VMware CEO Paul Maritz and former SGI senior VP Beau Vrolyk are angel investors in the San Mateo, California start-up Apture, where Vrolyk is executive chairman.

They were part of Apture's first venture round worth $4.1 million led by Clearstone Venture Partners.

Apture, which is a way of adding multimedia to web sites, counts the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC and Reuters among its clients.

We asked Beau to explain it. He says, "Apture provides information and media in context. This means that a person who is reading anything from a Twitter tweet to a Washington Post article can see media of all sorts without leaving the page they are reading. The reader enjoys keeping the context of what they're reading, the publisher retains the reader as a customer, the advertiser gets additional opportunities to provide impressions that are in-context and not just random irritations. Everyone wins."