Monthly Archives: July 2014

PriceAlert a new sheriff in town!

If you ever tried to use a tool for price comparison between two or more products of different online shops you definitely came in contact with the limitations that were imposed by such platforms. Usually this kind of apps work by periodically crawling a number of sites and periodically updating a certain product/price table. This is not very useful for users who want to choose products from various shops  in different geographical areas or from smaller sites that haven’t been crawled by that certain app.

Now, maybe it’s a bit early to talk about the capabilities of this next product but it’s rounding up nice and can be a real help for finite consumers around the world and even for  market analysts, and the best part is that it’s completely free, and with no commercials either. PriceAlert wants to be a new solution for measuring prices from various sites. Until now there’s nothing amazing but the technology behind allows users to compare prices on any ecommerce platform all over the world, because unlike other similar platforms limited to a number of well defined shops it uses an algorithm that automatically extracts data like specifications of that certain product or of course price and availability.

For now, only a beta version is available but new features are programmed to come up starting very soon. Useful proprieties like an email alert when a certain price has changed or statistics over the change in price for a period of time will be available, not to mention the capability of exporting the data gathered into various useful formats like excel or CSV.

So we think there’s no reason for you not to check out this interesting new toy and maybe leave a review in case that you feel so. You can find it here at the address //thewebminer.com/pricealert/ and we hope that together we can bring one more interesting tool to the use of people who need it.

Get started with microformats

Microformats are small patterns that can be embedded into your HTML for easier recognition and representation of common published materials, like people, events, dates or tags. Even though the content of web is fully capable of automated processing, microformats simplify the process by attaching semantics and other so lead the way for a more professional automated processing. Many advantages can be found in favor of microformats but the most crucial are these ones.

By this time i should mention that microformats are a huge relief in web scraping by defining lightweight standards for declaring info in any web page. By doing so another concept of HTML5 is defined, Microdata. This lets you define custom variables and implement certain proprieties of them.

Now that you know what microformats are we should focus on the getting started part. A really useful, quick and detailed guide can be found here, and more complex task are also available. Now, the only thing left is to wish you good luck into implementing it .

Big Data and Data Mining Tools

Recently we have tested a Data Mining tool about which i want to write today. It is called Datameer and it’s a cloud app based on Hadoop so we don’t need to install anything on our computers but we must have the data that we want analyzed.

Step 1: Importing the data

To import any kind of data we must select the format of them:

datameer0

Step 2: A small configuration

Some of which regard data format, others of the way to detect certain data types. This program tries to detect each column’s type being possible to add data types from a file:

datameer0.1

Step 3: Some fine adjustments
If the program doesn’t detect the columns well we can do it manually.  A bad of this program is the fact that we can adjust data at this step only by removing of the recordings that won’t correspond to the type of data recently defined.

datameer1

Step 4:Selecting the sample used for previsualisation

datameer2

So this is all it is to be done for adding data into Datameer. Further on, an excel-like interface shows all the data .
Here we can find a few buttons responsible for the magic:

Column Dependency
Shows the relation between different columns and basically if a variable depend on other.

Clustering
Using this we can group similar data.
All the discovering part is done by the program and we only have to specify the number of clusters that we want.

Decision Tree
Builds a decision tree based on the data.

These are all the important function of Datameer, but the true importance of this App relies not on the functions but on the ability of processing a huge quantity of data/