Known for a trio of social discovery (and photography) apps, Math Camp was founded in 2011 by Paul Davison and Benjamin Garrett. The startup’s co-founders and the majority of its San Francisco-based team will be integrated into Pinterest’s engineering, product, and design departments.
“The team behind Math Camp are experts in building innovative mobile products to connect people with similar tastes and help them discover day-to-day images and video across platforms,” states Steve Davis, lead product manager at Pinterest. “We welcome their years of experience across engineering, product and design as we build the world’s catalog of ideas.”
The startup’s most buzz-worthy app was arguably Highlight. Released in 2012, Highlight notified its users when their friends were in their vicinity, allowing for impromptu meetups. At the time, when rival location-based app Foursquare was also creating its fair share of hype, Highlight seemed like it could find an audience (although it never did). Today, it is no more, as the app’s iOS store page has been removed.
Math Camp also produced Shorts, an app that allowed you to share your smartphone’s photo library with friends, and Roll, which basically did the same thing but with a swipe-based user interface. Both those apps still seem to be up and running at present.
“We’ve always been huge fans of Pinterest and felt a lot of mission alignment with the company. When you can help people discover the world around them and connect them with others who share their interests, it just makes life better,” states Paul Davison, co-founder, Math Camp.
“We’re excited to extend our learnings around recommendations as well as visual and real world discovery to the millions of people who use Pinterest to find new ideas and do things they love.”
The Math Camp acqui-hire will likely aid Pinterest in its core mission to help people discover new, shoppable items by bridging the worlds of online and offline retail. There are already over 20,000 retailers selling buyable Pins on the platform. Additionally, Pinterest recently announced one of its biggest updates in regards to this strategy; a visual search shopping feature. The new tool allows users to upload photos of real-world objects, which are then analyzed by the app to provide a list of similar-looking products for purchase.
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