Apture and Scribd opens up document content with a new wave of semantic technology

So who are you? I'm Tristan. Tristan Harris, the CEO of appture. Yeah.

And it's been a while since I've interviewed you.

Probably about a year and a half.

Yeah, it's been a long while.

Yeah.

Tell me again what appshur does and where we would see appshur on the web.

Sure.

We can talk about the new stuff that you guys are working on.

Okay, so AppShure is a service for publishers that's meant to take the experience of their content and enable people to access additional information without leaving the page. So, you know, appshir is used by publishers big and small. We have small blogs and we have publishers all the way up to like, the New York Times, who uses appshare, the Financial Times, the Nation, things like that. And they use it so that they can provide additional multimedia that a user can click on and access without leaving the room, leaving the page, opening a tab, going somewhere else. So they have a more interactive experience and it keeps people on the site a lot longer, is one of the major benefits for the site owner. And I'd love to show you the new version too.

Yeah, let's see it.

Cool. So we're on the Read Write Web, one of the blogs. Yeah, we're Read Write Web. So they use appshare.

And so show me where the old.

Yeah, they're using the old one too, so I'll show you. Ok, cool. So Read Write Web is using the first version of appshare. So if I zoom in here, you'll notice there's a little link, it has a little icon, a little reference book icon. It says Paul Levinson. And if I click on it, what will happen is it'll open up a little window and show me information about Paul Livingston. So I can scroll around through here. This is actually not a preview. I can scroll through it and what I want to learn about his education, I can click on that and it'll just keep going. And I can dive anywhere in the table of contents and learn about his novels. I can click on one of them or whatever and click and I'm right back on the page. So it's just a really easy way to dig deeper. And it works with videos. So if you look here, there's a little video icon, fun boxing match about the mass broadcasting of beheadings.

Now, how did those links get in there?

These links got in here because the editor curated them. So the conversations we've had about curation, if you write a blog post and you want to provide additional information, you want to help the reader understand what that video is about, who that person was. You can curate a package of like a video, a photograph, a Wikipedia article, whatever it is that helps you tell your story, and you choose that media. Now, when I'm typing page, when I'm.

Typing in WordPress, how do I link that? Do I just do a regular link to a video and does it show up as a video icon then? Or how do I actually make this magic happen?

Yeah, we have an interface. I won't show it to you today, but we have an Interface inside of WordPress where you have the bold italic underline link button and then you click our appshirt button and we'll automatically search. So when you highlight, you know, the name Robert Scoble and you hit the app sure button, we find all this related media and then you curate the three things you want. Hit link. And then it creates a regular looking link in the HTML of the blog post. And then when the page gets loaded, our JavaScript enhances that link and adds the icon.

Got it.

So this is the first product. And the thing we notice after the first product was that we wanted to let people, people wanted to know even more about things. We thought, why limit it to what the publisher can curate? What if, as a reader, you could highlight anything on the page and get more information about it? And so what we did is we said, let me see if I can find something here. Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy okay, what we did is we said, what if you could look up anything on the page? So say I'm going to go in here to Paul Levinson. Can you see that? Yep. And I'm going to highlight Paul Levinson. And this little search icon appears.

Okay. You don't even need to highlight the whole word.

Don't even need to highlight the whole word. Okay. And when I mouse over a search, browse the selection to the nearest word boundary and I click it, it automatically gives me related information about Paul Levinson. So here you can see Wikipedia article, for some reason, City hall is relevant. You can see his Twitter profile. I'm going to click on his Twitter profile so I can load information from his Twitter profile right here about Paul Levinson. And I've got all of his tweets and I can read anything I want without leaving the page, including this video, which is a blip TV video. And that is will enhance that so you can actually watch it right here without leaving the page.

Oh, that's nice.

So, but what's really neat is you can take this kind of highlight to Learn more functionality and you can use it in almost a Russian doll style. So supposedly, suppose you're going through this article and you want to know more about, say, Martin Scorsese. So let me zoom in here.

Or how about Broadway Empire?

Broadway Empire. Okay. Broadway Empire. It's Boardwalk Empire.

Boardwalk Empire.

Yes, sir. So let's highlight that and hit search and it'll give me related information. Here's Broadway Empire and here's the promo video from YouTube. Now let me show you quickly. This is the. We have the Wikipedia article, we have the YouTube video. We have other results from Read Wide Web. So the site owner can show you and sort of drive related page views to other articles. And then we have results from search engines. But if I click on this video, it's going to actually show me the promo so I can understand what the Boardwalk Empire is about without leaving the page. Isn't that cool?

That's really cool.

And also maximize this and take it full screen. And so this is coming from Twitter, right when I want to know, I was learning more about Paul Levinson and then I wanted to know more about Boardwalk Empire and I can rush into search within a search within a search and I don't have to leave the page.

That's really neat. Now, did Read Write Web have to do anything to do this?

They didn't have to do anything. So if you think about it, if you're a site owner, right, and you want to enable people to really understand what you're talking about, and you want to show all the related articles that you have, every single time they want to know more, you put one line of code in your site. It's like this app. Sure, JavaScript code. And after that you don't have to do anything. Essentially, whenever someone highlights, this little search icon appears and they can click and they can get more information without leaving the page. Got it. And then we'll also hand back analytics to the publisher that show you what on per article basis people wanted to know more about. So we had a publisher, for example, I think it was like Cult of Mac or Born Mac Publisher. And he was writing all these articles and he put apps on the site and he looked at his analytics report, which we send every week, and what he noticed was the top search term was liquid metal. And that's because Apple bought a liquid metal company and that liquid. And everyone wanted to know, what does this liquid metal company do and what does liquid metal. So everyone was writing, so he, they wanted to know more about it that actually guided the articles. He ended up later writing to match what his readers wanted because he knew they wanted to know about liquid metal. And so he started writing more articles to supply the demand for that topic. And so anyway, what's neat about this is it's totally multimedia driven. You can learn more about what about on blogs that are lame like mine. I don't have ap. Sure, right. Well, you will soon.

But I will soon maybe. But let's say I stay lame. How can I use this technology on a blog that hasn't used it yet or embedded it yet?

So it's a great question. We have just two weeks ago launched a browser plugin. It's a browser extension for Chrome. It's called Appsure Highlights. And when you have it installed, you can actually go to any website, any website you want and you can highlight anything to learn more. And so let me just show you one other example. I mean it'd be the same as on Read Write Web here, but you can go in here and it says the 1962 declaration in the Gutenberg Galaxy, which is a book I think by Paul Levinson or Marshall McLuhan. So you highlight the Gutenberg Galaxy, hit search and we'll show you. How much of it do you have.

To highlight, by the way? Because I notice you're not highlighting the whole thing. But does it just have to the highlight just have to hit all three words.

You just hit all the words if you want. Yep. And then you get all this related information. You can see the Wikipedia article, here's the book, here's the Amazon. So you can go buy it. By the way, when someone buys the book, you as the publisher can actually make money from that purchase because we let you put the Amazon affiliate code into the abstract code so that every single time someone buys something off of your content, you actually get the credit for it. Now, whereas now how lucrative is that.

For some of these publishers? Is that turning out to be interesting?

I mean we haven't actually, this hasn't been out that long. We haven't talked to publishers as much as about. But for product driven sites which talk about products and, and books and authors, think about all the times that today you highlight something like Malcolm Gladwell and you go off to your favorite search engine. The favorite search engine benefits from you going there. And then when they go to Amazon and they buy the book, Amazon benefits from you going there. But the publisher who inspired the curiosity for that term, for that author doesn't make any money from it. So we just see this as sort of handing back what's due to the original publisher. But let me show you how it works. So look, if I'm on Gutenberg Galaxy and I want to know more about the book, I can click on it and we actually load the entire Google book preview. So it just grabs a selection of the pages and you can actually read parts of the book right here. And Google does a great job of actually linking up the table of contents. You can actually start reading pages of the book without leaving the page. So you can imagine you come across the word Gutenberg Galaxy. You want to know more about it. And we can give you a quick snippet of the book preview right there.

That's awesome.

And then you can go into videos and you can see an old interview with the 1960s here. And we'll load the video of Marshall McLuhan talking about the global village. There they are, our new electronic media page of the book. Our notions of right and wrong, our.

Regard for one another.

So we think this is just totally going to change the way that people browse the web. I mean, there's been a lot of talk recently with the evolution of browsers and the evolution of search. IE 9 is coming out. Chrome 6 just came out. There's this big browser competition. Browsers are all getting faster. They're all trying to make JavaScript faster. Everything we do works in HTML5 and it's all done in JavaScript. So browsers are evolving to provide more of a seamless interaction with content.

If I read write web on my.

Ipad, all this stuff works. Well, the thing about reading content on the iPad and the iPhone is that they don't let any application know when there's a selection event the same way. So it doesn't yet work on the iPad and the iPhone. We have some other cool stuff we're thinking about in mobile in the future, but for right now, this is a great way for any web publisher to increase the amount of time people spend on their site. Because one thing we notice is that when people use this, people will spend. It's not like a pop up where they see it and they want to close it. It's all user initiated stuff that they want to open. So we actually track the metrics and people spend more than 60 seconds in every window and they spend over time two to three times as long on the page than they do without appshur, which is amazing. If you want your readers to stay on the site, this is a great way to do that. So, you know, for publishers who are, you know, getting traffic from Twitter, getting traffic from Facebook getting traffic from search and they're battling with the back button. You know, how can you keep people on the site longer? This is a great way of providing the information.

Are you offering an API so that Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Seismic or whatever can build Apture into Twitter? Because I'm seeing a lot of terms that I'm grabbing and you want.

You go to Google.

What the hell is. Especially with trending terms or stuff, what the hell is this new show everybody's talking about? And I would have done that kind of thing.

Well, look, I mean, here's the browser plugin, right? So with the browser plugin, it works in Chrome, Firefox. If you have the browser plugin installed, which you can get by going to appsture.com extension and you click Download Chrome extension and I already have it installed.

You're on Safari and Firefox.

Safari, Safari, Safari, Firefox and Chrome. We're actually the number one featured plugin in the Chrome extensions gallery.

Got it.

And when you're on this page and you're on Twitter, Right. So Twitter doesn't have app share, but with the plugin installed, watch this. I'm going to zoom in. Here's Jason Kincaid talking about Mark Zuckerberg. So what if I highlight Mark Zuckerberg's name inside of Twitter and hit search and here's more information about Mark Zuckerberg and I can even see his LinkedIn profile. I can go over here to his Crunchbase profile, right? And I can do the Russian dolls thing. So I can say when he was at Harvard and I want to know what Harvard is, I can double click on Harvard and hit search and it does the search for Harvard and I can get photos, I can get videos, and I don't even have to leave the page. This is right on twitter.com it works within the native Twitter client experience. Wow. Yeah. So today, yeah, we're announcing something really special with scribd.com?

Ok. OK. And we just had an interview with Scribd, so everybody can go.

And check that out.

Now what I need is embed right in the video.

Exactly.

That's your next product, right?

Yeah, exactly. Video embeds. Yeah. Well, so the cool thing about scribd is scribd is one of the largest repositories of documents and books on the Internet. And it's all digitized. It's all sort of like YouTube for documents. The entire world of documents hosted by script. And about six months ago, or maybe four months ago, they put six PhDs in the problem of converting all the PDFs and documents that they have into native HTML5. And what happens with that is that now all the text rendered in a PDF is native browser text, meaning you can highlight it just like any other text. And what's cool is we've partnered with Script to enable this additional multimedia dimension of any document. So you just think about that like you think about books. Like this big dusty pile of books falling on a table. You can open up any book or any textbook, or like a 1975 copy of Life magazine. And in this printed Life magazine, you could like in the third column, highlight the word John F. Kennedy and you could click and you could read, you know, read a speech by him, watch a video of him without leaving like a book. That's how we think of how the web and how books and literacy should work, right? I mean, interactive literacy, helping kids maintain their attention when they're reading things. This is what it's all about. So we're announcing this thing with scribd and I'm going to show it to you now. This is actually, believe it or not, an infographic hosted on Scribd.com this is about the World Trade Center. So this is an infographic. This is just a PDF infographic, but it's talking about all the different buildings that are going to be in the new World Trade Center Memorial. And they're talking about some different buildings. And suppose you want to go in here and learn more about Frank Gehry. So I'm going to highlight Frank Gehry. It says search, hit search. And it's going to give me all this related information about Frank Gehry. Now I've got his Wikipedia article describing who he is. I've got a list of Frank Gehry buildings. I've got some New York Times information about him and some photos. So imagine, I just want to get a sense of what his buildings look like. So I can click on a photo and instantly we go to full screen Creative Commons license photography from Flickr and Photopedia that show you all of Frank Gehry's amazing architecture.

I've interviewed Photopedia.

Oh, cool. Yeah, they're great.

You can learn more about that too on my YouTube channel somewhere. We'll link that to the video again.

And so isn't that great? You can do that. And watch this. I can even go over here, it says Santiago Calatreva. I'm going to highlight Santiago Calatreva. Hit search. This is another Spanish architect. Apparently I learned this today when I did the demo. So you can see his Wikipedia article or you can go into his photos and it shows all of his different work around the world. And if you go into results from Scribdo Network, you can even see that there's another document in scribd's network that mentions Santiago Colatrepe. So you can actually click and read more documents on SCRIBD about this architect. So it's a way for the publisher, for scribd to drive more traffic. And, you know, you can even go in here to a video and you can see him giving an interview in Spanish, translated into English and utility and firmitas. By Fermitas, he also meant peranitas. In other words, permanence in time isn't that great? So imagine taking this to every textbook that's digitized and available on script, and we're even partnering or working with some book publishers that are eager to put their stuff on scribd. And we've actually got one author whose name is Kemble Scott, who actually has his book on Scribd and is excited about bringing Apture to the book because it's almost like a sort of choose your own adventure within a book. Right. So this is a printed page of his book. And when you want to know about, say, Andrews Air Force Base down here, zoom in. You can just highlight Andrews Air Force Base and hit search. And it will give you more information about Andrews Air Force Base. And you can even see, say, a map. Yeah, Andrews Air Force Base here. And it's all right here. Without leaving the page, you can resize this map, go as deep as you want. And this is coming from a book. So in a book, if you encountered a person or a place and you want to see a video, I mean, can you imagine, like you're reading a book and a video of the thing you want to know more about pops out?

Now?

This is really cool. It's something you can only do with HTML5. You can only do it on the web. You can only do it when browsers are making their technology faster. And it's just. It totally changes the way you read. It's like reading 2.0.

That's really, really exciting.

Yeah.

This is going to change how we look at information. Right. How we dive into it.

Right.

Really cool.

I mean, so when you think about.

It, you can make money with this now. I mean, this cool functionality is a cool feature, cool technology. How does Apture make money with this?

So it's Free for publishers of all sizes. So we have, you come to our website, you get a line of code, you put it on your site and it just works for larger publishers. What we do is we actually insert a small search advertisement in the search results. So just like Google or Bing or whatever you search and there's always an ad right, right next to the search results. We'll embed an ad from time to time in the results and that's how we make money. And then for publishers who don't want the ad, we can do like a version without ads for a small licensing fee per month. And that's how we make money. Very cool. But what's neat about this, if you think about it from, you know, it creates these business opportunities for publishers to keep people engaged in their site, to really increase their engagement numbers and their click through rates to driving page views. But in a larger sense about the web, what's exciting to me about it is the thing that's made the Internet powerful is not the content, it's not the document, it's not the page you go to, it's the fact that that page is connected to other things. The thing that makes the web powerful is connections. Right. The epitome of the flattest of the flat is documents and books and things like that. So we're essentially enabling is connections. Where there were no connections before, like today, there's only links. There's only links and connections. When the publisher hyperlinks a word and they put a little blue hyperlink in. But there's all these places where you want to know more and there is no blue hyperlink. Yeah, we're essentially enabling, you know, pseudo or infinite, infinite browsing, infinite searching, infinite hyperlinks to any information you want. So it just, when you think about.

It, sounds like you're going to do what you Google did to search a couple weeks ago. So you're studying where I'm putting links on a page, you're studying what I really wanted to click on and didn't you have a link?

Exactly.

Could you tell the publisher you're not linking these things up and you should have.

That's exactly what we're doing.

Or can you suggest things like can you put links on the page where you think I would actually click on things?

That's the direction we're heading is to use this whole amazing technology to bring this information to people, use all the aggregate information to help publishers improve the way that they write stories, just like we helped. So there's explicit ways to do that where we hand you analytics and we say, hey, liquid metal is the most popular term in your site that people want to know more about. But then there's implicit ways where just based on reader behavior and 100 people highlighting the same thing, there are different things we can do to help a publisher optimize their pages around that content. So when you really think about it, it's like it really changes the dynamics of how publishing content works. What used to be static and flat now gains these other dimensions that are up to date, right? Because these searches are always changing. Like Kendall Scott, who wrote this book, he actually wants to republish his book from time to time. Because in a digital medium, in an E literacy or E books medium, what's different is it doesn't take 18 months to get something from a Word document into print on a bookshelf, Right? You can actually update your book. This takes that to the next level. Because now every day when you search for something, we're going to start showing real time results from Twitter and things like that. So if you search for Ender's Air Force base and today something happened there, we can show you that in the results. So it brings flat content into this real time and recent and sort of fresh dimension. It changes everything.

Wow. It's cool.

Yeah.

I want to try it. Cool. Where do we try it?

So if you want the browser plugin browser extension, you can go to appsture.com extension. If you want to put this on your website, which we hope you do, you go to appsture.com and enter your URL and we'll give you a little code. You put it on your site, forget about it, and suddenly people stay on your site longer and we hand you a report about every week. Cool.

Thank you so much.

No, thank you for coming. Cool stuff.