Pageflakes was founded in Germany in 2005 by a team led by Christoph Janz who also founded German startup DealPilot.com. Pageflakes is currently headquartered in San Francisco and has received Series A funding estimated between $1.3 million from Benchmark Capital. Interestingly enough, before coming over to Pageflake current CEO Dan Cohen was the head of My Yahoo!, Yahoo’s personalized homepage, and before that led product management for personalized products at Google, including the Google Personalized Homepage. Pageflakes allows you to put all your web favorites, including news, email and search engines, onto one personalized page using “flakes”, or widgets. They have a large community of users that creates and helps each other discover more new flakes on Pagecasts, which is a new feature that allow users to share their pages with the world, or with private groups. Over 120,000 public Pagecast pages have been created and shared. When you go to the Pageflakes site you’re greeted by a “no nonsense” startpage full of ready-to-be-customized widgets, which is very refreshing. They keep the service completely focused on you and your personalized widgets. And, when you’re ready to explore other users’ public Pagecasts, Pageflakes has an impressively simple Pagecast directory. The directory uses strong indexing tools in providing great access and search for the public Pagecasts. The Pageflakes RSS reader is solid and comes with two different views: Outlook and Newspaper. The Outlook view resembles Google Reader and has two or three panes just like Outlook. All feeds from all your Pageflakes pages are included in the RSS reader, which is something Google has yet to do with their separate Google Reader and iGoogle services.

Above: Pageflakes Screenshot -- #1