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Apture Adds Former About.com CEO Peter Horan To Board; Signs Up More Publishers

Leena Rao

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Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
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We’re big fans of Apture, a startup that brings instantaneous search to content on the web. Today, Apture is announcing a new board member and new publishers using its plug-in. As we’ve written in the past, ‘Apture Highlights’ plugs the “search leak” that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content.

Apture is adding former About.com CEO Peter Horan to its board of directors. Horan was formerly the CEO of About.com, which was acquired by the New York Times for $410 million in 2005. Most recently, Horan was the CEO of IAC Media & Advertising.

Apture’s business model offers publishers a white-label version of Apture Highlights, which is being used by Scribd, The Financial Times and Reuters. CEO Tristan Harris is also announcing a number of new publishers are adopting Apture, including Economist.com, ScientificAmerican, BleacherReport.com, and Times of India. While Harris cannot comment on the amount of searches being made via Apture’s plug-in, he says that consumers stay on a publisher page with Apture two to three times longer than without the plug-in.

The startup, which has raised $4.1 million in funding, has also started to place ads in the browsing experience. Publishers pay a monthly licensing fee to have a branded, ad-free experience, but Apture now includes ads within searches for the consumer facing and free products.

Crunchbase

Company: Apture
Website: apture.com
Launch Date: June 2007
Funding: $4.6M

Apture allows publishers and bloggers to link and incorporate several media items into a dynamic layer above their pages. Publishers have to embed a single line of Javascript code into their site and then sign into their Apture account. By highlighting words or phrases Apture allows publishers to link, providing appropriate content to choose between. When the reader clicks a small window opens with related items selected by the publisher. The reader can view the content be it text,...

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