content-curation
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Cosmos wants you to save first. Make sense of it later.
The visual discovery company is betting that taste grows through collecting, searching, and following curious people. Its most revealing product decision was to stop asking users to organize every spark before they could keep it.
Trapit Put the Company in the News Feed
A news reader born in the same research lab as Siri became a tool for salespeople with something useful to say. The difficult part was learning when to let the machine stop talking.
Upwell gave the ocean a PR department. Who would pay for it?
A small San Francisco nonprofit turned online listening into shared campaigns for the sea. Its experiments outlived the organization - and left a difficult question about who funds work that benefits everyone.
Hornet
Hornet is a queer social network and mobile app for gay, bi, trans, and queer men, built around community, content, and connection rather than pure hookups. Launched in 2011 and led by founder and CEO Christof Wittig, the company (operating as Hornet Networks / Queer Networks) has grown to more than 30 million members, positioning itself as one of the largest gay social platforms in the world and a frequently cited competitor to Grindr.
Padlet
Padlet is a San Francisco- and Singapore-based software company behind the popular collaborative platform of the same name, where users post text, images, links, files, and audio to shared digital bulletin boards called 'padlets'. Founded in 2008 as Wallwisher by Nitesh Goel and Pranav Piyush, the company grew into one of education technology's most widely used tools, reporting tens of millions of monthly active users - most of them teachers and students. It has since expanded beyond bulletin boards into an infinite-canvas whiteboard called Sandbox and a suite of AI creation tools, while remaining a small, largely bootstrapped team.
Thismoment
Thismoment was a San Francisco marketing-technology company that built the Thismoment Content Cloud, a digital storytelling platform that helped the world's biggest brands monitor, moderate, secure rights to, and publish user-generated content alongside professionally produced media across social, web, and mobile touchpoints. Founded in 2007-2008 by gaming and tech veterans Vince Broady, Ankarino Lara, and Scott Bedard, it served more than 150 brands and agencies including Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Sephora, Levi's, Microsoft, Mazda, and AB InBev, and raised more than $50 million across four institutional rounds.