Apture was a service that allowed publishers and bloggers to link and incorporate multimedia into a dynamic layer above their pages. Apture was used by several large organizations and publishers including ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'', ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...

'', ''

Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon ...

'', and the

World Wide Fund for Nature The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961 that works in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the Wor ...

as well as individual bloggers. Apture announced its first round of funding in March, 2009. It received $4.1 million in a round led by

Clearstone Venture Partners Clearstone Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on IT investing with offices in Santa Monica, CA, Palo Alto, CA, and Mumbai, India. Founded in 1997, as Idealab Capital Partners, Clearstone is responsible for the earl ...

as well as angel investors

Paul Maritz Paul Alistair Maritz (born March 16, 1955) is a computer scientist and software executive. He held positions at large companies including Microsoft and EMC Corporation. He currently serves as chairman of Pivotal Software. Early life Paul Maritz ...

(CEO of

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

) and Steve Taylor (former executive VP of the ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

''). In August, 2010, Apture announced their browser extension, Apture Highlights, which enabled users to instantaneously search for content from around the web without leaving the page. The Firefox version of Apture Highlights was downloaded about 500,000 times. On November 12, 2011, Apture announced that it had been acquired by Google. On December 20, 2011, Apture disabled its scripts and discontinued its products and services.

References

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* Companies based in San Francisco Discontinued_Google_acquisitions {{Google-stub