy, Pinterest’s rumored plans to unveil a “buy” button this year could have ramifications for Amazon as well.
That’s why developing a solid team around the discovery engine is now key for Pinterest, whose most recent round valued the company at $11 billion.
As for the Drafty app the Hike Labs team was working on, the app was first released in private beta in the fall then updated this February. The app was going to offer users a new way to blog from their iPhone, which would have made it a competitor to things like Tumblr or Medium. However, Shellen says there are no plans to shutter the app now, as he’s exploring what to do with it in the future.
“We built it because we thought it should exist in the world and I would love to see someone take it over so I can keep using it,” he says.
Deal terms are not being revealed, but we understand that Hike Labs had a small amount of angel funding from friends, and the founders and investors are happy with the deal.
This is now Pinterest’s seventh acquisition to date, following Punchfork, Livestar, Hackermeter, Visual Graph, Icebergs and Kosei. In many cases, including most recently with Icebergs, whose team just pushed out the updated Pin It button this week, Pinterest’s acquisitions have been about bringing in new talent. But in other cases, as with Visual Graph, for example, it’s just as much about gaining access to technology that can make improvements to Pinterest’s underlying infrastructure itself.

By: Unknown On 11:27

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LocoMotive Labs, Maker Of Todo Math App, Raises $4M To Expand In Asia

Math can be fun, but try telling that to a small child stuck behind a desk doing endless drills and worksheets. Founded by a former game developer, startup LocoMotive Labs’ mission is to make learning mathematic basics entertaining for all children, no matter their learning styles.
Its flagship app, Todo Math, has already been downloaded 1.1 million times, and now the Berkeley, California company has picked up a series A of $4 million to expand into Asia.
The round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea and TAL Education Group and brings LocoMotive Labs’ total raised so far to $5.15 million. Returning investors K9 Ventures, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund, Joe Gleberman, D3Jubilee, and Jerry Colonna also participated.
LocoMotive Labs will first focus on China because the country currently accounts for half of its new users. Its apps have already been downloaded 350,000 times there.
Founder Sooinn Lee was inspired to launch LocoMotive Labs by her son, who has special needs. After he was born, Lee and her husband, also a game developer, began to brainstorm ways to keep kids like him motivated once they start school. Todo Math and other LocoMotive Labs apps, however, are made for all kids between the ages of three and eight, not just those with learning disabilities.
“We come from Korea, where academic environment is particularly competitive and intense,” Lee says. “We thought, how could our son have a good experience in his early academic career? That was our motivation to start this company.”
LocoMotive Labs’ goal is to instill confidence in kids who might struggle with traditional exercises and worksheets.
“If they feel like failures at an early age, it gives them a negative self-concept. If they keep failing, they think ‘I’m done. I don’t like math,'” Lee says.
A Friendlier Alternative To Cram Schools
While there are many other math-learning apps available, Lee thinks of programs like Kumon as LocoMotive Labs’ main competition. Founded in 1958 in Japan, Kumon is designed to reinforce math and reading concepts with a series of worksheets and teaching sessions. After school programs like Kumon (often referred to as “cram schools”) are extremely popular in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries (and also operate in the U.S.). But Lee says that paper worksheets aren’t the best way for very young children to learn math basics.
“As a game designer, I believe we can solve it in a much better way in the mobile era. Three year olds can touch and swipe before they even hold a pen,” she says, adding “games are designed for users. If they don’t want to play it anymore, it’s done. They give it a F and it’s done.”
To keep children engaged, Todo Math uses an exploration game with treasure boxes and other rewards that kids can unlock as they solve different levels of problems. LocoMotive Labs’ follows Universal Design for Learning concepts, which encourages educators to take different learning styles into account when designing teaching materials.
For example, children in the age group targeted by Todo Math are at widely different stages of motor development, so kids can either write or drag-and-drop numbers. The app also lets kids decide how math problems are presented. They can pick a word problem, play with tally sticks, or move around blocks. As they use the app, it will begin to tailor lessons to their learning preferences.
Bringing American Education To Asia
Todo Math is aligned with U.S. Common Core standards, but Lee says that early math curriculums followed by different countries aren’t too different (for example, Common Core has similarities with math education in Singapore and Japan). The process of localizing LocoMotive Labs’ apps for new markets will focus mainly on changing cultural references in word problems.
The bigger challenge of expanding into Asia, Lee says, is convincing educators and parents that mobile apps are a suitable alternative to paper worksheets and flashcards. Todo Math is already accepted by teachers in the U.S.—in fact, it is currently used in about 1,000 classrooms. Lee hopes that the program’s adaptability—and the fact that it keeps children engaged—will convince parents to use it instead of sending their kids to cram school.
One of LocoMotive Labs’ goals for its international expansion is to bring U.S. attitudes toward learning to Asia, where pedagogy often centers on rote memorization. While Lee acknowledges that the effectiveness of Common Core and other U.S. educational programs are widely debated, she says that Asian students can benefit from their focus on developing critical thinking skills.
“I know Asian parents and governments are still skeptical, but kids are learning in a new era. Schools still focus on memorization, but children can use tools like Google Search and access a larger way of learning beyond just memorizing answers,” she says.
 

By: Unknown On 09:34

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