cyberlaxamana

by Tom Fast By the latest estimates, there are over 30B websites up from 3M in 1999. The successful companies and business people of the 21st century will need to find ways to organize and exploit this source of information. One technique for this job is called web scraping . Web scraping use to be a very tedious and technical exercise but with new software packages that is no longer the case. Why might you want to use data scraping? The applications are numerous: you want to pull client contact info from a national organization website, you want to pull historic options prices into a financial model, or maybe you just want to pull stats from your favorite baseball team off MLB . com to impress your colleagues. There are several software packages on the market, but the one I chose to use was Mozenda . The company offers a 14 day free trial which is more than enough to test your scraping project and is $99 a month after the trial period for a basic package. You can also view pr...

by Alvaro Febrel More often than not, startups are ignored by big companies when seeking help. To make things worse, sometimes a startup’s business model relies on established players to succeed. “Data Aggregators” are a good example of this, as they use other companies’ data to provide new services for customers (Tripadvisor, Kayak, Cake Financial and Chegg are examples of companies that in one way or another aggregate data from different sources). The issue is, what can a data aggregator do if its sources of information don’t collaborate?  The answer: scrape! The term “Screen Scraping” is used to describe software that reads and extracts information from data that was intended for display to an end-user, as opposed to reading and extracting the same information from “non-manipulated/machine-oriented” data. Screen scraping is usually considered an inefficient way to get information, as it depends on how the end-user output is displayed. For instance, if you want to know today’s oi...