Most recently in the news for its executive exodus last week, Yahoo announced on its corporate blog earlier today the acquisition of San Francisco-based Dapper, a startup that specializes in fancy contextual display ads, i.e. ads that take what is happening on a content producer’s website as a cue from what to serve up to viewer.
Both Yahoo and Google have been working on optimizing contextual display ads for quite some time, and this recent acquisition is an attempt to harness the talent at Dapper, which has also figured out a realtime bidding feature for ads. This is the first Yahoo acquisition since the triumvirate of Koprol, Associated Content and Citizen Sports in May. → Read More
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. Website is the ad (even on other sites). → Read More
Yahoo may be pushing ahead with its strategy to open itself up to outsiders (this weekend was Hack Day), but insiders are still streaming out the door. Even some of the product managers driving the open strategy are not sticking around.
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. → Read More
Making my point that it is hard to make money from mashups, investors have pulled the plug on Teqlo. The startup, backed by Peter Rip, was originally focused on being a widget-based tool for creating mashups, competing with Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and OpenKapow. Then it tried to morph into a vague “Web-based workflow” company, and lost its CEO. Founder Jacoby Thwaites tells GigaOm: We had great investors, great people and great technology, but we ran out of time working out what the killer product could be! Time’s up, buddy. Teqlo is now in the deadpool. → Read More
This Tuesday, Israel-based Dapper will launch the private beta of Facebook AppMaker, a new tool that the company claims will provide people with a dead simple way to create new Facebook applications. 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. → Read More
Call them pipes, teqlos, dapps, modules, mashups or whatever else but fact is that recently we have seen a good number of new services that allow developers and users to build mini-apps and mashups that mix and re-mix data. Here we run through 5 applications that allow you to mix, rip and mash your data, looking at the data input, output, REST support, suggested use, and required skill level: 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 → Read More
Today, Kapow Technologies has launched a new developer community, OpenKapow, based around their Kapow web-crawling bot. OpenKapow lets anyone use Kapow’s visual IDE (Kapow RoboSuite) to more easily program and share bots that make RSS feeds, REST services, and web clips, which can serve as the backbone for all kinds of mashups. The IDE weighs in at 110MB, so sit tight for a long download. It’s not as sleek as Dapper, with its virtual browser and nontechnical interface, but serves as a good introduction to Kapow’s successful enterprise-level services. 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. → Read More
Mashup creation tool Dapper announced today that its users can now easily create new modules from any data source for placement in the popular start page Netvibes. Dapper is a company that’s either glorifying screen scraping or leading the charge towards data portability, depending on your perspective. I like it a lot. Working with Dapper to enable fast user creation of new modules is a nice competitive advantage for Netvibes. Our previous coverage of Netvibes is here and of Dapper here. 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. → Read More
Since we profiled Israeli startup Dapper, the controversial and very intriguing service has added about 2,000 new data sources that anyone can mix and mash from sites around the web. That’s been done in one month. The company calls itself a way to “create an API for any website,” though others call it a fancy screen scraper. Whether it’s a legitimate business or not, whether the rest of the web can be pushed into an era of data portability at Dapper’s pace, remains to be seen. So far the company says only two small websites have gone through their opt-out process. 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 → Read More
A new service called Blotter from startup Dapper (dappit.com) is getting some good coverage around the blogosphere today. Blotter graphs Technorati data for any blog over time. Most exciting to me though is Dapper’s basic service, just launched this week. The company says it’s effectively offering an easy way to create an API from any website. This might look like crass screen scraping on the surface, but the company aims to offer some legitimate, valuable services and set up a means to respect copyright. The site is clearly useful now. 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 → Read More
