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Aug

10

Pushing The Envelope: Apture

Filed Under life, recommendations, technology |

Recently I attended the first ever Start Conference here in San Francisco, CA. The last segment of the day they did was a “Pitch Off”, which I thought was absolutely fantastic! Imagine American Idol + Startup Nerds + Hilarity, it was pretty much like that. I saw some really great presentations and some really bad presentations, but learned a ton from all of the above.

There was one startup in particular that really stood out to me as a product that is truly pushing the envelope, especially in a world of facebook++ mentaility when it comes to consumer internet products. That product was Apture. Apture is all about creating rich and interactive media linking. At first, I was like “wtf is that”, but their expertly-crafted powerpoint skillz made it very clear.

In essence, its a tool that allows you to make your links in your blog far more interesting, what do I mean by that? Well, since I have recently enabled my blog to use apture, via the wonderful wordpress plugin they provide after their 3 second sign up, let me show you. :)

It has all sorts of integrations with places and things that people use most often on the web, so for instance, if I were to tell you I live in Albany, CA, I could provide a simple little map right here on my page (click the link to see what I mean). Now, when you click on that link, you’ll notice a Google Map appears, I’ve also annotated that link with another link to a wikipedia article of my favourite local pizza place!

Cool or what? Now check this out.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love The Mars Volta and Radiohead, they are definitely my two favourite bands. Now, if you click on both of the band names, you can see the cool sorts of things that Apture does for you, with very little effort at all!

Really the only downside to this product is the centralization aspect, if their servers go down, so do my links :(

I am able to create these links on the fly, and make them as inter-connected as I choose! Apture is definitely one of the coolest web tools I’ve seen in a while and I encorage my fellow bloggers to try it out for themselves!


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4 Comments so far

  1. Mark on August 10, 2008 5:51 pm

    Wow, I’m sold.

  2. Can on August 10, 2008 10:45 pm

    Hey Derek,

    Great blog post, it’s always good to hear positive things about the product. As far as the links going down this is obviously a big concern to us and to all the people we work with. We spend a lot of time making sure that this doesn’t happen and we’ve had a very good track record.

    Best,
    Can

  3. Mike W on August 13, 2008 8:12 pm

    As Mark said, I’m sold! This is definitely a great way to spice up the ordinary blog and really brings the content to life. I’m sure you know this but you don’t technically even need to click on the links, simply mousing over works too. I hope this technology gets picked up as it’s really quite nifty.

  4. Theresa Johnson on August 14, 2008 3:02 pm

    Actually, Mike, you can change the pop-up behavior to appear on click or on hover, whatever your preference. To do that, click the settings icon at the bottom of any Apture pop-up and the settings dialog will appear.

    Cheers,
    Theresa from Apture