Webware

Vysr RoamAbout, a browser add-on for contextual search that launched earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo, is opening up its service for developers Monday morning.

Vysr founder and CEO Guda Venkatesh says he wants the platform to be a veritable (and ultimately profitable) sandbox for developers.

The add-on tucks a small sidebar in the corner of your browser, letting you highlight text and quickly search various Web services to find out more--all without leaving the page.

Lately, I've seen a few publishing services that let content creators do this (see Apture and Zemanta) , but Vysr's solution is more voluntary, and it is aimed at users who want to look things up from very targeted services without having to rely on the built-in search box in their browser. To a certain degree, Vysr is an attempt to ween users off of the search box, for the sake of productivity.

The GrooveShark application on Vysr will look up bands or music tracks just by highlighting them in your browser.

(Credit: Vysr, Inc.)

Venkatesh says it will be an uphill battle to attract developers to build and maintain plug-ins, but after having watched Facebook's platform launch, he told me that he thinks the overall simplicity of building a Vysr application will attract bootstrapped developers who have put more care and finesse into their applications.

One of the new applications for today is a music search module that will look up any word or track name you highlight, then cross-reference it with GrooveShark Lite. When found, it will play the track in the corner of your browser while you continue to surf around, making it a pretty good addition to something like reading an album review.

As mentioned earlier, Vysr will eventually have ads as part of the equation. According to Venkatesh, they'll only be on the little application overlay windows--not on the sidebar itself--meaning that you won't be randomly surfing a page and getting advertisements. My guess is that most people will be willing to tolerate ads for convenience's sake.

If you're a developer looking to get your service integrated, you can check out the documentation here. Venkatesh says it took only 10 minutes to port over GrooveShark, so you might be able to get yours done during a bathroom break.

Asterpix, a video tagging service we looked at late last year is launching some exciting new technology later this month. It's a new automated tagging service that will go through any video you plug in and use its recognition algorithms to tag and link whatever's in your video to informational resources about it on the Web.

In its current state, the service lets you accomplish a similar feat, adding text and URL links to various objects--although the process is manual. On the 17th, users will simply be able to run videos from many major hosting services through Asterpix's tagging bot and have tags created automatically before adding their own.

Find out more about video clips using Asterpix's upcoming auto-tagging service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The Asterbot has already been doing this to several thousand videos a day and making the entire index of robot-created tags searchable alongside those made by humans. Video tags can pull up information from all over the Web. In one case I was watching a clip from Cheech and Chong, and there was a timed tag that had automatically been inserted with an anecdote about a certain part of the scene. That anecdote had come from IMDB, although the creators tell me information can come from less well-known sources as long as it's been indexed in major search engines.

The actual process of machine-tagging involves pulling in imaging data from the video clip and matching it up to whatever text was included by the video's creator. Nat Kausik, CEO of Asterpix tells me the process is a little similar to Google's search algorithm in creating relevancy based on what bits of parts of the video get the most screen time. For example, in a video of a someone walking through a grocery store there would be a wealth of information about other products and people, but if you're focused on that one person for the majority of the clip the engine will pick on it and react accordingly.

While there are no ads inserted into Asterpix-tagged videos yet, Kasuik says it's clearly a direction the company is going in. Contextual video advertising is already in action from Google, and is under development from over a dozen other companies. In the meantime, Asterpix's next move is a widget for video publishers that will do some of the tagging at the point of upload.

This is either creepy or annoying.

Pudding Media, a San Jose, California, start-up launching at DemoFall 2007 on Monday, is offering free Web-based phone calls, if you let them monitor phone calls and show you onscreen advertisements based on the topic of your conversation.

To use the service, users go to ThePudding.com and enter the phone number to call. The call quality is fine, and my call was connected right away, but what about the idea of the company monitoring your private conversations? Plus, most people are looking for ways to avoid ads these days (pop-up blockers, TiVo) but Pudding founders are sure that in exchange for free calls, users will made the trade-off. For now, Pudding uses a third-party to place the ads, but the company is working on developing its own custom ad network.

Perhaps the ads will be more targeted in the future. A quick testing of the software included a phone call about flying to San Diego, buying postage stamps, and eating Mexican food. Every ad served up gave me information about hockey and ice skating. Huh?

Digg seems to have outgrown Google as its ad provider, as today marks the start of a new three-year deal with Microsoft to serve up ads on the popular social news service. Microsoft is replacing Google for serving up many of the ads you see on Digg's pages. The rest are provided by Federated Media, which also works with Digg to create special branded pages like the newly-updated Arc visualization in Digg labs.

Digg is claiming the move is about scalability, and positive reviews from Facebook who also uses Microsoft for their contextual advertising. What does this mean for you, the end user? According to Kevin Rose's post on the Digg blog, there will be "...no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered." Whew.

Elinor Mills over at CNET News.com has the full story.