Back when Apture was in its fledging stages, its impact on the journalism community was the driving force behind development. From our founders’ early conversations with the Stanford Knight Fellows, to the latest BBC UK News trial, enhancing effective journalism through richer engagement and more compelling storytelling is ingrained in Apture’s mission. With the spotlight back on journalism this month, our CEO Tristan will discuss the impact of media tools for powering the multidimensional web and content rich news sites at three of the major journalism conferences this year.

The Society for News Design Conference begins on Sunday Sept. 7th in Las Vegas, NV at the Red Rock Resort & Casino. Make sure to catch the opening session from 8pm-10pm by the Red Rock Pool and Lounge. Tristan will be actively participating throughout the conference sessions on Tuesday. With its intense focus on design and innovation, this conference is one you do not want to miss.

Then on Wednesday, Sept. 10 at 8:35 am Tristan will be a featured speaker on the panel Innovative Tools to Improve your Online Site at the Associated Press Managing Editors Conference also in Las Vegas, NV. Moderated by Jim Brady of the Washington Post, this panel also includes Sphere CEO, Tony Conrad, and Inform CEO, James Satloff. The panel will focus on new technologies that cater to newspaper websites to create new forms of storytelling, connect readers to relevant information and, enable relationships between readers and journalists.

And finally, on Friday Sept. 12, at 4 pm, Tristan will be a guest on the Hello, Semantic Web! panel at the Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet in Washington, DC. If you don’t know how the next iteration of the Web, the Semantic Web, will affect your online news organization, this session is the place to find out. Tristan will be presenting alongside Tom Tague, VP, Clearforest Calais, and Tiffany Shackelford, Consultant.

If you’d like to meet up with Tristan this month, or think there’s another conference we should attend, let us know! Leave us a comment here, or send an email to contact@apture.com

And if you’re a publisher and want to know about how to put Apture to work for your online news site, check out http://www.apture.com/publishers/ for more information.

 Today Apture made CrunchBase’s rich database available to any Apture user.  Now you can search for and link information, profiles about entrepreneurs, venture firms, and companies in Silicon Valley (and beyond) with one click.  In addition, TechCrunch.com is now using Apture to quickly share these profiles any time an entrepreneur or company is referenced with a CrunchBase link. Take a look at some examples:  YouTube, Evan Williams, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital (we’ve gone ahead and added related links as well).

If you’re a current Apture user, CrunchBase is already available to you.  Just open the Apture Media Hub as usual, and when you search for something, you’ll now see the “CrunchBase” tab available right next to Wikipedia in the Reference section.

Because of CrunchBase’s simple API and Apture’s powerful plug-and-play architecture, we were able to integrate CrunchBase without much effort at all.  See a full demo of how it works with this video:

View Apture CrunchBase Links video

See the full coverage on TechCrunch.  Getting written up in TechCrunch is certainly not common, but we were flattered to have this happen not once, but twice in 24 hours.  The same day, Ouriel Ohayon, editor of TechCrunch France was kind enough to share his thoughts on Apture both on his personal blog, and on his post on TechCrunch France (written in French).

It’s thrilling to see our integration of CrunchBase capture so much attention, and we can’t wait to see how people use it across the web.  Imagine how with Apture, individuals across the web can link a PowerPoint presentation from a venture firm to an interview from one of the partners with a PDF of the latest term sheet from a company they funded. (Demo here.)  Or they can link a video interview of an entrepreneur discussing their latest company with their CrunchBase profile, detailing all their past companies.  All of this and more is possible with Apture!

How does this new CrunchBase feature strike you?  Let us know your thoughts here on the blog, or contact us at contact@apture.com

We were honored to have our own Stanford Professor, Patrick Young, work with us this summer at Apture.  Thanks to him we recently unveiled a new way to view a stream of related media. Introducing: the Apture Slideshow Viewer!

As with all of our new features, there’s nothing to download and nothing additional to install.  If you already have Apture, this feature is automatically enabled on your site.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Hover over the Apture Link about Superman, The Earth or Paris.  A Wikipedia article appears in an Apture window, as usual.

Step 2: To see the slideshow, click on the main image of the Wikipedia article, and voila!  Watch the slideshow run while you read more about the topic.

Step 3: Then, just double click anywhere on the screen to close all the Apture windows and return to the original text.

To create this Apture experience on your own blog, simply link to any Wikipedia article that includes images in the body of the page.  (Some other examples are Clint Eastwood, Miss Universe, Tiger Woods, London, and Central Park)

What do you think?  Leave us a comment, or send us an email to contact@apture.com

They are!

I’d like to take the time to recognize some of our most creative an loyal Apture users.

The Tacony Corporation uses Apture to sell more products…

Cambria Political talks politics using Apture…

Anoki is a blogger among bloggers…

and Evan Sims is a design whiz who uses Apture to spice things up.

It’s great to highlight some of our most innovative Apture users.  We’d love to feature your website or blog as well.  Just leave a comment here, or send us an email to contact@apture.com

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently about Apture appearing on the BBC website (here, here, here). This past week, the BBC began a pilot of Apture on the UK-facing Science/Nature and Politics sections to include links inline in BBC stories. We have been honored to work with the BBC to roll out this functionality to readers, and I wanted to point out several stories they have enhanced that deserve attention. First, however, I would like to take a step back and explain some history.

Note: If you do not see any links in the following examples, it is because you need to switch to the UK version of the BBC site. Click “UK version” in the BBC page’s left sidebar. If you return to the BBC story page, you should see a box called “BBC trial - in page links.” Click the “Turn on in-page links” button, and Apture’s iconic links should appear on the page.

When we started Apture two years ago, we wanted to raise the bar of the everyday “flat” web experience. Newspapers and “old” media after all, are based on flat pieces of paper, and the web offers so many more dimensions to communicate. So we set out to build a platform to deliver endless context and background information in the dimensions that aren’t offered by any other communication medium. The question was: could you build something educational and informative, and drive interest in topics someone might not have known or cared about beforehand?

Enter this example BBC story on primates. The regular “flat” version of this story is a basic BBC page: text describing the intellectual capabilities of bonobo chimpanzees compared to other monkeys, along with a leading photo of Kanzi, a bonobo chimp. As an average reader who came across this story, are you likely to know much about bonobo chimps? For most people, probably not. And further, do bonobo chimps really matter to you, anyway? Probably not either. But here’s the key point: if a topic did pique your interest, and you did want to learn more, then you would have to do work. You’d have to leave the BBC, open a new browser window or tab, Google for “bonobo chimpanzees,” and probably end up reading an article on Wikipedia. With Apture, the BBC can instead curate this story with further links and bring the research and background information to you. The story comes alive. You can click on the link for “bonobo chimps,” read the description of the species from Wikipedia, open a slideshow of photos, or even dive into the section on the Psychological Characteristics of the bonobo with one more click—all without leaving the page. You can see maps of where bonobos are normally found (Indonesia), and see a video of Kanzi (the bonobo chimp)’s sister playing the piano and richly communicate her intelligence. Isn’t this more meaningful to see the raw source material, up close and personal, rather than to have to drill down or research on your own?

There is a balance. You can’t have too many links on a page. You wouldn’t want the contextual or background information to overwhelm the core story. But using Apture, the BBC can facilitate the discovery of meaningful information, and in this case, expose just how fascinating or intelligent bonobo monkeys really are, perhaps even make it interesting to a reader who wouldn’t otherwise care.

Take a look at some other examples of how the BBC has used the software, and let us know what you think. They have used Apture to link to speeches by Stephen Hawking, expose video animations and PDFs describing NASA’s Orion Cruise Vehicle, reference biographical information on humorous political commentators, and expose paintings and historical information about ancient Roman empresses.

Do you have ideas on how to make the web experience richer? What else could we do to lower the costs to access information on the web and go deeper? Leave a comment here, or send us your thoughts at contact@apture.com.

This Saturday, we’re headed to WordCamp San Francisco 2008 hosted at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF.  This is our first year attending, but we’re excited to meet the enthusiastic users and developers working on one of the coolest blogging platforms around.  

We’re told that previous years included talks from core developers, amazing BBQs and free t-shirts. We’ll be giving away free promotional grub as well, so try to catch either Can, Josh, Theresa, or Tristan and we might have something special for you.  

Self-hosted WordPress blogs are currently Apture’s most popular platform for installations, and we’re looking forward to be among enthusiastic fans.  As you may not know, WordPress.com unfortunately does not let you edit site templates or add third-party services or scripts, so installing Apture isn’t possible.  If you’d like to be able to try Apture on your WordPress.com blog, you can kindly support the cause and ask WordPress.com to enable it.

We hope to see you there.

Tristan will be demoing Apture at the Start Conference in Cowell Theater, San Francisco today to great group of entrepreneurs, VCs, and tech visionaries.

A big part of the Apture team will be at the session and the evening gathering afterwards. Send us an email to contact@apture.com or message us on Twitter if you’ll be there and would like to talk.

Start is a one-day conference in San Francisco designed for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor whose final lecture inspired millions, died early Friday morning in Virginia of pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Pausch, 47, who turned the lecture into a book, said that no one would have been interested in his words of wisdom were he not a man in his 40s with a terminal illness, leaving behind a wife and three young children.

Last fall, Dr. Pausch delivered the lecture at CMU, which still posts it on its Web site. The lecture has attracted more than six million viewers…   (Read the rest of the article here)

The Apture team admired and respected Prof. Pausch, and our condolences go out to his family and loved ones.

Alexandria, VA and San Mateo, CA July 29, 2008 — Phase2 Technology and Apture, Inc. announced today a new solution to provide online publishers with an expanded toolset to enhance the user experience for publishers utilizing the Drupal content management system.  Publishers using the Drupal modules can now enjoy the added feature of Apture’s rich multimedia linking platform, which allows the user to effortlessly include rich multimedia content by simply clicking on the item to embed.

Phase2 Technology constantly seeks new and innovative tools for publishers using the Drupal CMS. It’s development of  the Drupal modules for Apture complements work in other semantic web practices including Calais, Thomson Reuters Semantic web service that enables publishers to automatically metatag content. Phase2 is nationally recognized for expertise in the implementation of non-profit, media and publishing solutions using open source technologies including Java and the Drupal content management platform.

Apture’s technology provides a powerful but easy to use WYSIWYG, interface to link several media into a web page, With Apture, a user can simply point and click to the content they wish to link.  Once the content is linked, Apture enhances the visitor experience by enabling the user to simply view the linked media in an immersive experience, without leaving the publisher’s web page.

At the heart of Apture’s technology is the innovative Apture Media Hub™ which suggests publicly available content that web publishers have at their disposal but may not be aware of. The Media Hub provides searchable access to the richest multimedia on the web, including  Wikipedia, IMDB and Amazon, videos from 11 major online providers (including YouTube, Hulu, and ESPN), Flickr’s global library of photographs, imeem’s library of user-embeddable music and video playlists from four record labels, Google Maps, and more. Publishers may also use Apture to link the exact parts of media, such as one page within a PDF or a single moment of a video . 

“The powerful combination of Drupal and Apture allows publishers to instantly add embedded content to their sites, adding greatly to the user-experience,” said Jeff Walpole, Managing Partner, Phase2technology, “Phase2 is excited to be at the forefront of helping publishers move into the new realm of linked data.”

“We are excited to have the innovative Apture Media Hub included in Drupal‘s toolset,” explains Tristan Harris, CEO and co-founder of Apture.   “By teaming with Phase2, we are providing Drupal customers with the capability to produce true multimedia webpages with ease.  This opportunity furthers our quest to educate publishers and users alike that the web does not have to be flat anymore.”

The modules can be downloaded here http://drupal.org/project/apture

About Phase2 Technology, LLC

Phase2 Technology is a leading provider of adaptable web software solutions, application development and consulting services. The company specializes in content management systems, content exchange, CRM and online publishing and community tools. We apply our unique Agile Approach methodology to every project and have particular expertise in Drupal, CiviCRM and custom Java applications. The Phase2 Technology development team has been highly active in the Drupal community for several years. For more information, go to www.phase2technology.com.

About Apture, Inc.

Apture, Inc. is an innovative technology company providing new tools for online publishers.  With its leading content injection technology, Apture is harnessing the power of the world’s multimedia libraries to build a richer and more compelling experience for end users, while building automated tools for web site publishers to enhance their content. Apture is a privately held company headquartered in downtown San Mateo, California. To learn more about Apture, log on to www.apture.com.

Media Contacts:

Tiffany Shackelford, Phase2 Technology

703 548 6050 x 100

tshackelford@phase2technology.com

Cathy Caplener, Be Cause PR

Tel: 310-428-7476

cathy@becausepr.com

We’ve listened to feedback from our UK users when you told us you wanted to be able to link to UK versions of IMDB and Amazon using Apture. Amazon.co.uk and uk.imdb.com Apture web clip parsers are now live!

Any other features you want to see implemented? Send us an email to feedback@apture.com with your suggestions.