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Pearltrees Arrives On Android, Wants To Become The File Manager For The Post-PC Era
Pearltrees, the visual and collaborative library that lets you easily organize and bookmark information in tree-like structures, finally launched its Android app for phones and tablets today. The service started out on the web in 2009 and then came to the iPad in 2011 and the iPhone last year. Android, however, as the company’s CEO Patrice Lamothe told me last week, was always one of the most requested platforms, and the team also expects this launch to help it quickly grow its user base.
Thanks to the flexibility Android affords developers when it comes to sharing and bookmarking, Lamothe told me, this platform is really the first one that allows the company to fully realize its vision of becoming a “file manager for the post-PC era.” For Pearltrees, this means that you can use the Android app to bookmark and organize content from both apps like Flipboard and the web — something that would be very hard to do on most other platforms.
The team focused hard on ensuring that the app would work on the vast majority of Android devices. It’s compatible with virtually every version of Android (phone and tablet), with the exception of 2009′s Eclair and below. As Lamothe told me, this meant making a few concessions, as the team couldn’t fully exploit the latest and greatest technologies on Android, but Pearltrees decided this small tradeoff was worth it to expand its user base as widely as possible.
Pearltrees, so far, has raised about $11.5 million. The company says it currently has about 2 million active users and manages over 50 million items in its database. Most of these are bookmarks, but the service also recently added the ability to add photos and text notes to these libraries. Over the last year, Pearltrees also added premium plans with advanced features like advanced privacy controls and personalization options.
