Dear Dapper-ites,

Over the years we’ve been moving full steam ahead toward our business model, while continuing to offer Dapper.net’s bevy of feed creation and transformation services for free.  We shall continue that tradition with the launch of open.dapper.net — the place to find the tools you know and love to create RSS, XML, Google Gadgets, and your world of content.

Don’t let the new look-and-feel over at the main dapper.net page bum you out   You’ll notice some changes there: the focus on our revolutionary dynamic ad creation and trafficking tools, the addition of a few sections that were previously not there (Advertisers, Agencies, Publishers, etc.) and the obvious omission of the Dapp search box.

There’s a link to open.dapper.net that will take you to a familiar sight (or site, for that matter).  But go ahead and bookmark that new address now!

We at Dapper feel that this direction — making the world of display advertising a whole lot more Dapper is a goal we can all hope to attain.  By using content rich, informational ads, we can finally escape the punch-the-monkey model and get people to engage with ads as they would with a site feature.  And by monetizing these tools, we’ve stumbled on a heavy incentive for funding the Semantic Web!

Other than that, it’s business as usual, and always feel free to contact us with comments, questions, bugs, and concerns.

Thanks,

Paul Knegten on behalf of The Dapper Staff

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released a major update to the Dapp Factory.  In the new version, you can now see how the content selection works across multiple pages and fix it if it isn’t perfect.

For some background: Dapper works by providing it sample pages that have the same structure, but different content.  For example, if you want to create a Dapp that allows you to extract search results from your favorite search engine, you would provide several different examples of searches (e.g., “cat,” “dog,” and “meow meow”).  Dapper will use the different sample pages to understand the structure of the page, so that later you can use it to conduct any search you want, even one you didn’t train it on (e.g., “woof woof”).  In the past, our interface allowed you provide multiple sample pages, but when it came to selecting content, you could only see how it worked on the first sample page.  If it didn’t work well on other pages, you would only know that after you saved your Dapp, and editing the Dapp so that it worked better on other pages was a chore.  With the new version, you can now see when you are creating your Dapp how it works on all the sample pages provided.

To help illustrate how the feature works, here’s a screencast demonstrating it:

We hope you find this new feature useful and that it helps you create better, more robust Dapps that work across many pages. Should you have any questions or want to discuss it with us, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Something to note: the new version does not extract content from all the pages at once – Dapper remains true to the concept that it extracts content from one page at a time.  Combining content from multiple pages is something that is left to techniques outside the Dapp itself (e.g., MS Popfly with their awesome Dapper integration, Yahoo! Pipes, or good old fashioned programming).

Today, we’re launching MashupAds in private beta. We believe with MashupAds we have a real chance on fixing display advertising, making it an effective, useful and relevant communication and marketing medium, which can stay up to par with search marketing. We think an ad should provide relevant, rich content and that the best way to improve the value of ads for publishers and advertisers is to improve its value to the end users. I think it’s time for advertisers to stop thinking of ads as a broadcast mechanism and start thinking of it as a mechanism to inform, communicate and converse with their medium. Ads are becoming the platform for distributing content and content is the best ad.

Here’s a video our very own Paul Knegten brewed to illustrate what MashupAds are all about:

To read some of the press coverage of our debut check out the links below:

techcrunch , RWW , VentureBeat , zdnet , wired , cnet

and of course, go sign up for some MashupAds goodness

Hello everyone!

I just returned from the Internet Marketing Conference in Barcelona where I presented Dapper’s MashupAds platform to a great group of marketing experts.  The crowd was engaging and provided a unique European perspective on our advertising offering.  A big thanks to Lennart and Jordi for inviting us to present.  The other presenters were particularly interesting.  I especially enjoyed a presentation about Avail Intelligence’s offering, which is effectively giving e-commerce sites the ability to provide collaborative filtering services to their users and boost sales dramatically.  The IMC is held in various places around Europe and North America and always has quality presenters – I’d highly recommend attending when it’s in your neighborhood (upcoming events are in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Vancouver).

Up next, I’ll be participating in two panels at the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara on October 16.  The first panel is called “A Little “mash-up” goes a long and smart(er) way” and the second is called “Monetization Implications of Web 3.0 (Semantic Advertising, etc.)“.  Both of these topics are highly relevant to what we’ve been working on at Dapper.  In the first session, we’ll be discussing how the technologies of the Semantic Web are continuing to evolve and are being applied to mashups.  In the second session, we’ll address business models of the Semantic Web (the other folks on the panel are all from interesting companies and will have great things to share).  I hope to provide a demo of dynamic ad creation using Dapper’s MashupAds.  For those of you interested in the emergence of the Semantic Web and the discussion around all of its various elements from a practical perspective, I’d highly recommend attending the conference.

So, as many of you have noticed, Dapper had a rough week, with dapp serving being down for a few hours and the dapp factory being down for more than a day. The cause of these unfortunate outages, at the end of the day, was a poor choice of ISP way back when. The events of the last week caused us to accelerate our work on a new infrastructure (with much better ISPs) that will have the kind of reliability our users demand of us, and we demand of ourselves.

We would like to truly thank all of our users who had the patience to endure with us as we were handling these unfortunate issues. I’d also like to thank the Dapper team which has worked nights and days on these problems and managed to fix them in record time.

Please stay tuned for some cool updates on our new infrastructure, as they emerge.

If anyone still experiences problems, please let us know as we’re cleaning up the mess,

Best,

Eran

PS: All Dapps and services should now be fully operational.

The kind folks at Cognizant have made available a video of the talk I gave there in May.  I’m a bit long-winded (the talk is almost two hours), but there are some good moments and the crowd asked excellent questions.  Enjoy!

Tony Loton has just released a new book called Mashups Made Easy with Dapper.  It is available in PDF format as well as paperback.  As an exclusive offer to our users, Tony has made available the first two chapters free of charge.  The book is loaded with examples, tutorials, and step-by-step guides that are relevant to beginners and advanced users alike.

Thanks to Tony for his work in compiling this work.

Our good friends at zembly have launched the beta of their service today and we’re proud to announce that Dapper and zembly are partners.  According to their website:

“With zembly, you easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, meebo apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.”

From that description alone, it’s fairly obvious how you could use Dapper and zembly together to create great web applications and widgets.  The zembly folks have built in support for using Dapps right within their app and it’s very cool what you can do.  So you can use Dapper to create feeds for any website, and then you can go use those feeds within your code inside zembly.  Very cool.

zembly is truly disruptive. It has the potential to fundamentally change the way developers create portable web applications and widgets. Its collaborative approach, emphasis on reuse of common code, and web-based interface dramatically reduce the barrier for developers to implement and realize their creative ideas. We’re excited that you, the users of Dapper, can now take the Dapps you create and immediately put them to use in new ways with minimal effort using zembly

Go to zembly’s website to apply for an invite into the beta.  If you create things using the service and are making use of Dapps, post it here or let us know by email.

Last week, Dapper made its first visit to India. Having received a kind invitation from the folks at the Great Indian Developer’s Summit, I made my way to Bangalore to talk about the Semantic Web and Dapper’s new server-side mashup framework. Having been to India before, I knew what to expect – a vibrant country teeming with life and excitement, amazing street life, and a world entirely different than any other country.

Yet, I had never visited Bangalore and was impressed to see the quality of the high-tech community. Everyone I met was working on great things and was eager to learn about the next great developments.

My first speaking engagement was at Cognizant. A large company with more than 55,000 employees, “Cognizant is a leading provider of information technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services.” I was given the opportunity to speak with a group of Cognizant’s brightest people about the “practical Semantic Web” (what we call “Web Plumbing 101″). Some of you have probably seen us present this talk in the past, but for those of you who haven’t, it focuses on how, using techniques like harnessing the user community and simplicity (REST instead of SOAP, Microformats instead of RDF, etc.), a bunch of companies are helping deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web. The Cognizant audience had great questions about the topics, which for me is always the best indication of interest and understanding. If video of the talk at Cognizant becomes available, I’ll be sure to post it online. For now, here is a photo from the session. Thanks to Dr. Kumar B.V. for inviting me and everyone at Cognizant who attended.

Following the session at Cognizant, I made my way to the Great Indian Developer Summit. This was the first GIDS and its success is sure to lead to many more. Run by the great folks at Saltmarch Media, Indu Britto and Dilip Thomas, the GIDS was really three conferences in one: two days dedicated to .NET, one day dedicated to the rich web, and another two days dedicated to Java. Hosted at the beautiful Indian Institute of Science campus, over 3,000 people attended throughout the week. I spoke twice on the rich web day, once about the Semantic Web and once about Dapper’s new server-side mashup engine (for those of you interested in the latter, just drop us a note and we’ll be happy to get you access before the official release). Speaking to a crowd of so many bright developers was fantastic. The people who attended the Dapper sessions asked some of the best questions we’ve heard. For those of you who were there, a great many thanks for making the sessions so truly interactive, and thanks as well to Indu and Dilip for the invitation to speak. When photos or video become available of the sessions, I will be sure to post them. In the mean time, here is a shot of some attendees from the main hall:

I look forward to my next visit to Bangalore.  For those of you who haven’t been, I encourage you to visit.  And for anyone in India or the region, I highly recommend attending next year’s Great Indian Developer Summit.

At Dapper, we’ve started the process of deploying Scrum into our dev cycle. To those of you who don’t know, Scrum is an Agile dev methodology flavor (read about it more in wikipedia). That gave us an opportunity to bring the dev team  from both Israel and San Francisco together in the Dapper villa, and take some cool photos. There’s a guest in the picture, see if you can spot him

Now when you want a feature of want to complain on a bug – you know the faces to hunt down..