Google has acquired Apture, a startup that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, we’ve confirmed with both companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Launched in 2008, Apture has raised $4.6 million from Beau Vrolyk, Paul Maritz, Steve Taylor, Clearstone Venture Partners
Co-founded by Tristan Harris and Can Sar, Apture developes ‘Apture Highlights,’ a browser extension that aims to plug the “search leak” that the company says is taking place with content on the web. Apture highlights a search leak as when a users is reading content, wants more information about a keyword or phrase and then opens another browser tab to search for the information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. The downside for the content publisher is that the user disengages with the actual content by leaving the page. → Read More
While hyperlinks are a fundamental backbone of the web, they’re also a bit odd. After all, hyperlinking is for the most part a subjective process. Someone decides if and when to link to something. It nudges the web from a completely open story into more of a choose your own adventure one. But what if we could change that?
That’s what HotSpots, a new feature from Apture aims to do. Most of you will know Apture as the contextual add-on service that both publishers (through simple JavaScript) and web surfers (through browser extensions) use to augment their web experience with information. What you may not know is that thanks to this service, Apture has access to some really good data. A lot of it. And the key part of that data shows exactly what users highlight when they browse webpages. → Read More
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. → Read More
We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform.
As we wrote in August, ‘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. → Read More
Apture, the startup that lets online publishers enhance content with rich media pop-ups from a variety of sources based on the context of linked words and terms, is launching a nifty new plug-in today that brings instantaneous search to content on the web.
Called ‘Apture Highlights,’ the browser extension aims to plug the “search leak” that the company says is taking place with content on the web. Apture highlights a search leak as when a users is reading content, wants more information about a keyword or phrase and then opens another browser tab to search for the information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. The downside for the content publisher is that the user disengages with the actual content by leaving the page. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
