Written on 6th February 2009
7 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Zemanta is a tool which makes writing blog posts easier and more media rich.
If you were writing a blog post about Bill Gates for example and were now ready to have a search for other related material from across the web as well as any worthwhile images or video – well Zemanta is there to help. The tool comes in the form of a Firefox extension and it’s latest release sees integration with GMail and Yahoo Mail, with the aim to make your emails equally as interesting.
Simply write your email as normal and once you’re done, click “add Zemanta” which will then reveal a sidebar full of relevant links, images and content. Zemanta is no slouch either, this whole process takes a matter of seconds for a reasonably long email. (more…)
Dutchman Thijs Jacobs used to be Holland’s youngest entrepreneur, by starting his own consultancy business at the age of 15. Yeah, 15. No wonder the Netherlands became small for him and he moved to Beijing. He’s now the CTO of semantic startup Linkool Labs and guess what, they’ve just launched a new discovery engine in public beta. Jacobs was kind enough to mail me before he contacted other tech blogs, so enjoy this little scoop.
This new tool by Linkool Labs, called Juice, saves you a helluva lot time when looking for online information. I could tell you all about it, but why would I considering there’s a “rocking webcast” explaining it all. Watch the first bit and you get the idea.
Excellent tool for bloggers
I’ve been using the service for two weeks now and really think this is the first great blogging tool since Zemanta. Imagine that I want to know more about Thijs Jacobs. After highlighting and dragging his name while browsing, I’ve all the info at my disposal. I can save the relevant images and videos, let the latter play in the background and browse to the next page at the same time. Awesome.
One minor downside: Juice doesn’t recognize text in text fields like the one I’m typing in right now. If they’d fix that, Juice would become even more useful for bloggers.
Zemanta is a London/Slovenia based startup who has built a platform that caters to online content producers, by contextually matching new stuff with existing content and consequently suggesting relevants third-party links, keywords, text, images, and even videos in a sidebar. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in. You can demo the solution here.
Zemanta was one of the winners of Seedcamp 2007, and raised $ 1,5 million in seed funding shortly thereafter from The Accelerator Group and Eden Ventures. In today’s blog post, the company talks numbers:
“A year has passed since than and Zemanta has become a respectable force in the blogging world. We now support more than 10 platforms, numerous versions, serve suggestions from 2500 sources, professional images…everything you need to enhance your blogging experience. We touch several million readers each month and zemify 1000 posts each day. We invented the way how computer helps bloggers enhance blog posts, introduced quoting of the posts as a cross platform concept(Reblog), aggregation page of mostly suggested posts (Popular) and seen phenomenal response from the community.”
All in all, it’s great for a European company to get funding and acknowledgment from overseas, and certainly a high-profile one like Union Square Ventures. Zemanta definitely has a great future ahead. I haven’t used the service myself, but I believe my co-editors here at The Next Web blog are actually pretty big fans.
On Thursday, Zemanta plans to release a new version of the platform, shifting from being a general suggestion service to a personalized service. You’ll be able to upload your sources and limit the suggestion pool to your sources, you’ll be able to search through your Flickr account and point Zemanta to your Twitter account to get related blogs from your friends. The company has also redesigned its UI and streamlined the blogging experience.
Written on 6th February 2009
7 COMMENTS 
Zemanta is a tool which makes writing blog posts easier and more media rich.
Written on 31st October 2008
Written on 15th September 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
