News

WaveMaker now support openkapow's REST/WADL format

2009-01-02T19:30:00Z

Please check out how openkapow can be used with WaveMaker on

http://dev.wavemaker.com/forums/?q=node/2830

The way this is done is with the new WADL (Web Application Description Language) support on openkapow.

Every openkapow REST service now support WADL, by using the .wadl extension. Try it out, it is a great way to do programatic discovery of REST services.

Recorded Webinar - Harvesting of Web Intelligence with Kapow OnDemand

2008-05-02T17:45:00Z

Kapow Technologies presented a special installment of our Enterprise Mashups Webinar Series, where we delivered a product preview of Kapow OnDemand, the newest member of the Kapow product family. You can watch a recording of the webinar here.

Kapow OnDemand represents the next step in enabling your capabilities for large-scale harvesting of web intelligence, providing a web based hosted service that is highly secure, cost effective, and scalable. We will demonstrate a rich set of new capabilities built around the concept of user roles and collaborative development of services and feeds, using an intuitive web-based interface.

Many of you have asked in the forums for a mechanism to privatize your robot executions within a dedicated environment. Kapow OnDemand offers that solution.

In this webinar, we also showed a demo of our new Kapow Connector for Excel. It is now feasible to collect and analyze web intelligence directly from your desktop on a realtime basis on an unprecedented scale. Getting started is easy and takes just minutes to be up and running.

This is just a sampling of some of the new and exciting capabilities we are introducing for Kapow OnDemand.

Mashup Competition Winner Harvests the Web to Support Ag Business

2007-12-14T15:04:00Z

At the recent Mashup Camp in Dublin, Ireland Dennis Deery at Irish Rose Consulting (http://www.irose.com) won IBM’s Business Mashup Challenge as well at 2n price in the Best Mashup competition. By leveraging Web 2.0 mashup tools from Kapow Technologies, IBM and StrikeIron, the Dublin, Ireland IT consulting firm created “Farm Explorer,” a mashup that actively harvests the Web and company databases to provide a single screen of data feeds that help farm workers do their jobs.

“With a large farming operation, it has been traditionally difficult for all the people involved with crop production to remain informed about the current field conditions and its activity history,” said Dennis Deery, founder of Irish Rose Consulting. “As with any industry, enterprise mashups help workers achieve higher levels of productivity through better and more timely information”. Furthermore Dennis says that “I was pleased to learn about Kapow as I feel there's great potential out there for using an incredible amount of data currently presented on web sites for producing some interesting mashups”.

Using IBM’s QEDWiki and StrikeIron’s services, and linking internal and external data sources together with Openkapow, Farm Explorer displays information from the farm's local databases, including field numbers, crop and grower information, and pesticide application history. Among its many novel features, the mashup also provides:

A Google map component of the field’s location
Links to PDF files of chemical label and Material Safety Data Sheet information provided by chemical companies to assist field workers in safely dealing with pesticides
Recent photos of the selected field are displayed via a Flickr query
An Accuweather widget, provinding current weather and a 5-day forecast for the field location
A widget that displays local sales and use tax information for the field locale
An Openkapow widget that scrapes gas price information from the MSN web site, linked to gas station locations near the field (Try or download the Lowest Gas Prices robot here)
A widget that displays local sales and use tax information for the field locale

So what happens to this Mashup after Mashup Camp? “After a little tweaking, I plan to demonstrate this mashup to one or more existing clients with the hope that they'll be interested in further developing the mashup into a usable system based on their data sources.” says Dennis Deery. So not only did he win the IBM Business Mashup Challenge using openkapow, he also has a good chance of really making the Mashup into a real business project.

How to create a mashup and not die trying…

2007-12-11T06:17:00Z

In the blog Franchu's Lair, Franchu has a great write-up on using openkapow, Yahoo Pipes, and Google Maps to create a mashup to display over a map of Spain the status of the dams and see where we have water and where we are not doing that well.

Check out his blog entry. I've embedded the mashup below:

Jobs at Kapow!

2007-11-28T19:57:00Z

Kapow Technologies is seeking to fill two key engineering positions in Austin, Texas - Java Software Engineer and Senior Java Software Engineer. You will be working with a small agile team to develop new SaaS solutions and the next version of openkapow.

To apply, please email a cover letter and resume to jobs@kapowtech.com. Reference the position in the subject line. We are an equal opportunity employer.

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Java Engineer

Kapow Technologies is at the forefront of the emerging Mashup space. With a proven set of data extraction and manipulation solutions that enable anyone to easily connect, collect, and mashup anything on the web, Kapow's leadership is unparalleled.

Kapow's Austin, Texas division is seeking a Java Software Engineer to help us build a new set of Software-as-a-Service offerings based on Kapow's proven enterprise solution. As a member of a small agile team, you will help drive the design and implementation of various solutions including our freely available openkapow.com.

Responsibilities:

Work closely with the Chief Architect and Senior Java Engineer to design and implement SaaS and Community offerings.
Work with the core product team in Copenhagen, Denmark to drive future core product requirements.
Be an active participant in the Mashup community.

Requirements:

3+ year's professional experience in developing complete Java web applications.
Experience with web application frameworks (Struts, Spring, J2EE).
Experience with data modeling, databases, and persistence frameworks (SQL, Hibernate).
Frontend development experience with JSP, HTML, CSS, AJAX.
Good development habits, process, and intuition.
Ability to work in a small, agile and collaborative team environment.

Desired Skills/Experience:

Experience building and supporting hosted applications a plus.
Eagerness to learn new technologies and languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, and mashup platforms.
Positive attitude.
Must love Robots.
Sense of humor.

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Senior Java Engineer

Kapow's Austin, Texas division is seeking a Senior Java Software Engineer to help us build a new set of Software-as-a-Service offerings based on Kapow's proven enterprise solution. As a member of a small agile team, you will help drive the design and implementation of various solutions including our freely available openkapow.com.

Responsibilities:

Work closely with the Chief Architect to design and implement SaaS and Community offerings.
Work with the core product team in Copenhagen, Denmark to drive future core product requirements.
Be an active participant in the Mashup community.

Requirements:

6+ year's professional experience in developing complete Java web applications.
Experience with web application frameworks (Struts, Spring, J2EE).
Experience with data modeling, databases, and persistence frameworks (SQL, Hibernate).
Frontend development experience with JSP, HTML, CSS, AJAX.
Good development habits, process, and intuition.
Ability to work in a small, agile and collaborative team environment.

Desired Skills/Experience:

Experience building and supporting hosted applications a plus.
Eagerness to learn new technologies and languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, and mashup platforms.
Positive attitude.
Must love Robots.
Sense of humor.

Webinar: Designing High Performance Robots - View Online!

2007-11-13T00:31:00Z

Kapow presented it's 4th installment of our Enterprise Mashups webinar series. This webinar focuses on techniques and approaches to writing efficient, high-performance Robots that automate the collection of web-based content.

You can view this webinar online here.

If you would like to have a better understanding of key concepts behind how to programmatically collect data from unstructured web data sources, please take the time to view this webinar.

You will learn tips and tricks from Kapow experts in the following areas:
• How to write robots to maximize runtime performance
• Common problems encountered in robot design and how to avoid them
• Building flexible robots that can handle website changes

Enjoy!

Mashup Camp - US$3000 in Prizes! (Dublin Nov. 10-12)

2007-10-30T14:06:00Z

Mashup Camp is coming up in a few weeks in Dublin and Kapow will be there to educate and enlighten on using our technology and openkapow in building mashups. There is a cool competition sponsored by IBM for building the best mashup with a special category for using openkapow.

Read more about Mashup Camp and we hope to see you there!

The value is in the data from the long-tail of the web

2007-09-21T22:50:00Z

Today there is an explosion of data around us, not only inside our enterprise, but even more so on blogs, communities, service providers, etc, on the web.

openkapow gives access to all those data in an unheard off easy way, basically any data as you see them in your web browser is now available for you right at your fingertip.

So which data are most valuable?

I basically classify data into two groups:

Standard data, data that anyone can get access to if they want to, data from the big web sites
Specialized “niche” data, data from all the 50 million smaller sites on the web, i.e. the long tail of the web

Data from the long tail of web sites are typically unstructured and before openkapow, very difficult to access in an easy automated way.

Standard data is a basic necessity for mashups. For example looking at a classic mashup like housingmaps, which is a very cool mashup between maps from Google Maps and Craigslist, everyone can get to these data, and thus the mashup gives broad value to many people.

Niche data on the other hand could dramatically add more value to housingmaps for the right group of people. For example school boundaries and school ratings would add a lot of value to families with kids, fault line data would add a lot of value to people buying rather than renting, and so on.

With this in mind you will realize that openkapow is key to create mashups with individualized and higher value, something mashups is all about.

Try it out yourself.

RoboMaker Development Lead Needed

2007-09-03T07:35:00Z

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead

We couldn’t have said it any better. We know what it’s like to “punch in” and “punch out” of a job. We’ve all been there and we prefer the type of career where you’re not peeking at your watch to see when it’s quitting time. We are building a smart, fun and collaborative team that’s wild about adventure travel and interested in creating a business with real staying power. We share a love of travel and exploration, and our goal is to create a business that will make a real difference in people’s lives and (dare we say it) possibly change the world – one person, one travel experience at a time.

All positions are based out of our headquarters in sunny Altadena, California (just a hop, skip and a jump from Pasadena and Downtown LA), unless noted otherwise. Compensation packages are flexible and based on experience and the right fit.

RoboMaker Development Lead

Our company is currently hiring for its Content Team, a critical part of our business. The position of RoboMaker Development Lead will be responsible for overseeing a team of bot makers who will ultimately deploy thousands of bots. We have already established a core bot creation team which works with our systems fully integrated deployment and Q+A strategy. Along with designing and fixing damaged bots, the right candidate will be trained to ensure a high level of architectural design is followed by his team. Additional responsibilities include identifying and ensuring the accuracy of our pulled partners’ operator data, regularly communicating between partners and internal departments to ensure information is correct, and troubleshooting whenever necessary. A successful candidate will contain a background in object oriented programming, a strong ability to solve complex technical problems and experience working around large amounts of data.

Prior experience with Kapow RoboMaker is not required. We are searching for an applicant who has the capacity to be a leader within this field. From the beginning we will be training the selected candidate to study as an independent apprentice and with Kapow Technologies to attain the highest level of technical mastery within this niche.

Please contact partner1career@kapowtech.com

Get to the data as you know them

2007-04-03T00:38:00Z

The most important foundation for mashups is combining multiple data sources into new views and create added value and insight into the data, wheter those data are location data, financial data, information data, etc.

How do most people know their data today. Not as tables in a database, or data behind API’s interfaces like SOAP and REST, no!, we know them from our web browser. The data we ind our mind want to mash up are the data we see while working with our favorite web applications or web sites.

Those are the data we think about and those are the data our brain digest and transform into those new genious ideas for mashups.

Openkapow gives you exactly this. Access to the data as you know them. Here and now, self service.

I encourage you to download RoboMaker, read the tutorals, and get access to the data as you know them, from your web browser.

Access the data in standard API’s like REST, ATOM and RSS, easily consumable by any mashup builder, that being Yahoo Pipes, Google Gadgets, Teqlo, IBM QedWiki, Ruby on Rails, or just plain Excel.

Best of luck with it

Is "Web Scraping" robust toward site changes?

2007-02-24T18:24:00Z

The #1 question that comes up with people, when they first hear about using "Web Scraping" technology to turn web sites into API's, is Robustness, but in reality it is almost a non-issue.

Let me explain why. The technology on openkapow, is the same as Kapow Technologies has been selling to more than 200 customers worldwide, which together must have deployed at least one hundred thousand robots. Even though this is the first question asked by each and every customer, it never has been raised again by any of them when they start using the product, since in reality it is a non-issue.

There are several reasons for this:

Web sites in reality changes layout very rarely, in average I would say once per year.
The fully customizable "tag finder" technology used in openkapow, which locate objects in the DOM tree based on smart relative pattern matching, in reality only breaks, when a web site has a major change of layout and functionality, something very rare.
In the rare event that something changes that cause a robot to break, the "debug path" in the error report from running a robot, directly lead to the broken place in the robot, thus locating and fixing a bug, most often is a 2 minute job.

openkapow web scraping is using the visual interface of a website, which is often a lot easier to access and understand than even a real API. After having used openkapow for a while, users realize this means that the ability to create a perfect fit API quickly with openkapow, most often is easier even for websites that publish other real API's, since those API's likely will not fit perfectly to the desired API signature and resultset.

It takes a few hours to learn how to use RoboMaker, and running over the tutorials is a must, but it's worth it.

Try it out!!!

New style on openkapow.com

2007-02-20T11:09:00Z

We are working on a redesign of the whole openkapow site. As you can see on openkapow.com we have started on the home page, and soon we will continue with the rest of the site. This is done as a response to all the input we have gotten about the site and we hope that the new design will make it easier to quickly get an overview of what openkapow does and make it easier to find the information that you are interested in. Please let us know what you think about it!

Btw, if you are missing "My Robots" from the home page then do not worry. That feature will soon be back on the robots page.

openkapow and Yahoo Pipes

2007-02-14T21:44:00Z

The combination of openkapow and Yahoo Pipes can be extremely powerful. Just look at this robot Northcap portfolio news which extracts press releases for all of Northcap Partners portfolio companies in one robot. If you take the RSS feed created by this robot and feed it into Yahoo pipes and ask for "sort by date" then suddenly you have a new feed with all press releases from 9 different companies sorted by date. Here is the result on Yahoo Pipes NorthCap Partners portfolio news sorted by date

RoboMaker 6.2 no longer in beta

2007-01-25T14:13:00Z

RoboMaker 6.2 is now available on the download page (instead of as before RoboMaker 6.2 beta 1), and we recommend that all users upgrade to the new version. There have been several improvements in the javascript support, bugfixes, usability improvements etc.One of the changes are that there now are direct access to community resources as quick start guid and forum from within RoboMaker. Quite a few improvements and bug fixes are based on the input we got from you all in the forums, so thank you for that!

openkapow launched at the Gartner AIWS Summit

2006-12-04T21:45:00Z

Today we launched openkapow at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Orlando, Florida.

The main message I brought back from the keynotes this morning (excellent by the way) was "interoperability", defined by getting systems not meant to work together, to work together.

Thinking about this for a second one quickly realize this is exactly what openkapow is all about, being able to take any web based content and/or logic and turn it into mashups. openkapow makes the whole internet "interoperable". openkapow is allowing the "long tail" of the Web to be mashed-up.

One example of this is a customer of Kapow Technologies, www.momondo.com

Momondo work a lot like Kayak, where you can quickly find the best airfare for your next travel. When hitting "search" on Monmondo, it sends away hundreds of robots that in real-time find the best deal for you, giving you tremendous time savings (and hopefully price savings as well).

After listening a lot to Web 2.0, mashups, etc, in the keynotes I walked down to the exhibition floor where we have a booth. Then I suddenly realized that Kapow Technologies is the only vendor promoting the term "mashup" with our Kapow Mashup Server. The effect was instant, never have I seen such a crowded booth.

For sure a very interesting day, with a strong indication that openkapow is filling a huge need out there.