Kimono Is A Smarter Web Scraper That Lets You “API-ify” The Web, No Code Required

A new Y Combinator-backed startup called Kimono wants to make it easier to access data from the unstructured web with a point-and-click tool that can extract information from webpages that don’t have an API available. And for non-developers, Kimono plans to eventually allow anyone track data without needing to understand APIs at all.

This sort of smarter “web scraper” idea has been tried before, and has always struggled to find more than a niche audience. Previous attempts with similar services like Dapper or Needlebase, for example, folded. Yahoo Pipes still chugs along, but it’s fair to say that the service has long since been a priority for its parent company.

But Kimono’s founders believe that the issue at hand is largely timing.

“Companies more and more are realizing there’s a lot of value in opening up some of their data sets via APIs to allow developers to build these ecosystems of interesting apps and visualizations that people will share and drive up awareness of the company,” says Kimono co-founder Pratap Ranade. (He also delves into this subject deeper in a Forbes piece here). But often, companies don’t know how to begin in terms of what data to open up, or how. Kimono could inform them.

Plus, adds Ranade, Kimono is materially different from earlier efforts like Dapper or Needlebase, because it’s outputting to APIs and is starting off by focusing on the developer user base, with an expansion to non-technical users planned for the future. (Meanwhile, older competitors were often the other way around).

The company itself is only a month old, and was built by former Columbia grad school companions Ranade and Ryan Rowe. Both left grad school to work elsewhere, with Rowe off to Frog Design and Ranade at McKinsey. But over the nearly half-dozen or so years they continued their careers paths separately, the two stayed in touch and worked on various small projects together.

One of those was Airpapa.com, a website that told you which movies were showing on your flights. This ended up giving them the idea for Kimono, as it turned out. To get the data they needed for the site, they had to scrape data from several publicly available websites.

“The whole process of cleaning that [data] up, extracting it on a schedule…it was kind of a painful process,” explains Rowe. “We spent most of our time doing that, and very little time building the website itself,” he says. At the same time, while Rowe was at Frog, he realized that the company had a lot of non-technical designers who needed access to data to make interesting design decisions, but who weren’t equipped to go out and get the data for themselves.

With Kimono, the end goal is to simplify data extraction so that anyone can manage it. After signing up, you install a bookmarklet in your browser, which, when clicked, puts the website into a special state that allows you to point to the items you want to track. For example, if you were trying to track movie times, you might click on the movie titles and showtimes. Then Kimono’s learning algorithm will build a data model involving the items you’ve selected.

That data can be tracked in real time and extracted in a variety of ways, including to Excel as a .CSV file, to RSS in the form of email alerts, or for developers as a RESTful API that returns JSON. Kimono also offers “Kimonoblocks,” which lets you drop the data as an embed on a webpage, and it offers a simple mobile app builder, which lets you turn the data into a mobile web application.

For developer users, the company is currently working on an API editor, which would allow you to combine multiple APIs into one.

So far, the team says, they’ve been “very pleasantly surprised” by the number of sign-ups, which have reached ten thousand*. And even though only a month old, they’ve seen active users in the thousands.

Initially, they’ve found traction with hardware hackers who have done fun things like making an airhorn blow every time someone funds their Kickstarter campaign, for instance, as well as with those who have used Kimono for visualization purposes, or monitoring the exchange rates of various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and dogecoin. Others still are monitoring data that’s later spit back out as a Twitter bot.

Kimono APIs are now making over 100,000 calls every week, and usage is growing by over 50 percent per week. The company also put out an unofficial “Sochi Olympics API” to showcase what the platform can do.

The current business model is freemium based, with pricing that kicks in for higher-frequency usage at scale.

The Mountain View-based company is a team of just the two founders for now, and has initial investment from YC, YC VC and SV Angel.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/kimono-is-a-smarter-web-scraper-that-lets-you-api-ify-the-web-no-code-required/

Getting Back Into Internet Marketing

Today I am getting back into internet marketing. In the last few weeks I have completely stopped internet marketing to focus on property. There is so much more money to be made easier in property than internet marketing and I can see now how property can provide me with financial freedom a lot quicker than internet marketing ever could.

Although I do have a problem. Property doesn't take up a lot of my time. Doing property deals is an elongated process and takes minutes of your time spread throughout each day and each week. But then you have the dilemma of what you do with the time in between. I could do nothing, but that isn't exactly me, I always love to have my head full of something.

So after much consideration I have decided to start getting back into internet marketing. Property will still be my focus, and will be my focus until I am financially free, but I realise that internet marketing will be good for me also. Firstly it will generate income which will increase my borrowing power, secondly it will give me something to do, but most importantly it will give me an outlet for which to teach.

I have come a long way in the last 6 months when it comes to understanding wealth and actually being in a position where I am moving forward into wealth. I am currently still in negotiations on my first property deal and I am looking to do my second deal within the next month.

It will be very different teaching wealth from a place of wealth (or really moving towards) than just from a student's perspective. In the past I have always been the student of wealth, someone who knows a lot but not someone that had a lot of money. In fact I worked just enough to scrape by so that I could spend my time studying wealth. This meant I had great knowledge but no money.

I do believe that knowledge brings with it finance. The size of your bank account will increase to fit in with the size of you as a person. If you are rich on the inside, you will naturally gather and grow money to reflect who you are on the inside. If you are poor on the inside, even if you win lotto, your money will naturally shrink to fit who you are. So I am so glad that I focused on increasing my capacity instead of working harder for money.

I haven't really planned out exactly what I am going to do when it comes to internet marketing. This blog exists as my own outlet for my life, so it won't be part of my investment plan. I am not trying to make money from this blog. Although I have a few other things in mind.

I have grown a large subscriber base over the last few years (about 1,500 subscribers) but making money from my subscribers has always seem to elude me. So to combat this I plan to create my own course to market to my subscribers. It will be a course to teach people about the financial basics that I have been learning for the last 6 months. The financial basics that have allowed me to purchase my first property and start generating passive income.

I also want to continue to market and grow my list. I have around 1,500 subscribers. Ultimately I want to have 60,000+ subscribers and to get them I will be writing articles and submitting them to article directories.

I also want to eventually create a "How to make money with Aweber" course. I free course that I would market and get people to sign up for. The course would be free and I would only make money through affiliate sales of the Aweber service.

Basically I am trying to keep my brain occupied and have a little bit of fun in between doing each property deal.

Your next step towards becoming rich is to increase your financial IQ through education. By educating yourself in the area of finances you will be able to get a greater return on investment and you will be able to earn more with less work and less risk. Does that sound good to you?

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Getting-Back-Into-Internet-Marketing&id=3744975

Five Steps to Quality Essay Writing

No two writers think alike. Everyone is unique. For the same reason, everyone has his own manner of using language. But as far as the science of essay writing is concerned, there are some general parameters to be followed. While writing an essay, certain tips will help you to make it an excellent one.

1. A Well Balanced Essay

Ideas should not be written in a Chaotic or disorganized manner. There must be an easy and automatic flow. You are not supposed to stop an essay in the middle of a hot issue. Proceed in such a way that each and every sentence must guide you to the conclusion. The beginning, the middle and the end must be crystal clear to the readers. How you begin, how you proceed and how you end up; all have equal importance in the assessment of an essay.

A well begun stuff pushes the readers to keep on reading it. Though the middle portion of the essay bears the essence of your topic, the conclusion is not of less importance. In short, each and every part of an essay is next to nothing.

2. Too Much is Too Bad

Never go for marathon writing. Essays must not be too long. It kills the grandeur of your work. Write the relevant points using minimum number of words which are apt and attractive. Though there are no strict rules governing the length of the essays, it is always desirable to finish it with 350 words. However you are free to break this unwritten law to a certain extent, considering the seriousness of your subject matter. A topic which requires much statements and explanations can take a little more length. But keep in mind the above said words; Too much is too bad.

3. Be up-to-the-minute

No need to mention the importance of 'knowledge chase' in the process of every type of writings. All findings start when you start finding the apt source. But don't be cheated by resources which are outdated. Be accurate in selecting the right assistance.

You can surpass your fellow students by attempting something new. Go for innovation in whatever field you indulge in. Any creative writing stuff can be made exceptional by clinging on to latest information on air. It shows that you are keeping the right pace with the world around.

4. Style par excellent

Don't use unnatural and unfamiliar words. An inclination to use these types of words seems to be made-up. A highly intricate language with full of unnecessary ornamentation leads the reader to finish reading from the middle. Use natural expressions in a novel way. Don't make sentences too complicated and too polished. Let them be interactive and conversing. Make it a thorough piece of objective one.

5. A flavor of personal touch

Study an issue from a number of possible angles. After finding creative assistance from experienced hands, add your own opinion. Give a personal touch to it. As far as your assignment is concerned, what others said is only secondary. An essay should not be a collection of the opinions of great writers and orators. There should be your stamp in it. Your own feelings and outlooks make the essay solely yours. Never be under the impression that you are second to somebody. Think that you are a person of importance. Crush the psychological barrier to include your individuality in your writings. Keep in mind; you are capable of doing anything great.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Five-Steps-to-Quality-Essay-Writing&id=3127797

How to Seamlessly Include Keywords in Your Web Content

If you're a newbie to internet marketing, you might be wondering, "What the heck is keyword optimization?" It sounds more complex than it is. Basically, keyword optimization is making sure your content contains enough instances of your keywords, which are words or phrases commonly used in search engines to find what you offer. For example, if you're selling real estate in Florida, your keywords may be "florida real estate," "jacksonville florida real estate," "orlando homes for sale," "palm beach houses for sale," etc.

You can find keywords by using keyword research tools and analyzers. This is software that tells you each of the combinations used with a particular keyword, along with how many times the original keyword and its combinations have been used. You can either use paid keyword analyzers, or you can use the popular Google keyword research tool, which is offered for free in the Google AdWords toolset.

How do you use a keyword analyzer tool? They're all the same: You enter in the desired keyword and are given a list of results. Paid keyword analyzers return more specific results, while free ones return more basic information. If you find that your keyword receives a lot of visitors--from 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month for exact matching terms as a minimum--these are the keywords you may want to consider as part of your keyword optimization strategy.

As you review the keywords, think about how you can break them out into logical, related groups. If your site is fairly new, start with the less competitive terms and build out using longer phrases to get some traffic and conversions.

When you've selected your keywords, you're ready to write your content. Here's where the keyword optimization takes shape. What you need to do is repeat your keyword several times throughout your content. Generally, you want your keyword to appear 2 to 5 percent of the time. For example, if you're writing an article of 500 words, you'll want your keyword to appear at least 10 times but no more than 30.

You might be wondering, "What if the nature of my website can't use keywords that often?" This could be the case for websites with a community theme or those promoting more creative content. You'll have to include separate sections that contain optimized content that still relates to your site. For example, if you're running a site related to "fan fiction," you could create articles that talk about how to create fan fiction (with "fan fiction" being the optimized keyword). Try to get content ideas first by asking your community and reviewing logs and analytics, and build keyword lists into your posts from there. You could also include articles that while not relating to fan fiction could still be of interest to your audience. Example keywords could be writing novels, writing movie scripts and self-publishing.

By including optimized content on a website that would otherwise not contain such content, you get the advantage of self-expression while making sure your site gets seen by search engine bots.

As you write your content, make sure it sounds natural and is enjoyable for visitors. Although the goal is to include your desired keyword 2 to 5 percent of the time, if you use it in a context that's inappropriate, you turn away visitors.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231333

6 Beginner Tips For Creating A Solid Social Media Marketing Strategy

Most small business owners already know that if you’re not using social media marketing, you’re simply missing the boat. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many newcomers to the scene represent excellent ways to get the word out about your biz. With all of these sites at your disposal and all the methods with which to use them, however, the process can seem overwhelming. Instead of getting frustrated and giving up, know that there is a method to the madness – and embrace it. Read on to learn how to develop and maintain an effective social media strategy for your small business.

1. Start With the Most Successful Sites

Facebook and Twitter continue to maintain a foothold as two of the most popular social media websites, althoughPinterest and Google Plus are moving up rapidly. Unless there’s a major shift in the social media landscape, though, those first two websites are your best bets for launching a campaign. If you’re already there, work on maximizing your effectiveness on them. If you’re not, get started now.

2. Investigate Lesser Known Sites

Have you ever heard of StumbleUpon? New social media websites are popping up all the time and you never know where your next set of customers is going to come from. The more saturated the top platforms become, the harder it’s going to be to reach an audience on them – your voice may be more easily heard in smaller rooms. Of course, don’t take that as license to veer away from Facebook and Twitter, but do investigate these other sites as time permits.

3. Place a Key Focus on Content Quality

No matter where you go with your social strategy, content is always going to be key. Never post anything less than your best work. If it’s an image on Pinterest, make sure it’s high quality. If it’s a tweet, make those few words impactful. Just because you’re limited to 140 characters doesn’t mean quality should suffer. For all posts, draw upon your industry experience to provide lesser known details and advice, and once you come up with a posting schedule, scale it back if your quality begins to suffer. This point can’t be emphasized enough.

4. Track Your Efforts

It’s essential that you monitor the progress of your social media campaign so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Even though Facebook and Twitter do work for most small businesses, they might not work for you. UseHootSuite or Google Analytics to effectively keep up on the success of each of your individual campaigns.

5. Effectively Adjust Your Strategy

Next, act on your results. If Twitter isn’t giving you the boost you expected, you might not want to abandon it, just tweak your strategy or devote less of a focus to it. If a newer player like Tumblr or Reddit doesn’t show any signs of life, eliminate it and move on to something else like Instagram or Digg. Gathering data on your social strategy is important, but that does nothing if you don’t put it to good use.

6. Always Respond to Comments

No matter where you market via social media, you can’t realize any individual site’s full potential without responding to each and every comment. Even if it’s simply acknowledging and thanking a reader for taking the time, this can have a positive effect. If you encounter negative comments, jump on them immediately. These are only blemishes on your reputation if you do nothing about them. First off, be governed by the notion that the customer is always right.

There’s nothing more off-putting than a Twitter fight between a business owner and a patron, even if you’re sure you’re correct. Take this opportunity to acknowledge any grievances and make up for them ten-fold, publicly. Turn that complaint into an asset and you’ve not only won over that customer, but all the others who read the exchange.

Final Thoughts

No social media strategy can succeed without an appropriate amount of time devoted to it. If your budget doesn’t have room to hire a social media manager, you’re going to have to wear that hat yourself. In order to free up the needed time, organize your day, schedule your most difficult projects for when you’re at your best (either morning or evening) and eliminate any unnecessary interruptions.

Stop spending time on useless phone calls from telemarketers and other folks who don’t serve your business needs. Get yourself physically fit so you perform at a high level each and every day, and take your breaks. Don’t feel bad about going out for a walk or for lunch each day, because your business is going to benefit from your refreshed mind. Social media marketing is important, but only if you’re fully up to the task.

How did you go about creating your social strategy? Leave your tips in the comments below!

Source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/6-beginner-tips-creating-solid-social-media-marketing-strategy-0783129#!wIkYk

Data Scraping Services Become Famous In The World As Business

Scrapping also called screen scrapers aside a specific web site to web sites using the latest tools for extracting information from the process. Website dismantling of automated scripts or programs that are written using Java, Perl, Python, is using such programming languages, etc. together a website, without any manual intervention automated tools to access web information to the control solution.

Web Scrapper for people to manually copy and paste information from thousands of websites is designed to find boring. Web Scraper can target users of information scrap and MySQL, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, etc., such as the different formats, to allow the export of

Web pages are structured to unstructured content into a Web Scrapper can help. Scrapper on the product information site, information, online shopping, news, press releases, contact information, stock quotes and other financial information may be useful to remove.

Web scraper companies, job portals, e – commerce web sites, directories, search engines and shopping sites, or information gathering of the material. Web scraper to help save many hours a person dedicated to data extraction itself and will dramatically reduce the time required.

Web Scraper using advanced Internet search algorithms to extract data from web pages, you can solve this problem.

Web Scrapper only software program that will crawl through the web and unstructured data from web pages and collect the required format and exported to the job of your choice. Web scraper Technical view by typing a URL to visit website after website and information on the Internet as a man. Web scraper data using advanced algorithms that are applied to PHP, Perl, Python, etc. This makes the programming languages by using the tracking

the measure of a website’s web pages to your local hard disk is useful for extracting information. Scrapper is a graphical user interface that you have a web URL (Uniform Resource Locator) allows you to create, delete data and is scrolling off the tracking algorithm is used to delete data.

Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.

 Web Scrapper at regular intervals using a scraper can be used with web data to your spreadsheet; you can download an online database. Web scraper to collect a large amount of information can be informal and useful information, formatting them into the analysis purposes.

Web Scrappers various sectors of business are used in various purposes such as track creation, marketing, market analysis, strategy setting, based on the analysis of foreign exchange, stock quotes, product prices, etc. The information is collected using a web scrapper; your business can obtain information on the Internet.

Web scraper public information websites, email addresses for marketing purposes that can be used to create a large mailing list can be tracked. Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.


Source: http://www.platforms.net/data-scraping-services-become-famous-in-the-world-as-business/

Data scraping tool for non-coding journalists launches

A tool which helps non-coding journalists scrape data from websites has launched in public beta today.

Import.io lets you extract data from any website into a spreadsheet simply by mousing over a few rows of information.

Until now import.io, which we reported on back in April, has been available in private developer preview and has been Windows only. It is now also available for Mac and is open to all.

Although import.io plans to charge for some services at a later date, there will always be a free option.

The London-based start-up is trying to solve the problem of the fact that there is "lots of data on the web, but it's difficult to get at", Andrew Fogg, founder of import.io, said in a webinar last week.

Those with the know-how can write a scraper or use an API to get at data, Fogg said. "But imagine if you could turn any website into a spreadsheet or API."

Uses for journalists

Journalists can find stories in data. For example, if I wanted to do a story on the type of journalism jobs being advertised and the salaries offered, I could research this by looking at various websites which advertise journalism jobs.

If I were to gather the data from four different jobs boards and enter the information manually into a spreadsheet it would take would take hours if not days; if I were to write a screen scraper for each of the sites it would require knowledge and would probably take a couple of hours. Using import.io I can create a single dataset from multiple sources in a few minutes.

I can then search and sort the dataset and find out different facts, such as how many unpaid internships are advertised, or how many editors are currently being sought.

How it works

When you download the import.io application you see a web browser. This browser allows you to enter a URL for any site you want to scrape data from.

To take the example of the jobs board, this is structured data, with the job role, description and salaries displayed.

The first step is to set up 'connectors' and to do this you need to teach the system where the data is on the page. This is done by hitting a 'record' button on the right of the browser window and mousing over a few examples, in this case advertised jobs. You then click 'train rows'.

It takes between two and five examples to teach import.io where all of the rows are, Fogg explained in the webinar.

The next step is to declare the type of data and add column names. For example there may be columns for 'job title', 'job description' and 'salary'. Data is then extracted into the table below the browser window.

Data from different websites can then be "mixed" into a single searchable database.

In the example used in the webinar, Fogg demonstrated how import.io could take data relating to rucksacks for sale on a shopping website. The tool can learn the "extraction pattern", Fogg explained, and apply that to to another product. So rather than mousing over the different rows of sleeping bags advertised, for example, import.io was automatically able to detect where the price and product details were on the page as it had learnt the structure from how the rucksacks were organised. The really smart bit is that the data from all products can then be automatically scraped and pulled into the spreadsheet. You can then search 'shoes' and find the data has already been pulled into your database.

When a site changes its code a screen scraper would become ineffective. Import.io has a "resilience to change", Fogg said. It runs tests twice a day and users get notified of any changes and can retrain a connector.

It is worth noting that a site that has been scraped will be able to detect that import.io has extracted the data as it will appear in the source site's web logs.

Case studies

A few organisations have already used import.io for data extraction. Fogg outlined three.

    British Red Cross

The British Red Cross wanted to create an iPhone app with data from the NHS Choices website. The NHS wanted the charity to use the data but the health site does not have an API.

By using import.io, data was scraped from the NHS site. The app is now in the iTunes store and users can use it to enter a postcode to find hospital information based on the data from the NHS site.

"It allowed them to build an API for a website where there wasn't one," Fogg said.

    Hewlett Packard

Fogg explained that Hewlett Packard wanted to monitor the prices of its laptops on retailers' websites.

They used import.io to scrape the data from the various sites and were able monitor the prices at which the laptops were being sold in real-time.

    Recruitment site

A US recruitment firm wanted to set up a system so that when any job vacancy appeared on a competitor's website, they could extract the details and push that into their Salesforce software. The initial solution was to write scrapers, Fogg said, but this was costly and in the end they gave up. Instead they used import.io to scrape the sites and collate the data.


Source: http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/data-scraping-tool-for-non-coding-journalists-launches/s2/a554002/