The most important ad for a company or brand is its Website. So why not use that Website to generate ads? Dapper, a startup that can create a feed from any Website, is applying its technology to generate contextual, display ads from the constantly changing content on an advertiser’s own site.

The new service is called MashupAds. It is currently in private beta. The first 150 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get an invite (mention TechCrunch in the comments)>

Everyone from Google to Yahoo is working on contextual display ads in an attempt to make display ads as relevant as contextual text ads. Like those efforts, MashupAds takes its cues from the content on the page where the ad is being served. So if you are researching what to do in Chicago on Fodor’s, you will get display ads for hotel rooms in Chicago. Where Dapper takes a step further is that the creative content in those ads are pulled directly from the relevant portion of the advertiser’s Website.

For instance, for a Marriott ad, you might see the Marriott hotels in Chicago along with room availability and prices. Click on Berlin, and you see the ads for hotel rooms in Berlin. When Marriott changes something on its Website, the changes are reflected in the ads. The Website is the ad (even on other sites).

Dapper has been testing MashupAds and claims a 3X to 5X improvement in click-through rates over other display ads. They can also take the form of a mini-store within the ad so people can buy those Docker pants without going to the Gap’s site. The ads can plug into most major ad networks. A month ago, the Yahoo product manager behind Search Monkey, Amit Kumar, left Yahoo to head up product management at Dapper. The videos below show how Mashup Ads work. (Update: Vimeo pulled the videos because it does not allow commercial use, so the company is putting them up on YouTube):

MashupAds: A contextual, interactive display ad ready to traffic in < 10 min from Paul Knegten on Vimeo.

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We have learned that Amit Kumar, the director of product management behind Yahoo’s Search Monkey and semantic Web initiatives, is leaving by the end of the week. He will be joining semantic Web startup Dapper as Vice President of product management.

The exodus continues.

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Time’s up, buddy. Teqlo is now in the deadpool.

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At its core, Dapper allows users to create API’s called “Dapps” by selecting data from Websites, RSS/XML feeds, Google Gadgets, and more. Each “Dapp” is an XML which can be manipulated in any number of ways. The company released a tool to create Netvibes modules in late 2006.

Dapper’s Facebook AppMaker lets these Dapps be transformed into full-blown Facebook applications. This includes functionalities such as remote search and retrieval, remote login, and multi-page apps. A Facebook Developer account is a prerequisite to the AppMaker process itself.

The test app I created was an effortless process: I created a Dapp, entered it in the AppMaker wizard, entered the appropriate Facebook’s API/Secret keys, saved and installed. While creating a Dapp was not a sophisticated process on Dapper’s side, it certainly could be more intuitive. I found the Facebook side of the process to require a higher degree of technological aptitude.

Dapper is debuting the AppMaker with an Answers.com application that features three applets: Word of the Day, Today in History, and Do You Have the Answers? Another already available app is Go2Web20’s. Expect an additional application to be launched in the next couple of days with a “high-profile” media player.

Headed by Eran Shir (CEO) and Jon Aizen (CTO), Dapper employs a team of 15 and is in the midst of setting-up an office in San Francisco. In 2006, the company secured a $1.2M funding round from Accel Partners. The company first launched in August 2006 and we covered them as part of a roundup post along with Yahoo Pipes, Teqlo, Proto and OpenKapow in March 2007.

Sign-up for beta access by emailing techcrunch@dapper.net.

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Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a GUI web app that lets you create new data feeds by remixing syndication feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF). Pipes takes in feeds from around the web, letting you sort, join, and analyze the feeds items before outputting them in RSS or JSON. It also has a good query builder module that lets you grab feeds based on URL parameters. Yahoo! has also created a community around the service, letting users publish and remix other people’s pipes. The resulting data from the pipes can even be used for other mashups, as Teqlo has done.

Ideal for ipes is best suited for mashups between well formed feed data with Yahoo! services such as Search, Local, Flickr, or even Google Base, since the modules are already included. Programming experience is limited to an understanding of procedural programming control structures (loops, logical tests) and aided by the visual interface.

Examples: Apartments near something (Craigslist and Yahoo! Local). eBay Price watch (eBay RSS API).

Teqlo

Teqlo is a new widget-based mashup application. You build mashups by dropping specialized widgets onto the canvas and specifying interactions between them. For instance, you can map the results of an eBay search by dropping an eBay search widget and Google map widget on the canvas. Then you connect the two widgets by specifying an interaction such as when an item is selected in the eBay widget, add a marker on the Google map. The application is then accessed by a webpage with the active AJAX widgets. Other widgets include Google Calendar, Gadgets, Spreadsheets, LinkedIn search, DabbleDB search, YouTube viewer, contact lists, and to do lists.

The service is currently in beta, so they have a limited number of modules and have not turned on publishing to the web yet.

Ideal for: Teqlo is a high level masher best suited for non-programmers. Users create interactions between widgets by specifying an action in one widget causing a reaction in another. However, Teqlo’s high level approach means most of its power lies with its developers ability to craft useful widgets and interactions.

Examples: Examples are not public yet, but an example Teqlo is covered in their blog.

Proto

Proto is a Windows based mashup application meant to join your desktop apps with the web. You need the Windows application to both create and use the mashups. It’s component based, joining your desktop and web apps by pulling data from your desktop applications, such as Outlook, and feeding it into online web components, such as Yahoo! maps. Proto has the Visual Basic for Applications development environment (VBA IDE) and Adobe Flash baked in, so you can create your own modules to pull and display data from your applications. Proto also has a light database it uses to broken and manipulate data between the application and online component.

Ideal for: Proto takes some familiarity with database concepts and hopefully VBA experience so that you can program your own modules. Their 5 minute intro is indicative of the experience level you need to really use the program. Since Proto allows you to share your mashups, non-programmers can also use Proto for their library of pre-existing mashups.

Examples: The intro video provides a good example of the program, but downloading the viewer is needed to view modules like the restaurant viewer or more enterprise minded Salesforce reporter.

Dapper

Dapper is a web based application for generating XML for website content. You create “Dapps” (web services) by using Dapper’s virtual browser to grab content from web pages. Dapper is trained by feeding it several example urls that hold examples of content you’re interested in. Dapper looks at the similarities between the pages to take a guess at the important content to pull from the page. After Dapper has analyzed the page, you can narrow down the fields on the page you want to track. For instance, the titles of stories on Digg. Dapper can then output the content you select from the page in various formats (XML, JSON, HTML, and YAML) and incorporate that data to trigger alerts or even map locations found in the feed. Each Dapper application, “Dapp”, is published to the community for anyone to use.

Ideal for: Dapper takes minimal programming experience and is useful for making well structured feeds for pages that don’t have them already. Their demo movie is a good place to start.

Examples: Fidget is a tool that lets you find videos of your favorite bands based on searches carried out by Dapper.

OpenKapow

OpenKapow is the industrial strength version of Dapper. It’s a desktop app that programs RSS feeds, REST apps, and web clips through a browser interface. You can use OpenKapow to make a web robot to pull from a web page like Dapper, but can direct that bot to navigate web pages (including form submission), carry out loops, branches, recover from errors, and accept user input at any point in the process. OpenKapow has a community where developers can share their robots to be used and remixed by other users.

Ideal for: OpenKapow is ideal for serious web scrapping. It takes basic knowledge of procedural programming and web markup to use.

Examples: Here is a robot that logs into Gmail and outputs your email in XML. Here’s another one that searches deep into TechCrunch’s posts for a keyword.

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The bot operates much like any other home-grown screen-scrapping bot you would quickly program to grab bits and pieces of pages across the web, but is more flexible and optimized better than bots that rely solely on grabbing html code based on matching text patterns (regular expressions). Instead, Kapow bots follow the DOM structure of a site when grabbing and looping through data.

The IDE’s interface is comprised of three main areas: logical structure of the bot (for loops and all), properties inspector, and an embeded browser you use to direct the bot’s interaction with a web page. Examples of completed bot programs can be found at the community forum page, where all completed bots must be published so that they can be run by Kapow’s servers. Each program can also be downloaded and modified by any user. Look at this NFL sports feed created by one member’s program. With a bit more programming, you can create more interesting mashups based on Kapow data.

Kapow Technologies was founded in Denmark in 1998, with their bot suite originally used to collect the data for the largest marketplace in Europe, Kapow.net. In 2001, Kapow decided to refocus solely on their software. OpenKapow marks a new effort to expose RoboSuite to a wider audience, particularly the mashup crowd. As with Dapper, though, we have yet to see how any copyright issues develop.

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Dapper first made the scene with the release of a tool called Blotter that displays any blog’s Technorati link data over time in a graph. The company has been on an innovation blitz lately, see for example the company’s recent proof of concept called Snag – a service that aggregates all your friends, updates and messages across LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Hi5. That was the first showcase of Dapper’s newly added support for incorporating data sources that require login and it’s just plain useful.

Dapper users use a point and click interface to grab changes to data over time on any website. That data can then be delivered in any number of different formats, including RSS, iCal, Google Maps or many others. Dapper hopes that in addition to the relatively simple functionality it now brings to Netvibes, they hope to include more interactive features in their modules and extend this service out to more start pages and widget platforms as users request them and company’s approve.

Dapper reports that they have much more in the works and a User Interface overhaul is near the top of their priorities. That’s great news as the site certainly needs one. Once the service becomes even easier to use, I expect to see Dapper implementations flourish around the web all the more.

Update: Scott Matthews emailed me again after I posted this and reminded me once more that I could have and should have mentioned BittyBrowser as another way to bring Dapper built RSS feeds into Netvibes and many similar places. Matthews deserves a lot of credit as well for his work on making data portability a reality in the emerging web.

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This week, though, the folks at Dapper added iCal as one of the formats available for data export. Now in addition to adding data gleaned from any site on the web to your own applications via 11 different formats – you can also sync data from many sites with iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook or anything else that supports the iCal format. That means I’ve got the weather.com forecast for my zip code for the next ten days automatically appearing at the top of my iCal display. Very nice.

Unfortunately, the service in general is very difficult to use. I asked the company for examples of data sources (called dapps) already in the database that could be easily imported in iCal format. Here’s four quick examples they provided:

• Ten day forecast for weather.com.
• Concert tickets from cheapeasytickets.com, for awesome Hasidic Reggae musician Matisyahu in particular (iCal file).
• Mugglenet, a Harry Potter news site.
• Apple News, from the Apple website.

These dapps work with iCal reasonably well, so it’s clearly possible and very useful. I don’t want news in my calendar but I do want forthcoming events and the weather. The Dapper team tells me they are going to hire a UI designer as soon as they get some funding and that couldn’t happen soon enough because the site is a disaster (for me) to try and use. Some one please, help them with the UI, this is a great tool that so many potential users just walk away from because it’s so hard to use. I can’t give up on it because when some one is able to make it work the results are really valuable. So ask yourself what you’d like in your calendar, maybe someone else has already braved the interface dungeon that is Dapper and created a tool for to accomplish your goal, or maybe you can struggle through it yourself. One way or the other, it’s a very handy service when it works. It’s nice to have the weather forecast on my calendar.

Dapper provides a point and click GUI to extract data from any web site that can then be worked with and displayed via XML, HTML, RSS, email alerts, Google Maps, Google Gadgets, a javascript image loop or JSON. The site could use a UI overhaul to make it easier for nontechnical users and copyright issues will have to be dealt with. That said, Dapper is pretty awesome.

Dapper is lead by Jon Aizen, a Cornel CS graduate who’s worked on the Alexa Archive and the Internet Archive and CEO Eran Shir. Aizen says the company aims ultimately to offer a marketplace for content reuse through Dapper, allowing publishers to set the terms and prices for any creative reuse of their published content. This is the kind of thing that it takes serious negotiation to do today, but Dapper has the potential to make such deals far easier for far more people. For developers Dapper will just save time, Aizen says.

Here’s how it works. Users identify a web site they are interested in extracting data from and view it through the Dapper virtual browser. Aizen showed my how to do it using Digg as an example. I clicked on a story headline, on the number of diggs and the via URL field. I went to another page on the same site and did the same thing so that Dapper could clearly identify the fields I was interested in. I then went through the various tools available on the site to set certain conditions and threshholds and ended up with XML feeds I could do all kinds of things with. Like send me an email whenever there’s a TechCrunch story on the front page of digg, or when a search results page shows a TechCrunch story with more than 10 diggs. After I create an end product through the site, other users will be able (after a 24 hour period in which I can edit the project) to use my project either as is, altered to fit their needs or in the future, in combination with other projects.

The alerts are of most interest to me, but data from other sites can be mapped on Google Maps, turned into an RSS feed for sites that don’t publish feeds, turned into a slideshow if the data is in the form of images. Aizen says he’s created a tool for himself that runs feeds through Babblefish automatically and produces a translated feed. The possibilities are huge.

Privacy and licencing the technology so it runs on your own servers are both things the company is looking at for the future. Both are pretty key.

Though the company says the site is largely a proof of concept they are also seeking seed funding and it’s pretty usable already. Dapper says it’s aiming high: what Geocities did for static web pages, they want to do for dynamic content reuse. If they can find a good way to manage the rights pitfalls around reused content, and I’d like to believe it’s possible, then we may start seeing a lot of dazzling new ways to interact with data built via Dapper and popping up around the web.