Pinterest Acquires Livestar

Pinterest has announced its acquisition of Livestar.  Livestar was founded in 2011 and was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012. Livestar provided personalized recommendations from your friends and also from expert sources from around the web.  While the terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, it has been reported that Livestar’s engineering team will be joining Pinterest as part of the deal between the two companies.  Additionally, Livestar will immediately be shutting down their service.

Livestar is mobile recommendations app that was founded by Fritz Lanman.  Lanman, formerly of Microsoft, has also been an angel investor for other startups.  These include Pinterest, as well as others such as Square and Getaround.  Post-acquisition, Lanman will remain as an advisor to the company. Livestar released an announcement explaining the move, as many users who rely upon the service could be disappointed that Livestar will be shutting down immediately.  Here is the announcement from Livestar in full:

“Our goal at Livestar is to help people find great recommendations from friends, critics and strangers with similar taste. Over the last two years, the Livestar community has shared millions of ratings and reviews. Today we wanted to let you know that we’ll be making our next move: the Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest.

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s an online tool that helps people discover things they love and inspires them to do these things in their everyday lives. We think this is aligned with what we’re doing here at Livestar. While we are excited to join Pinterest, we are sad to also announce that Livestar will be shutting down immediately.

We are so thankful to all of you. We hope you discovered great recommendations and enjoyed sharing your own experiences with your friends and others. We have put all your reviews in the attached spreadsheet so that you can take them with you.

Thanks again for your support and contributions to Livestar. We will miss Livestar dearly, and we will especially miss reading all of your great reviews. We hope to see you on Pinterest soon!

Best,

The Livestar team”

[Image via dejaengel]