THE GIST: Bundlr is a curation tool for organizing and communicating information about an idea. Whether you need to organize clips from around the web for a research paper, or you want to gather real-time news sources to share about the riots in Greece, Bundlr helps you store the information in one place. Instead of storing text-based links to sources that you want to remember, Bundlr keeps the links in their original media format. The multimedia “bundles” can then be shared with the public, or you can keep them private to share only with selected collaborators. Although there are already many startups in the curation space, Bundlr stands out because of its real-time collaboration features.
FOUNDERS: Based out of Coimbra, Portugal, Bundlr was founded by Sargio Santos and Filipe Batista in 2010. Pedro Gaspar was added to the team as partner in mid 2011.
INSPIRATION: The duo were computer science students when they decided to make a tool to help the organizers of the Switch Conference in Lisbon display information about the event via curated event pages.
FUNDING: Bundlr received €15,000 in seed investment from Portuguese venture capital firm Seed Capital. Mário Valente, General Partner at Maverick SGPS and Entrepreneur In Residence at Seed Capital advises the team.
BUSINESS MODEL: Bundlr operates on a freemium business model. To collaborate, users pay $5 per month for a team plan. For private bundles, users can subscribe to the pro plan for $10 per month. The team admits that they are becoming less interested in the private bundles feature. They hope to grow and monetize the public bundles in the coming year.
COMPETITION: Curation tools like Pinterest, Storify, and Pearltrees are competitors. Founder Filipe Batista notes that the rise on social curation of the web validates their premise rather than takes away from the originality of their idea:
“Bundlr is more interesting (than the other curation sites) because people can collaborate to curate bundles together.”
USERS: Bundlr currently has 8,500 users, and their user profile is rapidly changing. The trio first targeted journalists with the hopes that they would use bundles to organize web clips to later incorporate into new stories. The team soon found students to be their most enthusiastic users. Bundlr is now being used more for teaching and learning than it is for news organization. Most of their users discover the site via their chrome extension.
EMPLOYEES: The trio plans to hire more business development team members after they raise their next round, but for right now the three developers are getting the job done.
COMING SOON: The team is expanding into mobile this year. Founder Sérgio Santos notes that they want people to consume their bundles on a variety of devices to provide for a richer experience.
The Bundlr team is offering 3 free months of the team plan (so that you can collaborate on your bundles) exclusively for Techli readers! Click this link to sign up for Bundlr and start sharing your bundles with the world. I love the idea of Bundlr because it has more practical applications than Pinterest and Storify. The ability to embed pages is especially helpful for bloggers like me who want to display multimedia sources within post. I’ll be using it myself to organize bundles about startups. Make sure to follow me!
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