Flixster.com Data Scraping: April 2013

Saturday, 27 April 2013

Web Scraping,Web Mining and Data Collection for Online Retail Shops (e-commerce)

Web scrapping which is also referred to as web data extraction or web harvesting is of utmost importance in any and every ecommerce shop that strives to succeed. It is one of the easiest ways to monitor your market and the ecommerce industry in general. Web scrapping in its simplest form is described as the process of collecting information from the web automatically. A web scrapper is a computer software technique that is used to extract data or information from as many websites as is needed. This computer software program helps to stimulate people (potential clients) to explore the web by either embedding specific known browsers such as Mozilla and/ or Internet Explorer, or implementing a smaller degree of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Web scrapers are best used for market research, and are called ants, web spiders, automatic indexers, web robots, bots, and more. They are computer programs used to browse the web in an automated, orderly and methodical manner, called web crawling. Most site engines use web scrapers to provide up-to-date information that will help create copies of all their web pages visited. When these are processed, search engines then proceed to index all the downloaded pages. Indexing by search engines; helps for a faster and easier search, makes gathering of certain types of information easy, and it also helps with automating regular maintenance tasks on an ecommerce shop or website.

Web scrapping is simply web automation, which stimulates human web browsing using software programs. The uses of web scraping in an ecommerce shop are; for web research, price comparisons on the internet,   web data integration, content integration or mashup, detection for website change, data and information monitoring and more. A web scrapping from an exemplary point of view is like a person visiting a website by entering its URL on the web browser and then collects information from that website. In essence, web scraping does this same job but not by typing in a URL but by crawling (spider-like) using Algorithms which works with only scripting languages such as Python, PHP, Perl and many more.

From a competitive analysis, web scraping is very important for the success of any ecommerce shop/ website because;

It helps you automatically copy and paste thousands of data from as many WebPages as you want.

It enables you scrap data from your target website and export its contents in a variety of different formats such as   Microsoft word, PowerPoint, excel, MySQL format, rich text format and more.

Web scraping can be used to convert contents that are not well structured into well-formatted contents. It can also be used to extract product descriptions, and online ecommerce shopping data, financial information, email addresses, news contact details and all other information online.

This computer software can also gather information or data from business directories, ecommerce websites, shopping sites, search engines, job portals and other important contents online on its own without manual assistant.

Web scraping which is also referred to as screen scraping functions hand in hand with a concept called data mining. While web scraping allows you gather information online from a variety of websites, data mining allows you to analyze the information gotten. Data mining is describes as the practice of searching large data stores automatically for patterns. In essence, data mining allows you to learn about the data gotten. It often times is a statistical method based on complex algorithms. Note that it does not have anything to do with gathering data or knowing how you got the data, it just analyzes information.

Another term used with web scraping, and data mining is data collection. Data collection as the name implies is described as the process of arranging and collecting data. Data collection was created for obtaining information for record purposes, used for decision-making on vital issues and is used to pass information to other people. In the simplest form, data collection is data gathered to provide information on a specific subject.

In summary; while web scraping is the process of extracting information from targeted websites using software programs, web mining is the process of analyzing data collected, and data collection is the process of preparing and collecting data.

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Source: http://lawretta.hubpages.com/hub/Web-Scraping-Web-Mining-and-Data-Collection-for-Online-Retail-Shops-e-commerce

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Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on Flixster.com Data Scraping, Rottentomatoes.com Data Scraping, Fandango.com Data Scraping, Moviefone.com Data Scraping, Boxofficemojo.com Data Scraping and Comingsoon.net Data Scraping etc.

Flixster Hits 20 Million App Downloads. Top Movie App On iPhone, Android, And BlackBerry

It was almost exactly two years ago that Flixster bought one of the original popular movie apps for the iPhone from a college sophomore. Now, two years later, their Flixster iPhone app is the top movie application on the platform. It’s also the top movie app on the Android and BlackBerry platforms as well. All told, the app has just crossed a massive 20 million installs.

What’s perhaps even more incredible is that among these users, 70% of them are active in the past 90 days. CEO Joe Greenstein credits the companies combination with popular movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (which they acquired from News Corp. in January).

“The combination of Flixster and RottenTomatoes has helped us pull away as the go-to application in the movie category – bringing together everything you need from critics, other users and your own friends to make the best decision about which movie to see,” Greenstein tells us.

But Flixster isn’t sitting around content with their mobile success. The company has been working hard on experiences for other devices as well. They have an iPad app that just crossed 500,000 downloads. “iPad is our most heavily used app yet with over 5 visits per user per month,” Greenstein says.

He also notes that they just launched their first simple apps for the Roku box and for Sony TVs. So far, those have garnered 30,000 users in just 10 days, according to Greenstein.

In terms of what’s next, it’s something I’m very excited for: Rotten Tomatoes 2.0. It will have “some major new features and improvements,” is all Greenstein will say.

They’ll also be working on bringing Flixster to at four more platforms this year, Greenstein says.

We also just launched our first tiptoe into the Connected TV devices with simple apps for Roku boxes & Sony TVs. Over 30,000 users in the first 10 days!

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/20/flixster-20-million/

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Friday, 26 April 2013

Data Mining Services

You will get all solutions regarding data mining from many companies in India. You can consult a variety of companies for data mining services and considering the variety is beneficial to customers. These companies also offer web research services which will help companies to perform critical business activities.

Very competitive prices for commodities will be the results where there is competition among qualified players in the data mining, data collection services and other computer-based services. Every company willing to cut down their costs regarding outsourcing data mining services and BPO data mining services will benefit from the companies offering data mining services in India. In addition, web research services are being sourced from the companies.

Outsourcing is a great way to reduce costs regarding labor, and companies in India will benefit from companies in India as well as from outside the country. The most famous aspect of outsourcing is data entry. Preference of outsourcing services from offshore countries has been a practice by companies to reduce costs, and therefore, it is not a wonder getting outsource data mining to India.

For companies which are seeking for outsourcing services such as outsource web data extraction, it is good to consider a variety of companies. The comparison will help them get best quality of service and businesses will grow rapidly in regard to the opportunities provided by the outsourcing companies. Outsourcing does not only provide opportunities for companies to reduce costs but to get labor where countries are experiencing shortage.

Outsourcing presents good and fast communication opportunity to companies. People will be communicating at the most convenient time they have to get the job done. The company is able to gather dedicated resources and team to accomplish their purpose. Outsourcing is a good way of getting a good job because the company will look for the best workforce. In addition, the competition for the outsourcing provides a rich ground to get the best providers.

In order to retain the job, providers will need to perform very well. The company will be getting high quality services even in regard to the price they are offering. In fact, it is possible to get people to work on your projects. Companies are able to get work done with the shortest time possible. For instance, where there is a lot of work to be done, companies may post the projects onto the websites and the projects will get people to work on them. The time factor comes in where the company will not have to wait if it wants the projects completed immediately.

Outsourcing has been effective in cutting labor costs because companies will not have to pay the extra amount required to retain employees such as the allowances relating to travels, as well as housing and health. These responsibilities are met by the companies that employ people on a permanent basis. The opportunity presented by the outsourcing of data and services is comfort among many other things because these jobs can be completed at home. This is the reason why the jobs will be preferred more in the future.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4733707

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Flixster Update: Warner Bros. Very Interested, as Yahoo Drops Out of Bidding for Social Movie Site

Recently, BoomTown reported that Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site–was in early acquisition discussions with several suitors.

Now, said sources, Warner Bros. appears to be the frontrunner in various talks to buy the entertainment site, while Internet giant Yahoo has dropped out due to price concerns.

The reason for interest from the Time Warner-owned studio, said sources, is due to a spate of recent digital efforts, including its expansion of a movie rental experiment on Facebook.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote last night:

Facebook users watch “The Dark Knight” on the social network for $3. Now it has added five more movies, and is asking more money for three recent releases: It will cost you 40 Facebook Credits–the equivalent of $4–to rent “Inception,” “Life As We Know It” and “Yogi Bear” on the site. The first two “Harry Potter” movies, however, are at the original price.

Flixster has a strong presence on the Silicon Valley social networking giant, which could make it a good vehicle to attract people to the movie rental effort, as well as a popular mobile app.

Interestingly, Rotten Tomatoes was once owned outright by another traditional media giant: News Corp.

It is now only a minority shareholder, after trading Rotten Tomatoes for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox Studios, is not bidding for Flixster, several sources said.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million.

Any acquisition negotiations could always fail, of course. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Flixster trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings and news and even posts user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook, and on mobile devices.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

Source: http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/

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Wednesday, 24 April 2013

Daybees wants to be Google for event search

Daybees is a free-to-use events search engine with big ambitions. "We want it to be Google for information and Daybees for events," explained founder Gary Morris to Wired.co.uk.

The aim is to create "the world's most advanced vertical search engine" that focuses specifically on events.

Morris goes to great pains to highlight the fact that Daybees doesn't list only those events that offer a revenue share to the platform, it tries to list any event. It does this by scraping the web using its own algorithms with web crawlers to find any event taking place -- ticketed or unticketed. It can extract data from these event pages and assimilate them in a complex data stack. This is then formatted, tagged, categorised and compiled. It uses a proprietary merging tool to make sure that events that have been listed on a number of various sites register as the same one.

Currently, users have to either rely on the editorialised guides created by the likes of Time Out and other listings sites, or ticketing companies like Ticketmaster, which only show events that they are going to make money out of. While large cities such as London might be well-served by these models, it's harder when you live further afield.

Daybees -- which has been funded to the tune of $1m (£650,000) by Morris and his business partner Andrew Molasky -- is currently a web app, but there's an iPhone and Android app in the pipeline. It has more than 230 different event categories -- from opera to heavy metal, charity sales to auctions and even philosophy events. It allows you to search for events by genre, keyword, location and date. There's a one-click process to add the event to your Daybees calendar, which can also be exported to existing calendars such as iCal and Google. If you are already used to using these, you probably won't want to store your events somewhere else. But if you don't then there are tools for sharing events with friends and receiving automatic updates if any event details change.

Daybees also lets users select form a number of pre-programmed layers, such as national holidays, astronomical events or "European awareness", whatever the hell that means. This lets me know that next week (commencing 22 April) there is an Earth Day, World Book and Copyright Day, World Malaria Day and World Day for Safety and Health at Work. I'm particularly looking forward to 30 April, when it's International Jazz Day, and 11 May, when we'll celebrate World Migratory Bird Day.

Although it's currently not affiliated with any ticketing sites, Morris told Wired.co.uk that the company will offer sponsored listings, but is taking a "build it and they will come" approach.

Daybees, which is currently in beta, has a list of 1.5 million happenings around the world, with a bias towards the UK at the moment. Within six months it will soft launch in the US and come out of beta in the UK.

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/15/daybees

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