With Kapow, this leading global information provider automated 50+ manual processes and saved over $1 million a year.
Customers
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Challenge
- Aggregate web data from hundreds of public and government sources – including courthouse websites and criminal sex offender registries.
- Increase the scale and frequency of web data extraction and aggregation.
- Automate and streamline the web data extraction process to feed internal systems.
Solution
- Kapow automates the web data access and aggregation.
- Aggregated data is integrated directly into internal systems.
- The company is now able to offer on-demand real-time reporting to key customers.
Results
- Increased the number of data sources to more than 2,000.
- Automated more than 50 manual processes during initial phase.
- Reduced operational costs over $1 million/year by automating web data aggregation.
- Enhanced the quality and timeliness of data they provide to customers.
Attivio, a leader in unified information access, uses Kapow to automate web intelligence and integration with regulatory management systems.
Challenge
- Attivio needed to capture regulatory information from public websites, including content in JavaScript and PDFs, for their end-customer, a major financial institution.
Solution
- With Kapow, web data – including content in JavaScript and PDFs – is automatically fed into Attivio's Regulatory Active Management System, which runs on the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine.
- Attivio built a connector to their software so data output from Kapow robots is automatically transformed into the correct format.
Results
- Web data is collected automatically to support regulatory compliance.
- Based on their success with the financial company project, Attivio will be using Kapow robots to automate web data extraction on 200 additional sites.
Pearson, the world's leading education company, thought it would take 1 to 2 years to mobile-enable their websites. With Kapow, it took 2 weeks.
Challenge
- Pearson's customer base is largely made up of students, who prefer mobile access to information.
- They wanted to revise existing web content to support both large screen and mobile screen formats, but it would take an estimated 1 to 2 years, exceed budget and cause significant disruption to existing websites.
Solution
- Pearson used Kapow to leverage existing web content and underlying e-commerce infrastructure “as is.”
- With Kapow, Pearson created a service and database layer on top of their existing websites, and then built a mobile front-end on top of the new layer.
Results
- Pearson delivered mobile-enabled websites to students in just 2 weeks.
- They saved over 7 months of developer resources.
- “With Kapow web services, we saved 3 months of development time and costs for each mobile project.” Aravind Pochiraju, Chief Architect, Pearson
McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper company in the United States, improved news aggregation throughput by 5X – from 20,000 to 100,000 articles per month.
Challenge
- McClatchy syndicates content to customers like Lexus/Nexus, Factiva and other papers.
- They were looking for a way to streamline news aggregation for syndication.
Solution
- McClatchy uses Kapow to harvest and categorize content from local papers.
- Kapow eliminates hand coding by technical staff and provides self-service tools that news editors can use.
Results
- McClatchy collects over 3,000 news articles daily.
- Throughput has improved 5X, from 20,000 stories per month to 100,000.
ProQuest uses Kapow to automate web intelligence, enabling them to expand their line of university research and Spanish language articles.
Challenge
- ProQuest collects, organizes and publishes university research and Spanish language news articles, which are then repackaged and resold to education customers.
- The number of unstructured sources has grown significantly, and ProQuest needed to harvest research from public and private sources where electronic feeds weren't available.
- They also needed to aggregate and syndicate unstructured university research and Spanish language news articles
- They needed easy integration into existing syndication infrastructure.
Solution
- They use Kapow robots to automate web intelligence. This has enabled them to expand their product line of university research and Spanish language news articles.
- Competitive advantage is gained by independently harvesting the research supply chain.
- Kapow is a core component of their internet content acquisition (ICA) platform.
Results
- As a core element in their internet content acquisition platform, Kapow has had a direct and significant impact on revenues and margins.
- Kapow is an integral part of their value proposition as an information provider.
NewsBank, a content aggregator for small newspapers, reduced their development time for web intelligence scripts from 2.5 hours to 15 minutes.
Challenge
- Replace Perl scripts, which were costly to develop.
- Deliver newsfeeds to customers as RSS feeds.
- Harvest articles covering multiple pages.
- Eliminate “black box” tools. Give developers control of the harvesting process.
- Integrate the solution into their batch scheduler.
Solution
- With Kapow, collected news articles are written to a database and delivered to NewsBank customers as RSS feeds.
- A batch scheduler manages robot runs, which are executed several times a day.
Results
- Reduced development time from 2.5 hours for Perl scripts to 15 minutes for robot “scripting.”
- Increased sourcing. They are now harvesting articles from 300 sites.
- Reduced development and maintenance costs, enabling them to accomplish more with existing staff.
For TDC Online, one of Denmark's top 5 portals, content migration with Kapow went 10X faster and required one quarter of the resources of competing solutions.
Challenge
- TDC Online was based on static web pages. More than 5,000 articles were stored in separate files, making the portal's operations difficult and expensive.
- They decided to transition to a dynamic CMS, but this raised the challenge of migrating content while keeping the portal up and running.
- They considered hiring temp staff to do the transfer manually, but it was too time consuming. They also considered a dedicated integration application, but their site lacked the coherence and structure to make a single application feasible.
Solution
- Kapow's technology enables complex integration into systems through the web browser. This was an advantage for TDC Online because all the pages stored “in a heap” as files on the system appeared structured and consistent in the browser.
- Going through the front-end also meant the integration process could be conducted without interfering with existing system functions.
Results
- 1 person using Kapow's technology, transferred the same number of articles in 2-3 days that 3 or 4 people could do in 3 weeks.
- Using a quarter of the resources they solved the problem 10 times faster.
- The content migration was carried out without disrupting IT or creative staff.
With Kapow, InfoGroup collects and refines data to the highest compilation standards from the widest range of web sources.
Challenge
- Top internet search engines, in-car navigation systems and operator-assisted directory services rely on InfoGroup as the source of truth.
- The challenge for InfoGroup was to maintain the highest data compilation standards and seek out additional sources of validated data.
Solution
- Kapow enables them to extract web data from a wide range of sources, including FCC filings from county court houses and basic company data from public websites to supplement the business and consumer data products they sell.
- Much of the information they receive is from subscription-based data feeds. They use Kapow for all custom data requests, which are not available from data providers.
- By automating web data extraction, the Business Content Group can support the diverse needs of all InfoGroup departments and divisions.
Results
- Improved quality of data they provide to their customers.
- Dramatically reduced or eliminated hours of manual web intelligence.
- They can now get to data sources they couldn't reach in the past.
Playboy moved years of unstructured data from 20 diverse systems into FatWire CMS with no coding necessary.
Challenge
- Playboy Enterprises was launching their new public-facing website, Playboy.com.
- They had accumulated many years' worth of unstructured data – including static content such as images and videos – on multiple systems.
- They needed an automated way to move at least 75% of this data into their new FatWire CMS.
Solution
- Kapow was used to migrate all of the high resolution images (10,000+) from approximately 20 different systems into FatWire.
- No coding was required.
Results
- The project was completed in a fraction of the time required for competing solutions.
- The project was completed internally, without the need for consultants.
- Automating content migration with Kapow saved time, money and resources.
With Kapow, the energy division of IHS can monitor thousands of sites for factors affecting supply and demand, without relying on offshore resources for web intelligence.
Challenge
- The energy division of IHS needed to monitor thousands of government regulatory product vendor websites for factors that influence oil and gas supply and demand.
- They were relying on off-shore resources to access web data, reducing their control of what is a strategic aspect of their business.
Solution
- With Kapow's automated web data acquisition, they can gather and aggregate critical web information in real time without outsourcing.
- No coding or manual data extraction is required.
Results
- Increased efficiency with automated data extraction.
- Enhanced and improved quality of master data.
- Enhanced product offerings based on better web data.