Zemanta launches its alpha for blogging on acid
March 27 Mike Butcher
Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the London-based startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. Eventually they will also integrate tabs for third parties who provide vertical-specific suggestions (tech or SEO, for instance). The upshot? Start writing a blog post and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). I wrote more about it here.
You can now download a demo which works with Firefox and TypePad, Wordpress and Blogger. It’s in alpha material, so don’t expect it to be full-formed.
The Zemanta team emerged out of Slovenia and took part in Seedcamp (a London-based Y-combinator-style incubator) last year and was one of those selected as winners. They recently announced a $1.5M seed round, led by Eden Ventures with additional investment from Saul and Robin Klein through The Accelerator Group. The co-founders are Andraž Tori and Boštjan Špetič, both hyperactive, smart young guys who I met at Seedcamp last year. They have since brought in an experienced CEO in the shape of Aleš Špetič, a former O’Reilly author and CEO of an IT integrator in Slovenia. As it happens, the Zemanta story is quite typical of the European startup scene right now - very “London meets New Europe”.
Zemanta Wordpress Plugin Teaser from zemanta on Vimeo.
March 28th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Comments
March 27th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I have just installed it: it works as it says on the tin.
Beautiful, what a great product. Given it is a browser plugin, there is nothing one needs to do to set it up etc. It just works.
Now, let’s see whether it actually increases the traffic to my blog…
March 27th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Agree with Jens.
Works a treat.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Have got to give it to the guys - it’s a fantastic idea.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Met with these guys last year. Very smart and great idea but what sources do they lookup. i.e will it offer Techcrunch before Mashable before Readwrite Web. Or will they make their money from listing one source above the other?
March 27th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I’m very happy to say that we’ll have Andraž as a speaker at our Web.Start conference this May in Zagreb, as well as that Zemanta was selected as a Red Herring Top 100 finalist.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Good to see the lads in alpha and getting funding, installed myself, and hopefully now my blog will be a whole lot more creative
March 28th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
They are just bringing out all the best ideas in them
http://www.jollymates.com
March 29th, 2008 at 12:56 am
@Sam Sethi
Is that really you Sam ?
Are you back from the shadows ?
March 30th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Installed, blogged about, FaceBook’d and thanked personally x
April 11th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Lovely post. I like your pencraft and thats great that youve opened this subject. Only fool can disagree with this!