Mulu, the community-centric Pinterest-esque personal shopping assistant website, announced today that it will be launching Version 2 of their site during SXSW. For those uninitiated with the website, Mulu merges shopping with sharing by allowing users to pin potential purchases they come on the internet. Some of the purchases made through Mulu pages result in contributions toward charities affiliated with that page. To date, the company has partnered with 50 charities and 50 “taste-makers” in fashion, music, sports, film and lifestyle. Those organizations, including ASPCA, amFAR, Livestrong, CharityWater, Girl Up and Rock the Vote to name a few, are Mulu’s core causes that users will be able to choose to support.
While Mulu launched into beta this past January, Version 2 showcases a new and improved stream, cached images for faster loading, and a cropping tool. Also introduced for V2 is Facebook Connect, which allows users to log-in through Facebook and share picks with friends on their activity feed and timeline. V2 features accounting transparency infrastructure, which allows users to immediately see whether a website will earn for their cause with a check mark in the tool bar.
Further, Mulu users have the ability to ask and answer questions with product recommendations by pulling the image and product page from anywhere online. Users can pose questions to be answered by the community such as “Camping in Yosemite for the first time, What gear do I need?” Answers will then be provided from the community, buy the product, and send a little money toward their charity of choice as they go.
It doesn’t hurt that, on the way to their Version 2 launch, they’ve acquired some pretty high-profile members such as Jonathan Franzen and Michael Kors.
If you’re attending SXSW, the announcement for Mulu’s next phase will be happening during a dinner at SXSW Interactive, the tech-geek corner of the festival.