Dapper Archive

Earlier this week, ad service Dapper announced a partnership with weather service Weather Underground. Dapper notes, "The new targeting product, called WeatherMatch combines Weather Underground’s ability to identify the weather conditions for pre-defined markets with Dapper’s ability to interchange content in real time within non-rich media Flash files."

While I couldn’t find any news of this, I feel like I’ve seen this type of ad targeting before – years ago. I am also unclear if the ad targeting based on weather conditions only shows up on the Weather Underground site or if the WeatherMatch program can also adjust ads based on weather conditions on other websites.

I like the concept – anything that advertisers and publishers can do to increase the interaction rates for ads and make them more attractive to end users is a good thing.

Here’s an example of what the ads might look like on the Weather Underground site for Home Depot during different weather conditions:

Roi has the scoop on a new Facebook application creator by Dapper launching on Tuesday. He notes, "At its core, Dapper allows users to create API’s called “Dapps” by selecting data from Websites, RSS/XML feeds, Google Gadgets, and more. Each “Dapp” is an XML which can be manipulated in any number of ways." He found it to be super-simple to use, I found it to be the complete opposite. I am not sure how Dapper positions themselves, but this is not a consumer-friendly tool from my point of view. It does appear to have some great possibilities once the bugs are worked out.

I just tried creating one and it gave me the following error, "We're sorry, something went wrong…)". It seemed to work for Roi. Actually it seems after doing some bug checking the following issues appear:

• Doesn't work in IE7
• In Firefox, it appears to work but after creating the application, the "add to facebook" button produces an error in Facebook
• After going back, I could then add it to facebook, but it looks like a mess – I just used a simple RSS feed to create the Dapp and you can see the output below – appears to have stripped all of the space? (I won't link to it as it's not ready for all of my great readers yet).

Here is a sample screenshot:

Editor's note: Roi Carthy is currently writing for TechCrunch. Check out his previous CenterNetworks articles here.