NotesCloud becomes Collective.li, launches new iPhone app to become your personal Pinterest

Collective.li is the digital life magazine of your life, and now it’s going mobile, just like you.

“We are all out in the world like advance scouts with trusty smartphones in hand — observing, discovering, and capturing interesting details on the go,” chief executive Bruce Linn told VentureBeat via email. “Share it all in Collective.li.”

Linn’s startup was formerly called NotesCloud, but the rebrand better conveys that its community is building collections of digital artifacts that are significant to them, not just taking notes, Linn said. The goal: a single space where people can collect, organize, and share everything digital.

Above: The new Collective.li iPhone app

The new mobile app for iPhone is a good start. It captures photos, videos, and audio, and you can use it to edit clips and images before uploading them to a “beautiful digital magazine” all about you and your interests. Where, of course, they can be shared with your friends and family.

Collective.li’s interface is a little evocative for those of us who use Pinterest … or another competing mobile platform:

“We’re bringing the best of Metro (rich content tiles, elegant panoramic panels, fluid UI hierarchies) to the iPhone,” Linn says.

Since the goal is for users to be able to clip anything, anywhere, and add it to their personal portfolio, Collective.li is also launching a web clipper for Safari. The new clipper will grab articles, screenshots, tweets, videos, and more, and joins the company’s existing Chrome plugin.

Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 versions are coming soon, Linn said.

Once you’ve uploaded images, videos, and perhaps screenshots, you can organize and arrange your content. Another update Collective.li has made is that rather than using the old NotesCloud paradigm of notebooks, pages, and sections, the new service features what Linn calls a “simpler and flexible” arrangement of nested collections, which he says are “as natural to users as file folders or bookmark folders – and so much more powerful.”

Here’s a peak at one of those collections:

Above: A Collective.li collection

Image Credit: Collective.li

Collective.li is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has taken $100,000 in seed funding. It is still in public beta.