Google has unveiled a new program called "wave" at the google IO. The program was written by Lars Rasmussen who previously created Google Maps.
This is a new way to look at e-mail. Waves is a little like e-mail, blogger, and instant messaging all in one. If you choose your messages will instantly display on a blog, in an e-mail and and instantly in an IM. People can comunitact at the same document at the very same time.
The program is a little buggy, but still very cool. The part I liked best was the ability to display what the person is typing as they type it. This technology is only availible in HTML 5, and only with opensource browsers - Sorry IE users you will have to get something else.
Here is a photo of me with Vic Gundotra last night. Vic is the vice president of Engineering at Google.
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.
SALT LAKE CITY, April 8 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 13th, Michael Sterner's worst fears were realized. The 127 year old Duluth, MN manufacturer's web development company fell victim to a system error stopping sales and causing critical data to be lost.
"Our web development company was charging us for website management and hosting. Naturally, I assumed that our data was safe. We patched things together but had to limp through the rest of the holiday season with missing product information. These were very expensive lessons to learn."
After the holidays Michael Sterner researched ways to back up his data, but because the site was created by a separate firm he had no access to the it. "I could see all of the information I needed on the site, but we had no way to get at the data."
After doing some research, Sterner found Mozenda. "At first, the software seemed too good to be true. Mozenda was able to harvest all of the data from duluthpack.com and replicate our database without ever seeing it."
By means of Mozenda's (Website Data Extraction) technology, Internet retailer Duluth Pack was able to obtain its critical assets and build an offsite back-up for the company's entire system, much of it previously inaccessible.
About Duluth Pack
Duluth Pack has been manufacturing quality canvas and leather goods in Duluth, Minnesota Since 1882. The company makes everything from its original canoe packs, to high quality canvas and leather luggage, business gear, school bags, hunting gear and more. Every pack they make comes with a Lifetime Guarantee, a testament of the commitment to quality they have had for 127 years.
For more information about Duluth Pack visit www.duluthpack.com
About Mozenda
MOZENDA is a Salt Lake City tech firm specializing in the development and sale of (web data extraction software tools).
Its cornerstone product is the patent-pending Web Agent Builder 2.0, a web data extraction tool that grabs precise website content and organizes it into useable formats.
Screen scraping has gotten a bad rap for a long time, and its reputation is not entirely without merit. Ryanair, an Irish based airline company, announced in August of 2008 that it would cancel all tickets purchased through websites (e.g. BravoFly, Opodo, Atrapalo, OTBeach, et. al) that employed screen scraping techniques. There have also been countless examples of entire websites being duplicated using screen scraping. But, does that mean that all screen scraping is bad? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use techniques and technologies that allow you to get information off of a website. Hopefully, this article will address the stigma attached to screen scraping by discussing some of its legitimate uses.
It’s been a long standing practice of retail companies around the world to keep an eye on the pricing of the competition. By knowing your competitors prices, you’re able to make adjustments to your own pricing and remain an attractive shopping option. Now that most companies have moved their prices online, you no longer have to send “spies” into retail locations, spend hours leafing through newspaper inserts, or make price-inquiry phone calls. Many websites have no printed policy on the use of screen scraping techniques and while that’s not an open invitation to do whatever you want on the site, it may mean that, as long you’re not causing an unreasonable strain on the site’s servers.
Forums can contain a wealth of useful information for product manufacturers, service providers, and marketers but getting to that information is often clumsy and time consuming. Provided the site doesn’t restrict the use of data extraction techniques, using screen scraping can make a world of difference. Imagine you’re a cell phone manufacturer. You just released a new phone and want to keep an eye on the public’s reaction. Users are likely to be far more candid with the anonymity a forum offers than they would be in a more intimate setting such as a focus group. So, by monitoring a forum, the cell phone manufacturer may be able to find useful information such as design successes and flaws, manufacturing defects, and consumer demand. These same principles can be used to monitor blogs or blog comments in the event no RSS feed is available.
Getting product information to the people who need it can be a pain (especially if you’re one of the people who needs it). Distributers, wholesalers, and dropshippers often use archaic methods (CDs, Excel Files, physical product catalogs) to get out product information. None of these methods give those who need up-to-date information what they need at the time they need it. This can make it impossible to determine inventory levels, adjust pricing, and be aware of new product offerings or discontinuations. Screen scraping can provide a rather elegant solution. Whether scraping your own site and providing the information to resellers or scraping the site of your distributor, you’re able to extract needed information in a timely, simple fashion. Some solutions, such as Mozenda, offer the ability to not only regularly schedule a screen scraping agent, but to also automatically export that information to a file or to a website. This means that you can either alert distributors to changes or—if you are a distributor—you can monitor suppliers’ changes all without investing additional time and effort.
The above examples are only a handful of the thousands of legitimate uses for screen scraping. Hopefully in the future, responsible users will find new legal and ethical reasons to better organize and repurpose information from the web. Screen scraping–or whatever you chose to call it–won’t have such a stigma attached to it when that time arrives.
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