Apture, the startup that lets online publishers enhance content with pop-ups that carry rich media from a variety of sources based on the context of linked words and terms, has scored a healthy $4.1 million in Series A financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and a number of angel investors including Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware) and Steve Taylor (former Executive VP of the Boston Globe). The service was first launched in June 2008 and has much improved since then.
Online publishers can use Apture by simply inserting a line of Javascript code after creating an account, which allows them to link words and phrases to a HTML-based overlay that acts like a minitiature browser that enables readers to find and explore related multimedia content without leaving the original page. Note that this only works when you’re actually on the equipped page, not in the RSS feed, and that the functionality is not supported by Wordpress.com.
Contextual content is fetched from sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, etc. but also Twitter and FriendFeed (more on that below). They’ve also added CrunchBase to the mix, which we wrote about here.
You can see Apture in action by clicking through to this Washington Post article. Just hover over the names of U.S. Senators with a little icon next to them, and the widget should pop out automatically. I only wish it wouldn’t scroll the article up or down when it opens a pop-up, but I find it surprisingly non-intrusive besides that.
New is that Apture now also supports adding rich media links to content that hasn’t yet been published (something that wasn’t possible before and probably slowed down its adoption a bit) thanks to the addition of plugins for Blogger, TypePad, WordPress and MovableType.
They’ve also just released a neat integration with Twitter, so that you can easily link @username or #hashtags to Twitter streams in blog post or news articles, which is an excellent feature if you ask me. Read more about it here and hover over the account of Sen. John McCain in the blog post to see how it works.
Apture is free of charge for bloggers and online publishers with less than five million page views per month. More pageviews means you have to pay to use the service, but that’s not the core of Apture’s business model, which is centered around charging publishers for premium features, integration of custom content sources, customizations, and priority support. On top of that, Apture runs its own advertising sales with display opportunities across its entire publisher network, and splits that revenue with those publishers.
Apture has already been tested by BBC, Reuters and the Washington Post, and The New York Times is also said to be experimenting with the service.
congrats to Tristan Harris and Can Sar for their awesome product and for this round!
congrats
this really looks like a great product ! well done.
Congrats Tristen.
Tristan*
Yeah, Congrats Tris…
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Contextual Rich Media Overlays are all very well but I’m saving my money for their Portal Gun.
Wow, it is truly amazing that companies are still able to score $4 million Series A’s in this climate. It seems like they have some very solid people and some great pilot customers.
I do wonder, however, if they should be more concerned about the threat from Google. Google can easily offer publishers in their network a similar line a js that will create similar functionality AND they already have a rich base of advertisers …
Anjali Sen
P.S. Please ignore any comment responses that may come after this post that do not have anything to do with the original post.
there you go again, spamming TC with your *expert* opinions. Go away you shameless, ignorant spammer!
… I say and demand you obey:
“Please ignore any comment responses that may come after this post that do not have anything to do with the original post.”
Wrote the true retard … from you know where.
Not a big deal compared to the funding we have received at Extreme Enterprises (eeihq.com) for development of http://www.YourNight.com. For more information, see http://www.tech...itting-on-gold/
Congratulations, Team Apture. Your product is impressive, unobtrusive, and elegant.
Great Job!
Congrats Tristan.
We love it and use it happily on Bukisa
Contextual browsing that delivers relevant and related info intelligently seems like a no brainer.
There are companies like IntelliTXT that have been doing a similar thing but with paid links rather than free, relevant info for a while.
Congrats Tristan
Very well done.. congrats!
Nice!
THIS PRODUCT IS AMASING
it rocks, congrats….
sounds great.
the beauty of javascript
The products sounds amazing, but if Digg or twitter can’t make money, how can they. We’re just moving towards another bubble.
This is one of the keys to web site access personalization while enriching the browsing context and enhance the end users experience.
I like it
wow! that’s amazing.. i can only say “congratulations”.. great job.. hope to like you, sir…
Apture is a really kick ass product, congrats to Tristan and the rest of the team. I’m sure they’ll do big things.
Ahem, has everyone lost their minds? Adding hovers to links is now something that users *want*? Jeez.
I’m with you there.
Being afraid to move my mouse because the pointer is in a minefield of potential popups that I don’t care about is just plain annoying. 4.1 million dollars worth of annoying.
It’s nicely done, though.
Yawn…Oh so 2007.
Snap offers all this without the whizzy animation…
Snap is contextual etc etc done exactly wrong.
Congrats Apture!
Kind of like MashLogic except for users aren’t in control of content.
Clicking a link is such a commitment. you go to a new page, and it takes seconds to load, then you have to return back to the original page.
Apture makes a fluid, fast, attractive way to dive into more information without losing your place.
It’s a great product and very well executed. Looking forward to seeing this on more sites.
The Twitter integration is fantastic too!
Congrats team apture. Well done!
Hey i`m on techcrunch
Thats awsome
thx @Apture & @robin
Quite handy for users. However, for publishers there is a negative in that the user is not clicking through to say the biog page itself…so lost page impressions.
Also no SEO benefit when linking relevant pages from articles as javascript. Plus some users won;t see them at all.
So unless activity on these hovering boxes is much much higher than say people clicking through a normal link or the feature retains lots more users – it can only harm the publisher’s ad revenue.
Hovering your mouse over the links is annoying, why not let the user choose to click? Overall, it’s a good product.
I did not see any info for bloggers to get pay, i wonder if they are working on that.
Congrads Tristan, Can, Josh, and Jesse! The Twitter integration is slick. Keep it up.
TechCrunch: I’m tired of Snap, you guys should consider switching to Apture.
Hi everyone. This is Tristan, Co-Founder/CEO, from Apture. It is very exciting for us to see so much enthusiasm from everybody. We believe that what makes Apture so powerful is how it is designed to provide readers the ability to fluidly dive into multiple pieces of content at once without leaving the page. When readers have a question about a person for example, just linking to a Wikipedia article may not be enough. We let the reader open a video about the person, alongside their tweets and twitpics, along with a Wikipedia article about their background — all without leaving the page. We think this really differentiates us from any other product or service out there.
When readers can’t Publishers often don’t realize how much of their readership is lost to search, because readers can’t get the answers they want from the site they’re on. We think the reason NYT, Reuters, Washington Post… are so excited about this is because it allows them to retain their readership. Stay tuned for exciting new announcements in the coming weeks…we’ll be launching rich new content sources and product improvements that will make Apture even easier to use.
@Joe Apture links are baked into the page and benefit SEO. We have a plugin for WordPress, MovableType, Blogger and TypePad that you can use while writing content that enables this. Check out: http://www.apture.com/plugin
We hope Apture can improve the way we think about many different kinds of communication, including PR. Imagine an “enriched” funding announcement for example:
http://apture.com/seriesA
Hope you guys think this is as cool as we do. Thanks again.
Tristan
@apture, @tristanharris, http://blog.apture.com
Been a longtime since I have seen astroturfing like this one…
Good stuff Tristan, Can, Josh, et. al. Really interesting to see what kind of a dataset you are amassing over there (structuring tons of data on tons of different types of pages).
Congrats Tristan!
MapMyPage also provides contextual overlays, but specializes in maps. Publishers can add a single line of JavaScript that automatically adds Google Maps to all the locations mentioned in a web page.
Just add the JavaScript and MapMyPage takes care of identifying the place names in the page via the MetaCarta API and adding maps via the Google Maps API and Google Earth Plugin.
MapMyPage works on cities, states, countries, many points of interest, and street addresses throughout the U.S.
Publishers can simply copy the JavaScript or use the Blogger widget.
http://www.mapmypage.com
Bad ass.
Badass.