Archive for the ‘zemanta’ Category

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New version of Zemanta is out

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Book cover of Designing With Web StandardsBook cover via AmazonWe released a new version a few days ago.

It’s mostly a bugfix release on the front-end part while there are quite a few fascinating developments on the back end. The first one is that we now suggest CrunchBase links to companies and people and we also suggest images to go with that. So if you’re writing about a start-up, a funding round, investors or anything else that is present in CrunchBase you’re likely to get better suggestions.

We’ve also added Amazon book covers for books that we find in Amazon (like Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman or Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke).

The biggest news is that we were able to transfer the Zemanta experience to Windows Live Writer which is our first desktop application integration. I hope this brings joy to the users of Live Writer. Being the first desktop application integration it didn’t go without glitches but I hope we fixed all the bugs, even those that were found by the first users.

We also have a new home page for everybody who doesn’t yet know what we do. If you don’t have our extension/plugin installed and you’re a blogger give it a go – you won’t regret it.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Posted in browsers, companies, design, interface, microsoft, software, zemanta | No Comments »

Seed funding Slovenia

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

It’s happening. Slovenia is being put on the map of the internet.

The company is based in Slovenia and was funded through relationships it made at seedcamp. I am very interested in what’s going on with seed stage web startups in europe right now. I’ll be over there next month and will spend some time trying to get a sense of things. One stop is likely to be Slovenia to meet the Zemanta team.A VC, Jun 2008

Velika planina

Image via Wikipedia

I was fascinated when I read this post, not just because as most of you know I now work for Zemanta but also as somebody who has been trying hard to get people to think about seed funding Slovenian companies and organized two Start-up nights at Spletne urice for the same reason.

Unfortunately VCs in Slovenia still aren’t up to the task. And after all the great local companies get funded by foreign capital the local press will most probably say how we sold out everything of value.

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Zemanta Pixie

Posted in companies, events, spletne urice, thoughts, zemanta | 2 Comments »

Acrobat, the platform

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Adobe AcrobatImage via WikipediaThis post was written via the newly published Zemanta Reblog, the first feature I worked on at my new job. I helped evolve and implement the interface, which is not perfect yet but is better and will get even better in the future. Reblog feature also gives you an idea of how Zemanta Suggest works since you can see the sidebar on the right hand side of the content as you’re writing it. Reblog is only one of many features we released today – we now support more platforms, more browsers and we also have a few plug-ins for blogging platforms. Read about the release or check the interview with our co-founder and CTO Andraž Tori at ReadWriteWeb.

Adobe is making a major announcement tonight — the public beta launch of Acrobat.com. No longer does the Acrobat name only mean “related to PDF.” The suite of hosted tools include a word processor, PDF converter, conferencing and file storage. From the looks of it, Acrobat.com could be a competitor to parts of office suites from Google/Zoho and could also compete with document sharing tools including Docstoc and Scribd. All of the services are hosted on Acrobat.com and use the SaaS model (software-as-a-service). It’s clear that collaboration is now Adobe’s focus and this makes sense as we all move to a more connected world. Allen Stern, Adobe Launches Acrobat Hosted Services – New Web Office Player is Here, Jun 2008

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Zemanta Pixie

Posted in adobe, companies, design, interface, zemanta | No Comments »

Web Typography Sucks

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

The Elements of Typographic StyleImage via WikipediaThat’s the title of the talk by the first foreign speaker1 at Spletne urice — Richard Rutter from Clearleft, who’s really a great guy and a great speaker.

Web Typography is one of the topics I really care about and I think it’s an issue that iswas a bit overlooked in our local community. After my talk last year about fonts and possible ways to use / embed them I am happy that we got Richard to come to Slovenia to talk about this — who could be better than the author of The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

The talk went great2 (Cyberpipe filled up after the first few minutes) and it was followed by a good Q&A session. In the session I mentioned that a font foundry released a font that is free for use on the web and thus free for embeding — the foundry is called FDI fonts.info — you can read their press release or download Graublau Sans Web and Logotypia Pro for free. After the talk we went for a beer in Metropol (just above Cyberpipe) and then another one later on in the city center.

All in all it was great having Richard here and I guess he liked it too. I hope he’ll put in a good word for us and we’ll get even more foreign speakers to come to Ljubljana and share their in–depth knowledge of specific areas of webdesign and development3.

I would also like to thank our silent sponsor Parsek Interactive that took care of the air fare and the hotel bill and also Zemanta that shared their work space with Richard today4.

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  1. Technically Daniel P. Fischer was the first, but he gave his talk as part of the HAIP festival and his stay and talk was organized by the Cyberpipe crew. So what I’m trying to say is that Richard was the first speaker I organized by myself. back
  2. If you missed the talk the slides are here and the video should be online in a couple of weeks. back
  3. Any volunteer speakers? Any suggestions? Sponsors maybe? back
  4. Did you notice that I tried to punctuate with the correct apostophes, en dashes, em dashes, elipses’… It’s not that easy — somebody should create a WordPress plugin for this. back
Zemified

Posted in companies, css, design, events, html, layout, parsek, spletne urice, standards, technology, typography, zemanta | 1 Comment »

Zemanta is live!

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Zemanta, a Slovenian start-up that got into seedcamp, moved to London for a few months and came back a few months ago launched their service at Spletne urice yesterday. The service that bares the name of the company helps you enrich the blog posts you’re writing. What you need to do is download their browser extension (only Firefox currently supported) and a box will appear in your favorite blogging tool (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad currently supported) that makes adding relevant images, links and related articles to the post a one-click operation.

I like the technology and I think it will make the life of an ordinary blogger a whole lot easier. What I don’t like that much is the HTML they produce in the blogposts. I understand the dilemmas they have with all the themes and platforms they need to support but adding that much style attributes is really not nice.

Disclaimer: I’ve cleaned up the HTML in this post, to see the output check the demo.

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Zemified

Posted in blurps, browsers, companies, css, design, events, firefox, html, interface, software, spletne urice, standards, technology, zemanta | 3 Comments »

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