apture

Google buys Apture to bolster Chrome browser

Google's latest purchase is Apture, a startup that focuses on providing instant access to information with in-page search technology.

Also self-defined as a "glossary for the Web," Apture's features include boosting 2D Web sites into enhanced multimedia experiences in which readers better find related information as the text jumps off the page. This contextual search function was designed to increase revenue opportunities for publishers, including such customers as The New York Times and The Financial Times.

For example, you might have noticed some of this technology when reading the New York Times Web site, and you … Read more

Apture's on-page search tech comes to Scribd

The idea of finding out more about a word or phrase you run across while reading is becoming more popular. In reading applications on the iPad, and of course, Amazon's Kindle, it's now common to find a built-in dictionary tool, or a way to start a Web search on something that may have you scratching your head.

That same technology is coming to digital book and document repository Scribd via a partnership with Apture. Now, when a reader gets to a word or phrase they want to know more about, they can highlight it and select the "… Read more

Webware Radar: Alltop launches personal pages

RSS repository Alltop announced that it has launched a new feature called MyAlltop that allows users to create a custom page to which they can add the feeds they care about.

The widgets can be viewed on that single page and shared with others. In order to create a MyAlltop page, visitors will be required to register for the site. Once they do, they can click an icon next to the feed to add it to their page. The feature is available now.

Sorenson Media, a company that provides encoding and compression applications on video that will be streamed over … Read more

Only open news is good news: Apture, Washington Post, Times Extra

These days, you don't need to launch portal sites that vie for new audiences. You're better served leveraging existing applications to provide new functionality for venues that already attract a fair share of eyeballs or that even cultivate their own communities.

Internet activist Lawrence Lessig points out a feature of Apture, a rich media content compilation platform, that promotes government transparency by allowing bloggers and other publishers to embed links to rich media background info on politicians and their records (i.e., key moments of testimony in videos, historical source materials, government documents, and even bills and resolutions). … Read more

Lazy blogger tool Zemanta adds MySpace support and more

Hot on the heels of Monday's look at Apture, competitor Zemanta has pushed out an update to include several new publishing platforms--one of them being MySpace, a site with over 100 million registered users. It's a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service's built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like WordPress or LiveJournal.

Once installed, writing a blog post on the popular social network can be sped up if you take advantage of its auto-linking, tagging, and image finding capabilities.

The core service still remains largely the … Read more

Add (useful) pop-up links to your blog with Apture

Apture is a new tool for bloggers to add a little more context to their posts. Like Yahoo's Shortcuts it will go over what you've written and add little pop-ups in places where you link to other sites or media items from around the Web. The big difference is that Apture can either do all this automatically or let you to do the legwork.

It's set up to work with popular sites like Flickr, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Scribd. Any link to one of those sites will simply enable whoever clicks on it to see the entire entry … Read more