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April 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Lover.ly
[More from Mashable: Pretty Your Pinterest With This New Photo Hack]
Quick Pitch: Wedding planning made easy
Genius Idea: Lover.ly partners with bridal blogs and other editorial content creators to bring its users the most beautiful wedding ideas. The site’s plans to revolutionize image search, while making discovery, saving, and sharing of wedding items simple.
[More from Mashable: Oscar de la Renta to Live-Pin Bridal Show on Pinterest]
For years, a bride and her maid of honor have had to scour bridal magazines and scrapbook pretty dresses to wedding decorations ideas to share with others. Scrapbooking has been tossed aside thanks to the Internet, and today planning the perfect wedding instead involves perusing hundreds of wedding blogs and sharing links with the bridal party.
Kellee Khalil, founder of Lover.ly, knows this process all too well. She moved to New York City from Los Angeles two years ago to join her sister at a bridal public relations company. Her sister got engaged shortly after and Khalil was the maid of honor.
She found it tough to follow 30 wedding blogs at once to find the best ideas for her sister’s big day. And sharing with the bridesmaids turned into a bombardment of emails, she said.
Khalil thought there must be an easier way to organize and share wedding ideas. That’s when the idea for Lover.ly sparked. Now, the startup is based in New York and has seven employees.
The wedding search engine, which is in public beta, launched in October 2011 and was redesigned last week to improve search and usability. The site looks similar to Pinterest, but Khalil insists it is not trying to compete with Pinterest.
“We are trying to make wedding planning online easier and image discover better,” Khalil said.
Lover.ly is different than Pinterest in that it does not allow its users to upload their own pictures because Khalil wants to keep the site searchable and beautiful. The site instead works with 32 wedding blog partners, some of the most popular in the industry including Wedding Chicks, Snippet Ink, The Brides Cafe and celebrity wedding planner, Mindy Weiss.
“We want to have the most beautiful gallery of weddings and our partners are seeing the best stuff in the industry and are able to curate,” Khalil said.
The site is searchable by keywords, colors, categories, featured, popular images and more. Users can go to the original blog where the item was posted and purchase the item. More than 100,000 images are on the site and indexed to organize each photo in the proper categories.
Wedding enthusiasts can create bundles, or groups, to organize their favorite wedding stuff. They can name their own bundles or can love an image that will go into the love bundle. Bundles are private unless the user chooses to make them public.
You don’t have to be planning a wedding to browse Lover.ly for hours. Khalil said 25% of Lover.ly’s users aren’t engaged or planning a wedding for a friend or family member.
“A lot of unengaged girls in college who just like to plan their wedding use our site,” she said.
The site doesn’t release user numbers, but Lover.ly has more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and more than 15,000 Facebook Likes.
To boot, the site has several backers. Lover.ly has raised $500,000 in funding. The site has no ads and does not plan to ever publish ads. Instead, the site earns money by helping its partner blogs sell advertisements.
Check out Lover.ly and let us know what you think of it in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStock, 1905HKN
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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