We have all used news aggregation where we tell the app what interests us, e.g sports, business, entertainment, politics, etc., and it returns the most relevant news items for our reading pleasure.
In 2008, two MIT Sloan School of Management students created software to aggregate all the trip photos that classmates had taken and shared on their Facebook, Flickr and Picasa accounts. In 2009, after many tests, Pixable was founded by Inaki Berenguer, Andres Blank and Alberto Sheinfeld at Inaki’s apartment on the MIT campus to allow you to aggregate photos shared by your friends on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in one place. Last year, with five million users already using Pixable, they sold it to telecommunications giant SingTel for $26.5 million.
This technology is similar to what’s used for news aggregation websites, such as Google News and Yahoo News, and, more recently, Flipboard. However, Pixable does something novel by applying the technology to photos, Berenguer says.
“In the end, Pixable is a content portal. But our content is photos,” Berenguer says. “The information is out there — in the form of billions of new photos and videos shared every day on the Internet — but we’re aggregating, reorganizing, ranking and presenting that personalized information to the user.”
Read the story behind Pixable at: MIT.
