Inform Technologies pulls in $15 million for media tagging
Essentially a value-add for online media, Inform Technologies adds contextual linking within written content, as well as related links outside of it.
For example, in a standard news article, Inform would search the text for data points like the names of companies, people, places. It then turns those references into links. Outside of the article would be links to related content on the same site, or on affiliated sites.
The application is also adaptive to the website that it is on, meaning that it attempts to only provide links that are relevant to the site’s subject matter.
Inform utilizes some natural language and semantic technology, much like a similar company we previously covered called Jiglu.
Spark Capital provided the $15 million funding on a valuation of over $50 million. The company has taken about $25 million to date.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.