Welcome to openkapow.com – the center for Mashup development on the web.  You are certain to have many questions regarding robots, Mashups and how they can help you in your day to day life and business.  We have tried to answer the most common questions below and provide you with information on where to find further help beyond what we cover directly here.  Openkapow.com is a community experience and we hope you take advantage of the wealth of knowledge our members share through our blogs, forums, demos and tutorials.  We look forward to seeing you around openkpow.com. 

Who are Kapow Technologies?

Kapow Technologies provides software that enables companies to deploy portals and content-intensive applications such as enterprise mashups at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods. Because of our unique, patented approach, Kapow Technologies is one of the fastest-growing software firms in the world, with more than 200 customers worldwide.

What is a robot?

openkapow's cutting edge technology breaks down the barriers and allows everything browsable
to be mashed up into new services or RSS feeds - we call them robots.

What is a Mashup?

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript.

What is a REST Service?

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems like the world wide web. The term originated in a 200 doctoral dissertation about the web written by Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the HTTP protocol specification, and has quickly passed into widespread use in the networking community.

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS is today one of the most important standards used to spread information on the internet. Users can easily access the RSS feeds directly in their browser, email program or via feed reader programs. By using openkapow RSS robots anyone can create an RSS feed from almost any online source, be it a public website or a site that requires login to access the data. This enables developers to make an RSS feed from web sites that does not today offer an RSS feed, or maybe does not offer exactly the RSS feed that is needed. By using input parameters to the openkapow robot the content of the RSS feed can be very dynamic, the robot can search any site and create an unique RSS feed from the search results for example. So openkapow RSS robots is the connector between any online source of information and the end consumer of that information.

What is a Clip?

An openkapow Web Clip gives a developer the power to remix or change  a site, or maybe just pick the specific parts of the site that are interesting. The clip can then easily be integrated in any site simply by calling a URL to the Clip robot. This enables easy integration between web sites and a real reuse of the user interface. The robot can take parts from only a single page of a web site, or a whole functional flow spanning many pages, as well as requiring login and other interaction with the underlying site. It is even possible to create a whole portal by taking bits and peices from other pages and repackaging it, only using clip robots and a simple HTML Frame setup.

Where can I lean to build robots?

There is a section of openkapow.com dedicated to teaching you the basics of building robots and offers advice on where to learn about more advanced features also. 

Link to create robots page here…

Where can I get more help?

Openkapow.com is a community with many active and experienced users willing to share they experiences and knowledge of using RoboMaker to build robots and Mashups.  We encourage you to explore the forums where you can find discussions on advanced techniques and ideas, technical support and general discussions on robots, Mashups and web2.0.