A gathering of 4000 of the best and smartest programmers in the world is occurring right now at the google I/O. This conference is confirming to me that Mozenda and web data mining is the place to be. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the term "mashing together" in reference to data and web applications during his keynote address and then again 30 minutes later a reference was made to Mashups it only proves to me the need to mine out and aggregate web content. I have to say that the best part so far has to be the free Google Android phone that is being passed out to all conference goers. Googles goal with this is to give them to us and have programmers build applications on their open environment to strengthen the usability of their phone.
Our many thanks to Tom at CodeSanity.net for his killer Mozenda review:
"Mozenda is a very powerful data scraping service. If you have ever found yourself writing scripts or manually copying and pasting data from one website to another then mozenda is for you. They have a very nice, full featured REST API which will be the focus of this article." Read more...
Tom wrote a nifty CodeIgniter Library (PHP) to easily interact with our Mozenda API. Download it here.
We look forward to his launch of MyGov365.
So, Mashup Camp ended about a week and a half ago and I’ve now had some time to reflect on what happened. While at the conference, we were running around all day doing demos, teaching people how to use the software, and meeting conference attendees and other sponsors. All in all the conference was a lot of fun. It was refreshing to be in a less structured conference environment even though it occasionally meant that things were a little more hectic. It was also refreshing to be around people who feel passionately about mashups.
We here at Mozenda have always felt like the Web Agent Builder would be very well suited for handling the data layer of mashups. The conference featured a number of sponsors whose software allowed users to easily link up data or data feeds to create the front-end mashup that users would see which was exciting for us because we were able to show users how they could build those data feeds. It was also great to be able to show our software to people from Zembly, WetPaint, Calais, IBM, and Yahoo and see how impressed they were with it.
It was also interesting to listen to Tim O’Reilly’s keynote address on how the Internet is the new OS. He talked about how the web holds so many of the applications we use regularly—email, news, search, documents (with Google docs), chat, etc. Mashups are also great candidates to contribute to the Internet OS because they allow users to replace derive more meaning from a single source than from multiple other sources. As mashups help people gain ground on the massive amounts of information they are presented with, they will become a necessary destination, and an integral part of people’s online usage.
All in all, I would say Mashup Camp was a successful unconference both in general and for Mozenda specifically. It was great to see people getting creative mashup data with Mozenda, plugging it in to a mashup enabling software, and then wowing the attendees with it. Hopefully, we continue to see providing innovation in the mashup space, and hopefully Mozenda can continue helping people get the data they need for the mashups they’re building.
The beta version of the ‘Rest API’ has been released and is available to all customers. This allows for programmatic access of your data which gives customers virtually full control over their data as if it was being stored on their own local servers. Using this API, customers are directly connecting into their collections to obtain product information that will seamlessly integrate into their custom applications. Using this API you can also access different views of your data, update data, and delete old data as needed. For more information on using the API please contact customer support.
A few years ago, when InfoSquire was in its infancy, I received a phone call from a gentleman in New York named Jeff Stewart. He was curious if our technology was capable of 1) crawling multiple domains and discovering the presence of certain file formats, RSS/ATOM feeds and 2) capable of processing high volumes of web pages on demand.
At the time, InfoSquire was composed of no more than yours truly, and those of you who have run a tech sole-proprietorship know that when a potential client calls you asking if you have a feature that you know you could code up in a day or two, the answer is always yes. In this case yes and yes (this was early stage mind you).
Little did I know that I’d still be working with Jeff a few years later (and a couple of nice trips to Manhattan) and that I’d have built a whole system dedicated to managing, monitoring and saving the contents of (at one point) hundreds of thousands of RSS/ATOM feeds! The company that was using this custom feed “ping service”? You guessed it, Monitor110, a NY start-up specializing in real-time web-content monitoring/analysis and intelligence delivery to (primarily) the financial sector. Their goal was to provide a platform that gave knowledge workers a head-start on information that could impact their investments. This was accomplished at InfoSquire by “pinging” thousands of valuable resources to see when their contents had changed. Notification of changed resources was then passed onto Monitor110 who would then process the new contents of the resource.
At it’s height, our system was capable of pulling down well over a billion feeds per month, though the number of individual targeted feeds were eventually refined from hundreds of thousands to around 80,000 hand-picked premium feeds that contained the best information they were looking for. In turn, we provided a service to add/remove and update feed information in our system, as well as specify the interval at which a feed would be checked.
Last week Monitor110 announced that it was closing it doors. This is obviously sad to me for two reasons: 1) They had a great idea and had developed an awesome system, but unfortunately made some important direction changes too late in the game (see Roger Ehrenberg’s Monitor110: A Post Mortem) and 2) They were one of our best clients, and we loved working with that very talented and innovative group of individuals.
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