Data Extraction Services - A Helpful Hand For Large Organization

The data extraction is the way to extract and to structure data from not structured and semi-structured electronic documents, as found on the web and in various data warehouses. Data extraction is extremely useful for the huge organizations which deal with considerable amounts of data, daily, which must be transformed into significant information and be stored for the use this later on.

Your company with tons of data but it is difficult to control and convert the data into useful information. Without right information at the right time and based on half of accurate information, decision makers with a company waste time by making wrong strategic decisions. In high competing world of businesses, the essential statistics such as information customer, the operational figures of the competitor and the sales figures inter-members play a big role in the manufacture of the strategic decisions. It can help you to take strategic business decisions that can shape your business' goals..

Outsourcing companies provide custom made services to the client's requirements. A few of the areas where it can be used to generate better sales leads, extract and harvest product pricing data, capture financial data, acquire real estate data, conduct market research , survey and analysis, conduct product research and analysis and duplicate an online database..

The different types of Data Extraction Services:

    Database Extraction:
    Reorganized data from multiple databases such as statistics about competitor's products, pricing and latest offers and customer opinion and reviews can be extracted and stored as per the requirement of company.
    Web Data Extraction:
    Web Data Extraction is also known as data Extraction which is usually referred to the practice of extract or reading text data from a targeted website.

Businesses have now realized about the huge benefits they can get by outsourcing their services. Then outsourcing is profitable option for business. Since all projects are custom based to suit the exact needs of the customer, huge savings in terms of time, money and infrastructure are among the many advantages that outsourcing brings.

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Extraction Services:

    Improved technology scalability
    Skilled and qualified technical staff who are proficient in English
    Advanced infrastructure resources
    Quick turnaround time
    Cost-effective prices
    Secure Network systems to ensure data safety
    Increased market coverage

By outsourcing, you can definitely increase your competitive advantages. Outsourcing of services helps businesses to manage their data effectively, which in turn would enable them to experience an increase in profits.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction-Services---A-Helpful-Hand-For-Large-Organization&id=2477589

Collecting Data With Web Scrapers

There is a large amount of data available only through websites. However, as many people have found out, trying to copy data into a usable database or spreadsheet directly out of a website can be a tiring process. Data entry from internet sources can quickly become cost prohibitive as the required hours add up. Clearly, an automated method for collating information from HTML-based sites can offer huge management cost savings.

Web scrapers are programs that are able to aggregate information from the internet. They are capable of navigating the web, assessing the contents of a site, and then pulling data points and placing them into a structured, working database or spreadsheet. Many companies and services will use programs to web scrape, such as comparing prices, performing online research, or tracking changes to online content.

Let's take a look at how web scrapers can aid data collection and management for a variety of purposes.

Improving On Manual Entry Methods

Using a computer's copy and paste function or simply typing text from a site is extremely inefficient and costly. Web scrapers are able to navigate through a series of websites, make decisions on what is important data, and then copy the info into a structured database, spreadsheet, or other program. Software packages include the ability to record macros by having a user perform a routine once and then have the computer remember and automate those actions. Every user can effectively act as their own programmer to expand the capabilities to process websites. These applications can also interface with databases in order to automatically manage information as it is pulled from a website.

Aggregating Information

There are a number of instances where material stored in websites can be manipulated and stored. For example, a clothing company that is looking to bring their line of apparel to retailers can go online for the contact information of retailers in their area and then present that information to sales personnel to generate leads. Many businesses can perform market research on prices and product availability by analyzing online catalogues.

Data Management

Managing figures and numbers is best done through spreadsheets and databases; however, information on a website formatted with HTML is not readily accessible for such purposes. While websites are excellent for displaying facts and figures, they fall short when they need to be analyzed, sorted, or otherwise manipulated. Ultimately, web scrapers are able to take the output that is intended for display to a person and change it to numbers that can be used by a computer. Furthermore, by automating this process with software applications and macros, entry costs are severely reduced.

This type of data management is also effective at merging different information sources. If a company were to purchase research or statistical information, it could be scraped in order to format the information into a database. This is also highly effective at taking a legacy system's contents and incorporating them into today's systems.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Collecting-Data-With-Web-Scrapers&id=4223877

Data Mining And Importance to Achieve Competitive Edge in Business

What is data mining? And why it is so much importance in business? These are simple yet complicated questions to be answered, below is brief information to help understanding data and web mining services.

Mining of data in general terms can be elaborated as retrieving useful information or knowledge for further process of analyzing from various perspectives and summarizing in valuable information to be used for increasing revenue, cut cost, to gather competitive information on business or product. And data abstraction finds a great importance in business world as it help business to harness the power of accurate information thus providing competitive edge in business. May business firms and companies have their own warehouse to help them collect, organize and mine information such as transactional data, purchase data etc.

But to have a mining services and warehouse at premises is not affordable and not very cost effective to solution for reliable information solutions. But as if taking out of information is the need for every business now days. Many companies are providing accurate and effective data and web data mining solutions at reasonable price.

Outsourcing information abstraction services are offered at affordable rates and it is available for wide range of data mine solutions:

• taking out business data
• service to gather data sets
• digging information of datasets
• Website data mining
• stock market information
• Statistical information
• Information classification
• Information regression
• Structured data analysis
• Online mining of data to gather product details
• to gather prices
• to gather product specifications
• to gather images

Outsource web mining solutions and data gathering solutions has been effective in terms of cost cutting, increasing productivity at affordable rates. Benefits of data mining services include:

• clear customer, service or product understanding
• less or minimal marketing cost
• exact information on sales, transactions
• detection of beneficial patterns
• minimizing risk and increased ROI
• new market detection
• Understanding clear business problems and goals

Accurate data mining solutions could prove to be an effective way to cut down cost by concentrating on right place.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-And-Importance-to-Achieve-Competitive-Edge-in-Business&id=5771888

Data Mining As a Process

The data mining process is also known as knowledge discovery. It can be defined as the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and then summarizing the data into useful information in order to improve the revenue and cut the costs. The process enables categorization of data and the summary of the relationships is identified. When viewed in technical terms, the process can be defined as finding correlations or patterns in large relational databases. In this article, we look at how data mining works its innovations, the needed technological infrastructures and the tools such as phone validation.

Data mining is a relatively new term used in the data collection field. The process is very old but has evolved over the time. Companies have been able to use computers to shift over the large amounts of data for many years. The process has been used widely by the marketing firms in conducting market research. Through analysis, it is possible to define the regularity of customers shopping. How the items are bought. It is also possible to collect information needed for the establishment of revenue increase platform. Nowadays, what aides the process is the affordable and easy disk storage, computer processing power and applications developed.

Data extraction is commonly used by the companies that are after maintaining a stronger customer focus no matter where they are engaged. Most companies are engaged in retail, marketing, finance or communication. Through this process, it is possible to determine the different relationships between the varying factors. The varying factors include staffing, product positioning, pricing, social demographics, and market competition.

A data-mining program can be used. It is important note that the data mining applications vary in types. Some of the types include machine learning, statistical, and neural networks. The program is interested in any of the following four types of relationships: clusters (in this case the data is grouped in relation to the consumer preferences or logical relationships), classes (in this the data is stored and finds its use in the location of data in the per-determined groups), sequential patterns (in this case the data is used to estimate the behavioral patterns and patterns), and associations (data is used to identify associations).

In knowledge discovery, there are different levels of data analysis and they include genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, nearest neighbor method, data visualization, decision trees, and rule induction. The level of analysis used depends on the data that is visualized and the output needed.

Nowadays, data extraction programs are readily available in different sizes from PC platforms, mainframe, and client/server. In the enterprise-wide uses, size ranges from the 10 GB to more than 11 TB. It is important to note that two crucial technological drivers are needed and are query complexity and, database size. When more data is needed to be processed and maintained, then a more powerful system is needed that can handle complex and greater queries.

With the emergence of professional data mining companies, the costs associated with process such as web data extraction, web scraping, web crawling and web data mining have greatly being made affordable.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-As-a-Process&id=7181033

Benefits of Predictive Analytics and Data Mining Services

Predictive Analytics is the process of dealing with variety of data and apply various mathematical formulas to discover the best decision for a given situation. Predictive analytics gives your company a competitive edge and can be used to improve ROI substantially. It is the decision science that removes guesswork out of the decision-making process and applies proven scientific guidelines to find right solution in the shortest time possible.

Predictive analytics can be helpful in answering questions like:

    Who are most likely to respond to your offer?
    Who are most likely to ignore?
    Who are most likely to discontinue your service?
    How much a consumer will spend on your product?
    Which transaction is a fraud?
    Which insurance claim is a fraudulent?
    What resource should I dedicate at a given time?

Benefits of Data mining include:

    Better understanding of customer behavior propels better decision
    Profitable customers can be spotted fast and served accordingly
    Generate more business by reaching hidden markets
    Target your Marketing message more effectively
    Helps in minimizing risk and improves ROI.
    Improve profitability by detecting abnormal patterns in sales, claims, transactions etc
    Improved customer service and confidence
    Significant reduction in Direct Marketing expenses

Basic steps of Predictive Analytics are as follows:

    Spot the business problem or goal
    Explore various data sources such as transaction history, user demography, catalog details, etc)
    Extract different data patterns from the above data
    Build a sample model based on data & problem
    Classify data, find valuable factors, generate new variables
    Construct a Predictive model using sample
    Validate and Deploy this Model

Standard techniques used for it are:

    Decision Tree
    Multi-purpose Scaling
    Linear Regressions
    Logistic Regressions
    Factor Analytics
    Genetic Algorithms
    Cluster Analytics
    Product Association



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Benefits-of-Predictive-Analytics-and-Data-Mining-Services&id=4766989

Unleash the Hidden Potential of Your Business Data With Data Mining and Extraction Services

Every business, small or large, is continuously amassing data about customers, employees and nearly every process in their business cycle. Although all management staff utilize data collected from their business as a basis for decision making in areas such as marketing, forecasting, planning and trouble-shooting, very often they are just barely scratching the surface. Manual data analysis is time-consuming and error-prone, and its limited functions result in the overlooking of valuable information that improve bottom-lines. Often, the sheer quantity of data prevents accurate and useful analysis by those without the necessary technology and experience. It is an unfortunate reality that much of this data goes to waste and companies often never realize that a valuable resource is being left untapped.

Automated data mining services allow your company to tap into the latent potential of large volumes of raw data and convert it into information that can be used in decision-making. While the use of the latest software makes data mining and data extraction fast and affordable, experienced professional data analysts are a key part of the data mining services offered by our company. Making the most of your data involves more than automatically generated reports from statistical software. It takes analysis and interpretation skills that can only be performed by experienced data analysis experts to ensure that your business databases are translated into information that you can easily comprehend and use in almost every aspect of your business.

Who Can Benefit From Data Mining Services?

If you are wondering what types of companies can benefit from data extraction services, the answer is virtually every type of business. This includes organizations dealing in customer service, sales and marketing, financial products, research and insurance.

How is Raw Data Converted to Useful Information?

There are several steps in data mining and extraction, but the most important thing for you as a business owner is to be assured that, throughout the process, the confidentiality of your data is our primary concern. Upon receiving your data, it is converted into the necessary format so that it can be entered into a data warehouse system. Next, it is compiled into a database, which is then sifted through by data mining experts to identify relevant data. Our trained and experienced staff then scan and analyze your data using a variety of methods to identify association or relationships between variables; clusters and classes, to identify correlations and groups within your data; and patterns, which allow trends to be identified and predictions to be made. Finally, the results are compiled in the form of written reports, visual data and spreadsheets, according to the needs of your business.

Our team of data mining, extraction and analyses experts have already helped a great number of businesses to tap into the potential of their raw data, with our speedy, cost-efficient and confidential services. Contact us today for more information on how our data mining and extraction services can help your business.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Unleash-the-Hidden-Potential-of-Your-Business-Data-With-Data-Mining-and-Extraction-Services&id=4642076

Web Data Extraction

The Internet as we know today is a repository of information that can be accessed across geographical societies. In just over two decades, the Web has moved from a university curiosity to a fundamental research, marketing and communications vehicle that impinges upon the everyday life of most people in all over the world. It is accessed by over 16% of the population of the world spanning over 233 countries.

As the amount of information on the Web grows, that information becomes ever harder to keep track of and use. Compounding the matter is this information is spread over billions of Web pages, each with its own independent structure and format. So how do you find the information you're looking for in a useful format - and do it quickly and easily without breaking the bank?

Search Isn't Enough

Search engines are a big help, but they can do only part of the work, and they are hard-pressed to keep up with daily changes. For all the power of Google and its kin, all that search engines can do is locate information and point to it. They go only two or three levels deep into a Web site to find information and then return URLs. Search Engines cannot retrieve information from deep-web, information that is available only after filling in some sort of registration form and logging, and store it in a desirable format. In order to save the information in a desirable format or a particular application, after using the search engine to locate data, you still have to do the following tasks to capture the information you need:

· Scan the content until you find the information.

· Mark the information (usually by highlighting with a mouse).

· Switch to another application (such as a spreadsheet, database or word processor).

· Paste the information into that application.

Its not all copy and paste

Consider the scenario of a company is looking to build up an email marketing list of over 100,000 thousand names and email addresses from a public group. It will take up over 28 man-hours if the person manages to copy and paste the Name and Email in 1 second, translating to over $500 in wages only, not to mention the other costs associated with it. Time involved in copying a record is directly proportion to the number of fields of data that has to copy/pasted.

Is there any Alternative to copy-paste?

A better solution, especially for companies that are aiming to exploit a broad swath of data about markets or competitors available on the Internet, lies with usage of custom Web harvesting software and tools.

Web harvesting software automatically extracts information from the Web and picks up where search engines leave off, doing the work the search engine can't. Extraction tools automate the reading, the copying and pasting necessary to collect information for further use. The software mimics the human interaction with the website and gathers data in a manner as if the website is being browsed. Web Harvesting software only navigate the website to locate, filter and copy the required data at much higher speeds that is humanly possible. Advanced software even able to browse the website and gather data silently without leaving the footprints of access.

The next article of this series will give more details about how such softwares and uncover some myths on web harvesting.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction&id=575212

Basics of Online Web Research, Web Mining & Data Extraction Services

The evolution of the World Wide Web and Search engines has brought the abundant and ever growing pile of data and information on our finger tips. It has now become a popular and important resource for doing information research and analysis.

Today, Web research services are becoming more and more complicated. It involves various factors such as business intelligence and web interaction to deliver desired results.

Web Researchers can retrieve web data using search engines (keyword queries) or browsing specific web resources. However, these methods are not effective. Keyword search gives a large chunk of irrelevant data. Since each webpage contains several outbound links it is difficult to extract data by browsing too.

Web mining is classified into web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. Content mining focuses on the search and retrieval of information from web. Usage mining extract and analyzes user behavior. Structure mining deals with the structure of hyperlinks.

Web mining services can be divided into three subtasks:

Information Retrieval (IR): The purpose of this subtask is to automatically find all relevant information and filter out irrelevant ones. It uses various Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and other resources to find the required information.

Generalization: The goal of this subtask is to explore users' interest using data extraction methods such as clustering and association rules. Since web data are dynamic and inaccurate, it is difficult to apply traditional data mining techniques directly on the raw data.

Data Validation (DV): It tries to uncover knowledge from the data provided by former tasks. Researcher can test various models, simulate them and finally validate given web information for consistency.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Basics-of-Online-Web-Research,-Web-Mining-and-Data-Extraction-Services&id=4511101

Data Entry Services Are Meant To Ease Your Workload

Data entry services provided by the firms are growing very rapidly with a huge demand. It may sound that data entry is a simple task to do but it is not so simple and plays an important role in running a successful business. We all know that data and information related to any company is very crucial for them. Data are priceless for any firm, no-matter they are small or big. The companies provide you highly customized business solutions depending on your requirement.

The companies also provide various range of services for all kinds of textual data capturing from printed matter, manuscripts, and even web research. Very advanced technologies are used to convert large quantities of paper work and image based task to electronic data that is usable in database and in the management system. Any kind of data is very essential for an organization whether it is manual or electronic.

There are many companies that provide highly accurate data entry services with complete confidentiality and high level of accuracy. These services are undertaken by banks, retail organizations, medical research facilities, universities, insurance companies, newspapers, large corporate enterprises, direct marketing and database marketing firms, school and trade associations to make their organization a successful and profitable enterprise.

Outsourcing is a business strategy which is highly being used by businesses to take care of the data entry services. In fact, the process of outsourcing has made things simpler for business owners and the businesses are running successfully. The companies that are involved in outsourcing work do provide these services efficiently to those firms who are burdened with heavy workload. If you are running a business of your own and want to manage it properly and run smoothly, then all you need to do is to hire data entry services.

Availing the benefits of outsourcing works in the form of data entry services can prove tremendous for your company. If you outsource your extra burden of work to a company then in such case, you can make growth plans and strategies for your organization. The companies will console you about the high quality of services and the accuracy they provide for the business that needs data to be extracted from any source.

Data entry services is an information technology enabled services that provides you wide range of services. The professionals working for you are trained and extremely talented who are ready to provide you high end services with full dedication. Since, you are spending money for this, so you must take the best services and choose those companies who can cater to your needs according to you.

Data entry services is not a complex application but it's extremely time taking and this the main reason for a company that hires this service so that they can save their time and money. Every business has many more things to consider for their growth prospects and for this reason they don't want to waste their time and money in such stuffs. The professionals are especially trained according to the requirement of the work depending on how critical the work is. Hiring for this service is definitely a wise decision for your business prospects. These types of services will surely help you to make big profits in the business. The strategy and techniques applied to any business is the key to success.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-Are-Meant-To-Ease-Your-Workload&id=538877

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Digging Up Dollars With Data Mining - An Executive's Guide

Introduction

Traditionally, organizations use data tactically - to manage operations. For a competitive edge, strong organizations use data strategically - to expand the business, to improve profitability, to reduce costs, and to market more effectively. Data mining (DM) creates information assets that an organization can leverage to achieve these strategic objectives.

In this article, we address some of the key questions executives have about data mining. These include:

    What is data mining?
    What can it do for my organization?
    How can my organization get started?

Business Definition of Data Mining

Data mining is a new component in an enterprise's decision support system (DSS) architecture. It complements and interlocks with other DSS capabilities such as query and reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data visualization, and traditional statistical analysis. These other DSS technologies are generally retrospective. They provide reports, tables, and graphs of what happened in the past. A user who knows what she's looking for can answer specific questions like: "How many new accounts were opened in the Midwest region last quarter," "Which stores had the largest change in revenues compared to the same month last year," or "Did we meet our goal of a ten-percent increase in holiday sales?"

We define data mining as "the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data." Data mining differs from the retrospective technologies above because it produces models - models that capture and represent the hidden patterns in the data. With it, a user can discover patterns and build models automatically, without knowing exactly what she's looking for. The models are both descriptive and prospective. They address why things happened and what is likely to happen next. A user can pose "what-if" questions to a data-mining model that can not be queried directly from the database or warehouse. Examples include: "What is the expected lifetime value of every customer account," "Which customers are likely to open a money market account," or "Will this customer cancel our service if we introduce fees?"

The information technologies associated with DM are neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and rule induction. It is outside the scope of this article to elaborate on all of these technologies. Instead, we will focus on business needs and how data mining solutions for these needs can translate into dollars.

Mapping Business Needs to Solutions and Profits

What can data mining do for your organization? In the introduction, we described several strategic opportunities for an organization to use data for advantage: business expansion, profitability, cost reduction, and sales and marketing. Let's consider these opportunities very concretely through several examples where companies successfully applied DM.

Expanding your business: Keystone Financial of Williamsport, PA, wanted to expand their customer base and attract new accounts through a LoanCheck offer. To initiate a loan, a recipient just had to go to a Keystone branch and cash the LoanCheck. Keystone introduced the $5000 LoanCheck by mailing a promotion to existing customers.

The Keystone database tracks about 300 characteristics for each customer. These characteristics include whether the person had already opened loans in the past two years, the number of active credit cards, the balance levels on those cards, and finally whether or not they responded to the $5000 LoanCheck offer. Keystone used data mining to sift through the 300 customer characteristics, find the most significant ones, and build a model of response to the LoanCheck offer. Then, they applied the model to a list of 400,000 prospects obtained from a credit bureau.

By selectively mailing to the best-rated prospects determined by the DM model, Keystone generated $1.6M in additional net income from 12,000 new customers.

Reducing costs: Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield is New York State's largest health insurer. To compete with other healthcare companies, Empire must provide quality service and minimize costs. Attacking costs in the form of fraud and abuse is a cornerstone of Empire's strategy, and it requires considerable investigative skill as well as sophisticated information technology.

The latter includes a data mining application that profiles each physician in the Empire network based on patient claim records in their database. From the profile, the application detects subtle deviations in physician behavior relative to her/his peer group. These deviations are reported to fraud investigators as a "suspicion index." A physician who performs a high number of procedures per visit, charges 40% more per patient, or sees many patients on the weekend would be flagged immediately from the suspicion index score.

What has this DM effort returned to Empire? In the first three years, they realized fraud-and-abuse savings of $29M, $36M, and $39M respectively.

Improving sales effectiveness and profitability: Pharmaceutical sales representatives have a broad assortment of tools for promoting products to physicians. These tools include clinical literature, product samples, dinner meetings, teleconferences, golf outings, and more. Knowing which promotions will be most effective with which doctors is extremely valuable since wrong decisions can cost the company hundreds of dollars for the sales call and even more in lost revenue.

The reps for a large pharmaceutical company collectively make tens of thousands of sales calls. One drug maker linked six months of promotional activity with corresponding sales figures in a database, which they then used to build a predictive model for each doctor. The data-mining models revealed, for instance, that among six different promotional alternatives, only two had a significant impact on the prescribing behavior of physicians. Using all the knowledge embedded in the data-mining models, the promotional mix for each doctor was customized to maximize ROI.

Although this new program was rolled out just recently, early responses indicate that the drug maker will exceed the $1.4M sales increase originally projected. Given that this increase is generated with no new promotional spending, profits are expected to increase by a similar amount.

Looking back at this set of examples, we must ask, "Why was data mining necessary?" For Keystone, response to the loan offer did not exist in the new credit bureau database of 400,000 potential customers. The model predicted the response given the other available customer characteristics. For Empire, the suspicion index quantified the differences between physician practices and peer (model) behavior. Appropriate physician behavior was a multi-variable aggregate produced by data mining - once again, not available in the database. For the drug maker, the promotion and sales databases contained the historical record of activity. An automated data mining method was necessary to model each doctor and determine the best combination of promotions to increase future sales.

Getting Started

In each case presented above, data mining yielded significant benefits to the business. Some were top-line results that increased revenues or expanded the customer base. Others were bottom-line improvements resulting from cost-savings and enhanced productivity. The natural next question is, "How can my organization get started and begin to realize the competitive advantages of DM?"

In our experience, pilot projects are the most successful vehicles for introducing data mining. A pilot project is a short, well-planned effort to bring DM into an organization. Good pilot projects focus on one very specific business need, and they involve business users up front and throughout the project. The duration of a typical pilot project is one to three months, and it generally requires 4 to 10 people part-time.

The role of the executive in such pilot projects is two-pronged. At the outset, the executive participates in setting the strategic goals and objectives for the project. During the project and prior to roll out, the executive takes part by supervising the measurement and evaluation of results. Lack of executive sponsorship and failure to involve business users are two primary reasons DM initiatives stall or fall short.

In reading this article, perhaps you've developed a vision and want to proceed - to address a pressing business problem by sponsoring a data mining pilot project. Twisting the old adage, we say "just because you should doesn't mean you can." Be aware that a capability assessment needs to be an integral component of a DM pilot project. The assessment takes a critical look at data and data access, personnel and their skills, equipment, and software. Organizations typically underestimate the impact of data mining (and information technology in general) on their people, their processes, and their corporate culture. The pilot project provides a relatively high-reward, low-cost, and low-risk opportunity to quantify the potential impact of DM.

Another stumbling block for an organization is deciding to defer any data mining activity until a data warehouse is built. Our experience indicates that, oftentimes, DM could and should come first. The purpose of the data warehouse is to provide users the opportunity to study customer and market behavior both retrospectively and prospectively. A data mining pilot project can provide important insight into the fields and aggregates that need to be designed into the warehouse to make it really valuable. Further, the cost savings or revenue generation provided by DM can provide bootstrap funding for a data warehouse or related initiatives.

Recapping, in this article we addressed the key questions executives have about data mining - what it is, what the benefits are, and how to get started. Armed with this knowledge, begin with a pilot project. From there, you can continue building the data mining capability in your organization; to expand your business, improve profitability, reduce costs, and market your products more effectively.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Digging-Up-Dollars-With-Data-Mining---An-Executives-Guide&id=6052872

Seamless Acquires MenuPages (But Grub Street Is Staying Put)

Today New York Media, which acquired MenuPages in 2008, is announcing that it has sold the comprehensive menu- and restaurant-listing brand to Seamless, owners of the site from which you've probably ordered delivery before. As you know, New York Media also owns Grub Street, but we're not going anywhere. In fact, as far as Grub Street is concerned, things around here won't seem all that different — we'll continue to give you breaking food and restaurant news from all of our Grub Street cities, though we will now do so missing our colleagues from our sister site. For more information on the deal, check out the full press release straight ahead.

    New York, NY - September 26, 2011 - Seamless, the nation’s leading digital service for ordering delivery and takeout food from thousands of top restaurants in the US and UK today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MenuPages from New York Media LLC. MenuPages is the most comprehensive provider of continuously updated menu content available via mobile and online platforms, including a database of 35,000 menus and more than 175,000 user‐generated restaurant reviews. The acquisition furthers Seamless’ clear leadership standing as the most trusted source for local restaurant information and food ordering in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas by expanding on its already robust offering of restaurant menus and user recommendations. Together, Seamless and MenuPages will provide a full‐service, closed‐loop experience for consumers looking to discover, research and order from local restaurants.

    “For customers and restaurant partners, a Seamless and MenuPages union makes perfect sense. We’ll offer the most relevant local neighborhood content and restaurant data, the best mobile platform for food delivery and menu browsing, and the largest and most reliable source of customer orders for restaurant owners. With 40,000 of the most accurate menus available via mobile apps and online, Seamless is definitively the most trustworthy source for hungry diners,” said Jonathan Zabusky, Chief Executive Officer of Seamless. “This transaction is a natural evolution of a strategic partnership between Seamless and MenuPages that has been very successful over the last several years.”

    “MenuPages, which we have owned since 2008, has been a great investment for New York Media. We are thrilled to have found a new home for the site in Seamless, that will be able to capitalize more fully on all that MenuPages offers,” said Anup Bagaria, Chief Executive Officer of New York Media. “Following the sale we will continue our focus on and expansion of our core online verticals including Vulture (entertainment), The Cut (fashion) and Daily Intel (news and politics). In addition, New York Media will continue to operate its national network of food blogs, Grub Street, which will continue its content partnership with MenuPages that has been in place since 2009.”

    The acquisition will also enable Seamless to further cultivate the deep and long standing relationships it already has with its restaurant partners by connecting them to even stronger platform capabilities— from content, to visibility and reach, to web and mobile transactions—and increasingly loyal customers. More than $1.5 billion in food orders to Seamless’ network of independent restaurant partners have been processed since 2004. The combined entity will have a large and rapidly growing mobile presence, with nearly one million downloads of the Seamless and MenuPages mobile applications. The company’s consumer business is growing rapidly across all of its metropolitan markets, with over $400 million in order volume expected through the Seamless network this year.

    By the numbers:
    1. Mobile: Seamless and MenuPages have nearly one million in combined mobile downloads

    2. Web: The brands’ online properties draw more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month (source: comScore)

    3. Menu Content: MenuPages’ proprietary menu transcription and updating tool ensures that the company’s menus have the most accurate and up‐to‐date information

    4. User-Generated Content: More than 200,000 user-generated restaurant reviews from Seamless and MenuPages encompass delivery, takeout and in-restaurant dining experiences

    5. Local Presence: The two brands offer content and ordering capability across 50+ cities worldwide

    The closing of the acquisition is expected to take place by October 3, 2011. After the closing, Seamless will immediately welcome MenuPages employees to the Seamless family, bringing its total employee count to 240. In addition, New York Media will continue to represent MenuPages in the sale of advertising on the menupages.com website.



Source: http://www.grubstreet.com/2011/09/seamless-acquires-menupages.html

Who Can Use The Data Scraping Services?

Scrape data from the software using the website is the proven process of extracting data from the web. The retrieved data for the world according to the needs of all important information such as the Internet can be used in various industries. We offer the best web software to extract data. We have expertise and web data mining, the end view of this knowledge, end screen, emails services, data mining to gain capture of the Internet.

Who can use the data services Scraping?

Scraping and data extraction services for any organization, company, can be used by, or a data company wants a particular sector, the public company in particular, or anything e-mail ID, site information and data available at the name of the network, finding a job or something on the Internet. Most of the time as a marketing company, using data scraping and data mining services to industry for targeted marketing of specific products to reach customers, such as Company X as a restaurant in California City, s-contact Our software information of restaurants in the Californian city, a marketing company to use the data to restore the restaurant, you need to market your product.

MLM and Network Marketing with data extraction and data services at the end of the data used by removing a number of potential customers to find a new customer, customers can contact us by phone, postcard, e - mail marketing, and how they build their extensive network and product and business building for large groups.

We help many companies, for example based on their need for specific data.

Web data extraction

Web pages, text-based Mark-up Language (HTML and XHTML) are made by, and often have a wealth of useful information as text. However, most Web pages are not suitable for human users and automated for ease of use. For this reason, tool boxes that were made to the barns of the web content. A web scraper for extracting data from the API is a web-site. We help a number of APIs that friction data according to your needs everything to help you. We offer quality and affordable application of data mining Web

Data Collection

In general, the information transfer of data between programs, People for the automatic processing by the computer using appropriate structures. This exchange formats and protocols are generally strictly structured, well documented, easy to analyze and opacity to a minimum. Very often, these programs are not readable at all. This is the main factor influencing the data analysis was regularly made scratch to show to an end user separates scratched.

Email Extractor

A tool that helps you a reliable source called an extractor email to the email ID you want to delete. Basically multiple web pages, HTML files, text files or other format, without collecting e-mail ID of contact cases of the dual function of the changes.

Finished screen

Web screen scraping analysis of the data as text instead of a computer screen of the terminal, a source of information to read and practice of collecting data to send.

Data Mining Services

Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from information. Data mining has become an information tools more and more important change in the data. MS Excel, CSV, HTML and many formats, including any format to your needs.

Sitting

A spider is a computer program that systematically, automatically and in an orderly manner to the World Wide Web navigation. Different areas of particular search engine, the speed as a way to use of updated information.


Source: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/who-can-use-the-data-scraping-services