SEO Werkt!

Google says that YouTube isn’t going to somehow solely escape its new “pirate penalty.” Any popular site may be OK, as the penalty works off of more than pure copyright infringement reports. Nuances in calculating the penalty should save popular user-generated content sites, the…



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This week we boosted your home Wi-Fi, improved your Windows mastery, prepared our student-readers to go back to school, and more. Here’s a look back.

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Popular password management tool, LastPass, offers a bunch of security options to keep your passwords safe. If you’re not aware of all these options, though, such as using a dedicated security email address, it’s a good time to review. More »

Popular social networking service Pinterest has finally ditched invitations and opened its doors to anyone who wants to sign up on the spot.

Pinterest launched in 2010, but it didn’t start gaining traction until late last year thanks to its addictive nature. It eventually became the third-most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter in April.

During this entire period, Pinterest has been invite-only. It was fairly easy to score an invite, but any service that limits immediate signups might lose some users because of it. No more. The site is finally open for anyone who wants to sign up, most likely because it trusts its infrastructure to support large groups of signups on any given day. Pinterest is built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which has been mostly reliable minus a wide-spread EC2 outage in late June.

Pinterest is so popular it even has tons of clone sites trying to take its concept of pinning photos and products by adding a twist. The concept is so pervasive there are even two “Pinterest for Porn” sites, Snatchly and Sex.com.

San Francisco-based Pinterest has raised $138 million to date, including a $100 million mega-round led by Japanese web retailer Rakuten. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital.

Filed under: social

Google is seeing huge mobile search growth and search engines are widely used by mobile device owners. However a new study confirms that search is not the center of the mobile universe, as it is online. I discuss many of the top-line findings of the study, conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by…



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This week we discovered ten easy-to-miss new features in Mountain Lion, showed you how to stream the BBC’s vastly superior Olympics coverage, met Microsoft’s impressive new Gmail competitor, and more. Here’s a look back.

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Popular image-sharing service imgfave launched an iOS app last week, causing most of their engagement metrics to at least double, and signups to quadruple.

Underscoring the power of both mobile and social right now, imgfave’s app reached the same level of activity as the main website, which gets 30 million monthly page views and 3.3 million monthly unique visitors, just two days after it launched, according to the founder, Gabe Ragland.

As its name implies, imgfave is a simple image-sharing site that focuses on “design, creativity and beautiful things.”

Ragland is an unlikely case, a single founder with no mobile experience working to disrupt the image-sharing space that is dominated by giants like imgur.

He applied to YC with a much larger vision for the site, which he hopes to scale up to in the future; he launched in 2009, building it in one week. He started working on imgfave, which he says is very profitable, full-time a year ago, making the site faster and more accessible, tripling its user base.

Ragland has been focusing on the mobile app and future changes during Y Combinator this summer (he will finish in August).

“That’s largely a testament to how much being in YC motivates you to get stuff done, as well as how powerful it is to be surrounded by a network of incredible smart startup founders in the YC program,” Ragland tells me.

A user-generated image, professing their love for the app (hmm…I wonder what that camera app on the left does)

Ragland says the app is successful because of the small, devoted community that he developed early on.

“The lesson for startup founders is to initially focus on building a small, but very happy community, because that can turn into a powerful marketing engine,” he tells me.

Ragland says he is looking to hire a team soon to help him build “the next largest entertainment and content discovery destination online.”

Imgfave will then undergo a site redesign, especially aimed at mobile and tablets and will launch communities for hundreds of different topics. Ragland hopes to turn the site into a platform for engaging image-sharing communities around a variety of niches.

Popular file-syncing service Dropbox just admitted to leaking an undisclosed number of user emails. Here’s the word from Dropbox: More »

It’s easy to find a smartphone running app, but it’s a lot harder to find a good one. With so many options it’s difficult to figure out which one is going to work best for you. We asked you last week which running apps you thought were best. Then, we tallied up your nominations and took a look at the top five smartphone running apps, and put them to a vote. Now, we’re back to highlight the winner. More »

This week we celebrated the DIY versatility of the binder clip, found cheaper stuff on eBay, dove head first into OS X Mountain Lion, and more. Here’s a look back.

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