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Rapportive Confirms It Has Been Bought by LinkedIn; Contact Product Not Being Shut Down

Liz Gannes — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:27:50 +0000

As we said would happen, Rapportive has been acquired by LinkedIn.

Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra said in a blog post today that Rapportive would continue to be available for Gmail users as a plugin that overlays information about their contacts inside their inbox, as it is today.

Rapportive has drawn many passionate users — it hadn’t disclosed how many — who were worried that it might be shut down, given the tendency by top tech companies to “acqhire” small teams for their talent but not their products.

Vohra said today, “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.” Rapportive users will now be covered by LinkedIn’s terms of service and privacy policy.

LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash, beating out other potential acquirers such as Twitter, sources said. As of Feb. 7, when we first wrote about it, the deal had not closed but was well on its way.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

Image2Play Connects Images to the Videos They Came From (Demo at AsiaD)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:36:33 +0000

Humans do such an incredible job of recalling things, we don’t often realize what a difficult problem it is for, say, a computer.

A few bars of music can bring back an entire song, a smell can trigger memories of an event, and a single freeze-frame image can bring back an entire film.

It’s that last human talent that Image2Play, a technology from Korean smart-search firm Enswers, tries to port over to the world of computing.

Image2Play, which demoed its beta technology today at AsiaD, analyzes images and instantly matches them up with their corresponding video … assuming the image did, in fact, come from a video.

In essence, Image2Play does for video snapshots on the Web what music recognition app Shazam does for music in the real world.

The technology, currently deployed as a javascript plugin for Web sites and a browser plugin for users, overlays a “play” button on any image taken from a video, on a given Web page.

The user can then click play, and the corresponding video begins in a pop-up player, right on the site where the analyzed image was displayed.

The whole thing, in this iteration at least, is paid for by a pre-roll ad in the player that pops up over the analyzed image.

Additionally, the Image2Play team said they are working with video provider partners to offer the connected videos for sale, also from inside the popped-up player.

Image2Play claims that there are over 8.5 billion page views of “entertainment content” consumed in the U.S. each month, and while it’s unclear what fraction of those pages contains images grabbed from movies, it could amount to a significant ad network and revenues.

Below, video and images from the demo.

[ See post to watch video ]

Microsoft Outlook Team Still Cracking "Google Apps Stink" Jokes

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:37:31 +0000

A week after launching Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook with great swagger and pomp, Google is taking heat for unwittingly disabling one of the mail client’s key functions. Seems the service, which allows enterprise to use Outlook without shouldering the costs of running an Exchange server, doesn’t play well with Windows Desktop Search.

“The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data,” Microsoft explained in a post to the Outlook Team blog. “When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.”

Uh-oh. Good luck finding that budget-request email you sent to your CFO a few months ago….

Google (GOOG) is working with Microsoft (MSFT) to resolve the issue, but the damage may have already been done. Enterprise is notoriously reluctant to embrace change specifically because of cock-ups like this. Enterprise likes familiarity. It likes seamless change. With Apps Sync for Outlook, Google provided the former, but it fell short on the latter. And that may inspire some companies that had been considering Apps Sync for Outlook to stick with Exchange for a while longer.

Microsoft Outlook Team Still Cracking "Google Apps Stink" Jokes

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:37:31 +0000

Uh-oh. Good luck finding that budget-request email you sent to your CFO a few months ago….