Kapow: Web Scraping Goes Legit?

paul.kedrosky.com

8 points·rp··5 comments

I get paid to write code all day (writing a fair amount of one-off data munging scripts in the spirit of web scraping) and I have no clue what their product actually does, even after looking at their website.

You can check out what their open version does. [0] It looks like the product allows you to grab bits of information from various document sources on the web easily [1] into a db ready for various reports. Is there merit in creating a Data agency that you can subscribe to which parse known sites for info & creates an rss feed?

[0] With a download of 165MB of steaming Java ~ http://openkapow.com

[1] You know it's easy because it's point & click

Not that I can get through now. That guy's site is broken.

But I had the same problem as you a few years back when some friends were evaluating their product and asked me to look into it. IIRC they let you mix and match chunks of web content in one place. Good for large corporate intranets and maybe porn sites. That's about it I think.

Link above is dead. Use this, scroll halfway down:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/

Blog refers to this article on MarketWatch:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kapow-technologies-sec...

If you're like me and wonder what Kapow is, their website is here:

http://www.kapowtech.com/

Sorry about the link. The site's link functionality took a dive soon after I posted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com