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 Content for Your Site Free and Easy

Any avid website owner knows how critical it is to have a website that contains large amounts of genuine 'content'. These days a website pretty much lives or dies by the amount of content it has on it. A simple and brutal truth of today's Internet is that a site without increasing amounts of frequently updated content is not deemed important enough to merit frequent spidering by the Search Engines.

Successful search engine optimization experts tout that in today's online environment a website is successful because of several sequential steps occurring naturally online. That is...

- increased website content creates more search engine indexing opportunities, which results in more opportunities for organic search engine traffic;

- more search engine traffic leads to more online popularity and subsequently, increased viral online linking;

- this increased linking to a website results in more perceived relevancy by the search engines and, again, higher organic search engine listings; and,

- finally, these higher listings lead to more traffic, and the cycle continues.

So how does a website owner deal with this fact of doing business online? Simple. By providing an ever-increasing amount of content on their website.

But if you own several websites you understand how great a challenge it can be to be able to provide constantly updated, valid and useful content, usually in substantially large quantities via hundreds or thousands of webpages, for your website's visitors and information seekers.

So the way to solve this dilemma for most webmasters is to use content written by others. But the most common route to getting this type of information is to have to pay for a ghostwriter to write the content. This can get expensive so, again, one's website's content volume suffers.

Some webmasters use RSS feeds to scrape content from other websites, but to build static webpages from the scraped content can get into legal issues so this tactic can be rather risky.

And for those webmasters brave enough to write the needed content themselves usually face a difficult mountain to climb. That is, these days it's very tough to actually find the time or have the knowledge to do this. One can only write so many pages on the same topic before experiencing writer's 'burnout'.

So what would be the answer to this apparent dilemma of needing lots of website content but not having lasting viable routes to obtaining the needed content? Simple.

Grab content from free article directories. An article directory is specially designed for website owners and publishers to legally and freely take copyrighted articles, written by online authors willing to share their writings, and post on their website as content.

And one can find hundreds of article directories available on the Internet today and most have only one condition of use: there are terms of usage that website owners agree to follow before using the articles from the article directory. But outside of that there are no other restrictions, and no 'memberships' required.

So, in view of the issues surrounding creating content for one's website, as described above, and the absolutely necessity for a website to have voluminous and fresh content to stay ranked highly in the Search Engines, one can easily see how the free articles found at an article directory can be just the answer a website owner needs to give their websites a needed boost with the Search Engines.

No more having to pay for content. And no more struggling with writing the content yourself. Use whatever information you find at the article directory that you deem relevant and post it on your website, or blog, or forum.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Getting-Content-for-Your-Site-Free-and-Easy&id=99304

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

Data Recovery From Your Hard Disk

Some people come under a lot of mental pressure and become worried when they lose any vital data. The age to worry is over. PC Data Recovery, today, is a very simplistic task. PC Data Recovery is the process of recovering data from the storage systems. One can retrieve data by using floppies, DVDs or compact disks, hard drives, etc. It helps one to recover all the data that has been lost in a professional, safe and speedy manner. For all the IT firms and corporate houses dealing with website functioning data recovery is vital for storing the data in a proper mode. The time for protecting your data from corruption or from getting lost has gone.

First of all, you can catch hold of some technically sound friend of yours. They can help you out with your problem. They might also have the PC Data Recovery software if you are lucky. If you are not successful, then you should try and point out the problem with the hard disc. Your computer might fail to boot or if it does start up, it might not display other drives. You also need to listen vigilantly to any ticking, grating or scraping sound that your hard drive may make. If it does you should inform the PC Data Recovery experts about the problem. In any case, you will have to take it to the experts who will take some time and also empty your wallets!

But getting the data recovered by the experts is better than doing it yourself as there are chances that the hard disk may crash.It is also advised that you know which data you want to recover beforehand. Making a checklist along with alluding at the location of the files, movies, or pictures (that you want to retrieve) can make the task simpler and less time consuming. If it is only a few music files or some games then one should erase it and consent to the data loss. Conversely, if it is some significant information such as a product that you cannot reproduce, then you have no choice but to take your PC to a PC Data Recovery center.

If the hard drive is secure then one has a decent likelihood of recovering the data. Downloading the software might help in some cases. In this techno world, where we all are completely dependent on computers, one cannot afford to lose any piece of information or data. Thus data recovery software has become extremely significant for personal as well as business use.Today, PC Data Recovery is no longer a difficult task. With recommended software or with the help of IT experts it can be accomplished easily.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Recovery-From-Your-Hard-Disk&id=3347589

How to Write Online Content for SEO, Google and Marketing

The web can be a difficult environment and many professional writers do not understand how to write for it. Three primary rules of writing for the Internet align with the habits of web readers:

1) Be brief; web readers have short attention spans;

2) Readers find content through search engines, so choose words search engines can find;

3) Readers enjoy passing content on to others, so provide links.

Some other important considerations:

The web is a vast universe of unstructured content – On the web, relevance is paramount. With infinite choices, readers will focus only on what matters to them. Design your web content for search engines. In functional terms that means: Write for Google. When you do, your material will be relevant to your website visitors. Plus, they will be able to understand it and “act on it.”

Web users evaluate your words to check for relevance – Flowery, figurative or highly technical words and terms will send readers elsewhere. In traditional media, writers are in charge of the terms they use. Web readers establish what “they think” a particular word or phrase means. Internet readers thus “own” web content and Internet writers do not.

The web is filled with incorrect information – Web readers are skeptical of online content. You must convince quickly them that your content is credible, so include links to respected authorities.

Regularly change and improve your web content – Internet readers expect updated information. Upgrade regularly. Searchers perpetually seek new content, so refresh yours as often as possible. You cannot govern the online reading experience. As a newspaper, magazine or book writer, you can assume that your readers regard your material as relevant. Otherwise, they wouldn’t read it. Web readers may land on your web page randomly, bounced in from search engines or social media referrals. Readers spend less time reading web pages than print pages.

After scanning, online readers give you “an average of three to six seconds to engage them.” If the content doesn’t intrigue them, they hit the back button to chase more relevant material. Offline, you can make an informed guess about the identity of your readers. Online, you haven’t a clue. Your online writing is aimed not at individual readers, but at search engines. That’s how readers find you. Focus on the requirements of interested searchers who seek specific keywords and links.

What about keywords?

For a web writer, keywords – “strings of characters that people enter into search fields” – are mother’s milk. Keywords may be single words, long phrases or “word combinations.”

So-called “long-tail” keywords are highly specific, lengthy phrases. They are designed to draw Internet users with particular interests. To learn about the context of long-tail keywords, visit social media sites, blogs and online forums that are popular with your target audience and your competitors. Identify repeated keywords and phrases. Research keywords using Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes and Yahoo Alerts. Popular words – or “tags” – that people assign to relevant web content and social media are also helpful.

Pepper your main web page and subsequent pages with keywords that matter. Post the specific purpose of your pages – shopping, support, services and so on – in your website titles and links. Add “a verb to your keyword phrase,” for example, “learn about” or “shop for” or “compare.”

Keyword research is a straightforward process. Brainstorm the “seed words” people might use to find information about your topic. Start with the most generic terms. Create “keyword clouds,” keywords that relate to one another. Google AdWords is a good tool for keyword research. Other tools include Keyword Discovery Tool, Goggle Insights and the Free Keyword List Generator. Wordtracker helps you check your competition. Type your potential keywords into Google’s search box. It will show you “various incremental possible matches for your search string,” each matched by the “hits” or returns for each search phrase.

Creating Great Web Content

Follow this six-step plan to create the most effective web content:

1. Establish exactly who your target audience is.

2. Do keyword research to determine what specific words and phrases your target audience uses to search for relevant web content. Make Google your default search engine for this research.

3. Create a list of “core words” that are most popular with your target audience.

4. Create a web page for each of these words.

5. Routinely test the pages you create for relevance.

6. Adjust your web content to optimize its relevance

Source: http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/write-online-content-seo-google-marketing-0772596#!wIjyT

8 Methods Of Internet Marketing - That Will Help Your Business

The way we do business at the moment has changed dramatically and that is because of the internet, I am going to explain to you in this article 8 different methods of internet marketing.

With email and the internet we now have a way to show our products, services and opportunities to people worldwide, this gives us a way to constantly keep in contact with our customers, prospects and leads.

1. SEO - Search engine optimization is an excellent method of driving traffic to your website or blog, SEO works by trying to get your site or blog to rank high on the search engines.

The way to do this is by finding valuable keywords in your niche that people search for everyday, then once you find a keyword that you are looking for you then go and write some content around that keyword and put it on your site or blog.

You then have to promote that content you wrote and get back links and social media votes, SEO is one of my favorite methods of internet marketing.

2. PPC - Pay Per Click allows you to create ads that are linked to high traffic keywords, what you do with PPC is you can make as many ads as you wish and both Google and Yahoo have programs that allow Pay Per Click.

Basically with Pay Per Click programs you decide how much you are willing to pay for people to click on your ad, and the more you want to Pay Per Click the higher on the search engines your ad will be, the price varies from pennies to hundreds of dollars.

If you do decide to use this method of internet marketing make sure you have enough money to use on it because once you stop paying for your ad it will not rank high on the search engines anymore.

3. Google AdSense - The way this method works is you have ads from other peoples websites on your website, every time other peoples ads get clicked on in your site you will make money.

The price will depend on the keyword related to the ad, if you don't want your competitors to appear on your site you can block them out.

One of the very good things about Google AdSense is when you pay for an ad that will appear on another persons website this creates a back link to your site which will eventually improve your ranking on the search engines the more back links you get.

These ads are a very effective way of generating lots of traffic to your site that you target and along with the other methods it is only one of the top effective methods of internet marketing.

4. Banner Ads - These ads are very colorful, have graphics, animated and they can catch peoples eyes very fast, you can place these banner ads either at the top or along the bottom of a webpage.

You is also vertical banner ads which you can place on either side of a web page, we call these sky scrapers.

So whichever type of banner ad appears on someone's page they always link back to a different website, which will be yours in this case.

I would recommend that you try to avoid animated ads, because according to statistics these types of ads do not work as well as the ads that have no motion in them.

5. Online Newsletters - This is a very effective way of forming a relationship with your potential customers, with this method you can constantly keep people up to date about new products, services and changes.

On the bottom of the newsletter you should make sure and have an opt in and an opt out form, if you wanted to you can always have an opt in form on your website which is very effective too.

6. Online Magazines - This type of method is similar to print magazines where you would buy ad space for a certain fee, and depending on how much traffic that the particular magazine gets this will decide the fee you pay.

7. Website Lead Generation - With this method there are services that can provide you leads that are already qualified and you will pay a certain price per lead.

The way it works is that these particular companies find possible leads in a few different ways and one of the ways includes cold calling, I could go into a lot more detail on all these different methods of internet marketing but it would take more than just this one article.

8. Online Directories - This method of internet marketing is where you have loads of different types of online directories and city guides, you also have the online yellow pages.

You can get yourself listed under the correct categories that relates to what you are doing, with the majority directories they have a general listing which is free and you can also pay for adverts if you wish too.

So in this article I have only explained the basic principles of just 8 methods of internet marketing and there's a good few more you can use too, but remember that you do not have much of a chance to interact with potential prospects with internet marketing apart from the phone so make you portray the right message online.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?8-Methods-Of-Internet-Marketing---That-Will-Help-Your-Business&id=6876343

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/