We have just launched (and it's now live) the Kapow Web Data Services product available via our Website on top of our IronCloud infrastructure using Ironcloud's pay-as-you-go API-driven capabilities:
I think this is a landmark contribution to the industry and I am excited about this new announcement with Kapow Technologies for several different reasons.
First, I have always thought that the true power and potential of the Internet was its ability to serve as a communication mechanism for the high-speed transfer of a wide variety data, and a shared I.T. resource for everyone, connecting systems and applications around the world. I think this far outweighs the value of the collection of "brochures" that represent a substantial part of what the Web is today. I think this joint offering we now have with Kapow takes us another big step closer to the vision of a hyper-connected world via the Internet.
The general idea behind this offering is that you can custom create your own data sources using the vast resources of the Web and the incredible amounts of data that exist out there rather easily. Simply point and click on any part of a Web page (or Web application) including as many data elements within that page as you would like to have access to. This process is the creation of a “robot” (which can be thought of as a kind of "script" for technical types) that is the core component delivering the data source. Once built, this robot has a REST interface (or can be used as an RSS feed) that when invoked will retrieve the desired data from the specified source as if the data were just sitting in a database somewhere. This retrieval via the robot can occur weekly, daily, hourly, in real-time, or whatever you specify, as it is eternally standing by awaiting your command to go out and get the latest data.
These robots essentially enable you to create your own unique data sources from anything on the Web. Now that is powerful. They (and the data they provide) can then be accessed by any application or Website in a purely automated way. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of traditional cutting and pasting (and the time and cost associated with that) for people to get the data they need regularly, but its ease-of-use and flexibility creates an endless set of possibilities.
For example, you could create individual robots that collect competitor pricing information from twenty different competitors, and then do analysis within Excel using each of these robots to display and analyze current pricing information at any given point in time. You could perform worldwide currency analysis from data provided by many different banks, analyze large diverse sets of data that might trigger investment activity, or even create the most incredible data-driven fantasy football tool ever imagined.
Then, these data sources can all be used within applications like Microsoft Excel, Salesforce.com, business intelligence tools, reporting tools, ETL and data quality tools, mashup builders and development environments, and basically any other application that thrives on data.
The environment itself to build these robots on the Kapow Website is very solid and very easy to learn. All that you have to do is register at StrikeIron and then take your UserID and password to strikeiron.kapow.net (you will need to register for a Kapow account as well when you get there) and start building and deploying robots. It is a visual environment (no code needs to be written) enabling these powerful data-collecting robots to go deep within Websites and extract 100% of any data from anywhere on the Web. It is the only product of its kind that can deal with Websites that contain Javascript and AJAX as well. And, if a source Website should ever happen to change, there are alerting capabilities to let you know, minimizing any potential downtime. You can also actually extract data behind login-protected sites and from the results of search forms simply by passing input parameters to the REST interface for the robot.
For a "getting started" walk-through guide, click here.
Another nice benefit to StrikeIron is that in the past, we would be approached with requests for all kinds of obscure data sources, from lottery data, to global temperature data, niche medical data, and on and on. Our focus has always been providing more mainstream data such as sales tax rates, address data, telephone number data, business demographics, and financial data. These are all sources of data that have a lot of general applicability that we have done a heavy build out around and make available via API.
Now however, instead of saying "sorry" when approached with niche data requests, we can tell our prospective customers that if the data is publicly available, then a robot can be built to go and get that data in an automated way whenever desired, and that data can be fed into anything. In other words, the "long tail" of data sources is now within easy reach.
And finally, this joint offering showcases our IronCloud pay-as-you-go infrastructure offering, demonstrating that StrikeIron can provide a full solution helping software and Internet companies quickly bring enterprise solutions into a SAAS, subscription-based, pay-as-you-go model.
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