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.

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Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.

Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.

We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.

Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date.

Apture

Apture is a startup trying to bring “depth to the web” with contextual popups that require no browser plugin. The product’s blog integration provides a very visual and intuitive way of navigating CrunchBase entries. Here are some examples (click on the little book icons to the left of the links): YouTube, FriendFeed and Evan Williams. Also, check out this video they compiled:

Zemanta

Zemanta, a blogging enhancement tool that launched back in March, recently integrated CrunchBase so that publishers can easily slurp in extra information like company logos into their posts.

Zemanta’s product integrates closely into blogging platforms such as WordPress, and it helps to semantically link up parts of your post with sites from around the web (CrunchBase now included). These guys have been on our case (and rightly so) to release an API for a couple of months now, so it’s great to see their implementation go live. They even offer their own API which takes plain text as input (say, a blog post), and spits out correctly disambiguated CrunchBase entities.

You can check out a demo of their product here.

Flash CrunchBase

Nicolás Parziale has created a very cool flash app inspired by They Rule that visualizes the graph of connections throughout CrunchBase. You can start with a company (such as Digg, shown below) and then flesh out different parts of the graph with your mouse. You can even input any two companies, causing the app to crawl the web and visually display all of the connections between the two.

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I’m generally not pleased when a user interface does something I didn’t intend it to do. Such as when I click on a link but instead of taking me to a new page, it pops up an overlay with advertising or related content (see this Yahoo News article or any website “enhanced” with Vibrant Media to see what I mean).

So I really should resist the idea behind Apture, a startup founded by three Stanford computer science students that aims to improve contextual popups rather than ban them. But its technology and user interface is actually quite good, even if it does require users to change their expectations a bit.

Publishers can use Apture to enhance their writing by adding links to popups (or HTML-based “overlays”) that display relevant media from sources such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Scribd, Google Maps, Hulu, ESPN, YouTube, Imeem, and Flickr.

Installing Apture is easy: just drop a snippet of JavaScript code onto your site and begin manually choosing the sections of your writing that you want to turn into popup triggers. Related media content can also be added between paragraphs as embeds. The publisher interface, like the end-user experience, overlays the page’s content, making setup a matter of point-and-clicking.

Let’s say I’m talking about Redmond, Washington or Family Guy or David Bowie. See those links? If you click on them, popups will appear that shed light on what they reference. And the popups will lead you off to other, related popups that can be used to learn even more.

Apture’s publisher tool has been available to 2,500 blogs (including a couple blogs run by the Washington Post) since April. Over the past couple months, the company has worked on improving the user interface and adding support for additional sources. The tool is now being made available to everyone.

As a publisher, there are a few concerns that come to mind when considering a tool like Apture. As mentioned before, it requires users to change their expectations. It also requires publishers to change their own habits (especially if they have to add these links after their content is live). And it might even cut down on page views when used to showcase internal media in lieu of hard links. Perhaps a way to get around two of these issues would be to make the link’s icon trigger an overlay but leave the link itself as a normal one.

Apture is based in San Mateo, California and has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding since its founding in February 2007.

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