Monday 30 September 2013

Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Sunday 29 September 2013

Microsys A1 Website Scraper Review

The A1 scraper by Microsys is a program that is mainly used to scrape websites to extract data in large quantities for later use in webservices. The scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using multiple Regexes and saving the output into a CSV file. This tool is can be compared with other web harvesting and web scraping services.
How it works
This scraper program works as follows:
Scan mode

    Go to the ScanWebsite tab and enter the site’s URL into the Path subtab.
    Press the ‘Start scan‘ button to cause the crawler to find text, links and other data on this website and cache them.

Important: URLs that you scrape data from have to pass filters defined in both analysis filters and output filters. The defining of those filters can be set at the Analysis filters and Output filters subtabs respectively. They must be set at the website analysis stage (mode).
Extract mode

    Go to the Scraper Options tab
    Enter the Regex(es) into the Regex input area.
    Define the name and path of the output CSV file.
    The scraper automatically finds and extracts the data according to Regex patterns.

The result will be stored in one CSV file for all the given URLs.

There is a need to mention that the set of regular expressions will be run against all the pages scraped.
Some more scraper features

Using the scraper as a website crawler also affords:

    URL filtering.
    Adjustment of the speed of crawling according to service needs rather than server load.

If  you need to extract data from a complex website, just disable Easy mode: out press the  button. A1 Scraper’s full tutorial is available here.
Conclusion

The A1 Scraper is good for mass gathering of URLs, text, etc., with multiple conditions set. However this scraping tool is designed for using only Regex expressions, which can increase the parsing process time greatly.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/microsys-a1-website-scraper-review/

Friday 27 September 2013

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Thursday 26 September 2013

Scraping Amazon.com with Screen Scraper

Let’s look how to use Screen Scraper for scraping Amazon products having a list of asins in external database.

Screen Scraper is designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases and web-languages. There is even a data-manager that allows one to make a connection to a database (MySQL, Amazon RDS, MS SQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc), and then the scripting in screen-scraper is agnostic to the type of database.

Let’s go through a sample scrape project you can see it at work. I don’t know how well you know Screen Scraper, but I assume you have it installed, and a MySQL database you can use. You need to:

    Make sure screen-scraper is not running as workbench or server
    Put the Amazon (Scraping Session).sss file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/import” directory.
    Put the mysql-connector-java-5.1.22-bin.jar file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/lib/ext” directory.
    Create a MySQL database for the scrape to use, and import the amazon.sql file.
    Put the amazon.db.config file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/input” directory and edit it to contain proper settings to connect to your database.
    Start the screen scraper workbench

Since this is a very simple scrape, you just want to run it in the workbench (most of the time you want to run scrapes in server mode). Start the workbench, and you will see the Amazon scrape in there, and you can just click the “play” button.

Note that a breakpoint comes up for each item. It would be easy to save the scraped details to a database table or file if you want. Also see in the database the “id_status” changes as each item is scraped.

When the scrape is run, it looks in the database for products marked “not scraped”, so when you want to re-run the scrapes, you need to:

UPDATE asin
SET `id_status` = 0

Have a nice scraping! ))

P.S. We thank Jason Bellows from Ekiwi, LLC for such a great tutorial.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/scraping-amazon-com-with-screen-scraper/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:


The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

Tuesday 24 September 2013

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Monday 23 September 2013

Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Companies in India offer complete solution services for all type of data mining services.

Data Mining Services and Web research services offered, help businesses get critical information for their analysis and marketing campaigns. As this process requires professionals with good knowledge in internet research or online research, customers can take advantage of outsourcing their Data Mining, Data extraction and Data Collection services to utilize resources at a very competitive price.

In the time of recession every company is very careful about cost. So companies are now trying to find ways to cut down cost and outsourcing is good option for reducing cost. It is essential for each size of business from small size to large size organization. Data entry is most famous work among all outsourcing work. To meet high quality and precise data entry demands most corporate firms prefer to outsource data entry services to offshore countries like India.

In India there are number of companies which offer high quality data entry work at cheapest rate. Outsourcing data mining work is the crucial requirement of all rapidly growing Companies who want to focus on their core areas and want to control their cost.

Why outsource your data entry requirements?

Easy and fast communication: Flexibility in communication method is provided where they will be ready to talk with you at your convenient time, as per demand of work dedicated resource or whole team will be assigned to drive the project.

Quality with high level of Accuracy: Experienced companies handling a variety of data-entry projects develop whole new type of quality process for maintaining best quality at work.

Turn Around Time: Capability to deliver fast turnaround time as per project requirements to meet up your project deadline, dedicated staff(s) can work 24/7 with high level of accuracy.

Affordable Rate: Services provided at affordable rates in the industry. For minimizing cost, customization of each and every aspect of the system is undertaken for efficiently handling work.

Outsourcing Service Providers are outsourcing companies providing business process outsourcing services specializing in data mining services and data entry services. Team of highly skilled and efficient people, with a singular focus on data processing, data mining and data entry outsourcing services catering to data entry projects of a varied nature and type.

Why outsource data mining services?

360 degree Data Processing Operations
Free Pilots Before You Hire
Years of Data Entry and Processing Experience
Domain Expertise in Multiple Industries
Best Outsourcing Prices in Industry
Highly Scalable Business Infrastructure
24X7 Round The Clock Services

The expertise management and teams have delivered millions of processed data and records to customers from USA, Canada, UK and other European Countries and Australia.

Outsourcing companies specialize in data entry operations and guarantee highest quality & on time delivery at the least expensive prices.

Herat Patel, CEO at 3Alpha Dataentry Services possess over 15+ years of experience in providing data related services outsourced to India.

Visit our Facebook Data Entry profile for comments & reviews.

Our services helps to convert any kind of  hard copy sources, our data mining services helps to collect business contacts, customer contact, product specifications etc., from different web sources. We promise to deliver the best quality work and help you excel in your business by focusing on your core business activities. Outsource data mining services to India and take the advantage of outsourcing and save cost.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Mining-Services-to-Offshore-Data-Entry-Company&id=4027029

Sunday 22 September 2013

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

Should you have any queries regarding Web Data extraction services, please feel free to contact us. We would strive to answer each of your queries in detail. Email us at info@outsourcingwebresearch.com




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Friday 20 September 2013

Small Businesses And Web-Based CRM

Web-based or hosted Customer Relationship Management applications have come as a major boon for small businesses that till now were loath to even consider CRM for their businesses. This was because the cost of on-premise CRM was simply too much for SMBs.

The advent of web-based CRM has enabled SMBs to enjoy the benefits of CRM at a fraction of the cost of on-premise CRM. Businesses, big or small essentially have the same requirements from a CRM system. SMBs now have an application suite at their disposal which enables them to take on the big players in their business.

Earlier, small businesses were forced to run their businesses based on thumb rules and play by the ear as far as marketing strategies for customers were concerned. SMBs had to make do with spreadsheets and discrete software loaded on different machines which made it very difficult to extract information out of data.

Benefits of web-based CRM software for an SMB include

1) Low cost of installation and low TCO - The most attractive proposition for an SMB. Low entry costs since costs depend upon number of users and modules selected. Also, the costs get defrayed across a number of users who use the hosted software.

2) Ease of implementation - Far easier to implement as compared to on-premise CRM. You can select the modules best suited for your business. There are vendors that offer pre-customized hosted CRM for different verticals. Businesses get more time to secure user buy-in.

3) Accessibility - A huge plus with hosted CRM is that you can conduct business on the move so long as you have internet connectivity. Salespersons have the right data at the right time. Lead conversion can be streamlined. Telemarketing is facilitated.

4) Minimum or no server requirements - Web-based CRM does not make any infrastructure demands of an SMB. This frees space which can be used for other purposes. IT staff requirement is minimized, which is an additional cost saving.

5) Data security - An SMB may not be best equipped to handle the security of sensitive business information and customer data. But a hosted CRM provider has the capabilities to encrypt data and ensure data security through prevention of hack attacks of any kind.

SMBs now have the means to conduct business on the move with the help of online CRM. So, whether you are a high-growth or a mid-market company, an e-tailer or a service provider you have access to a CRM that will empower your business. Look around before you decide on the CRM best suited for your business. Many online CRM solutions, especially the open source ones are offered free. Some vendors offer a single-user solution for free.





Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Small-Businesses-And-Web-Based-CRM&id=820182

Importance Of Data Mining In Today's Business World

What is Data Mining? Well, it can be defined as the process of getting hidden information from the piles of databases for analysis purposes. Data Mining is also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). It is nothing but extraction of data from large databases for some specialized work.

Data Mining is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, e-commerce, investment trend in stocks & real estates, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

Data Mining has great importance in today's highly competitive business environment. A new concept of Business Intelligence data mining has evolved now, which is widely used by leading corporate houses to stay ahead of their competitors. Business Intelligence (BI) can help in providing latest information and used for competition analysis, market research, economical trends, consume behavior, industry research, geographical information analysis and so on. Business Intelligence Data Mining helps in decision-making.

Data Mining applications are widely used in direct marketing, health industry, e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), FMCG industry, telecommunication industry and financial sector. Data mining is available in various forms like text mining, web mining, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks data mining.

Data mining, however, is a crucial process and requires lots of time and patience in collecting desired data due to complexity and of the databases. This could also be possible that you need to look for help from outsourcing companies. These outsourcing companies are specialized in extracting or mining the data, filtering it and then keeping them in order for analysis. Data Mining has been used in different context but is being commonly used for business and organizational needs for analytical purposes

Usually data mining requires lots of manual job such as collecting information, assessing data, using internet to look for more details etc. The second option is to make software that will scan the internet to find relevant details and information. Software option could be the best for data mining as this will save tremendous amount of time and labor. Some of the popular data mining software programs available are Connexor Machines, Free Text Software Technologies, Megaputer Text Analyst, SAS Text Miner, LexiQuest, WordStat, Lextek Profiling Engine.

However, this could be possible that you won't get appropriate software which will be suitable for your work or finding the suitable programmer would also be difficult or they may charge hefty amount for their services. Even if you are using the best software, you will still need human help in completion of projects. In that case, outsourcing data mining job will be advisable.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Importance-Of-Data-Mining-In-Todays-Business-World&id=281415

Thursday 19 September 2013

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.

If you are interested to know something more on Web Data Mining and other details, you are welcome to the Screen Scraping Technology site.




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

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Innovative Online Data Entry Services

Number of companies providing data entry services has increased in the last few years. These companies also provide services on online and offline data-entry and data processing, etc. Data Entry is to enter any form of data into computerized inventory. It could be done by typing at a keyboard plus electronically entering information into the machine.

These companies have updated technologies, unique processes and efficient data processing by integrating skilled professionals. These companies deliver high-quality services with complete accuracy, efficiency plus effectiveness. They provide services through reliable and secure online platform with the help of encrypted FTP upload CD-R or CD-W or E-mail. Adopting this technology customers get an assurance that their information is free from any sort of unauthorized access, copying or downloading. Companies specializing in such services provide a broad spectrum of services fulfilling each customer specific needs.

Few of these services are listed as follows: surveys, online copying, pasting, sorting, editing, and organizing data, questionnaires, online form processing and filing, reports and submissions, online medical and legal data entry, data collection, mailing list / mailing label, email mining, typing the manuscript in MS Word, etc. Outsourcing of the documentation of the work is a workable and a reasonable option.

Such services includes a wide range of back office and BPO - Business Process Outsourcing and ITO - Information Technology Outsourcing enabled data processing services.

Online data input services provided by India have earned a global recognition for its superior quality and timely completion of its work. Saving time is crucial for each organization running its business. Qualitative output is produced in lesser time which is advantageous for using the time at other important places. By availing such services one can save on cost of hiring trained professionals. More services could be availed within the saved cost.

Talking about the role of online data processing services, as the requirements of high quality and accurate data-entry of textual and numeric data processing business needs is most needed. In this way, companies can save valuable time and money by entering information online reduces. You can also consult experts who have vast experience and knowledge about online entry of data.

With the help of these services, mostly many business processing companies are able to focus on their core activates through online services. This kind of services require speed, analytical skills, domain expertise and industry experience. Choosing right outsourcing partner can save you cost and time significantly.

For more information about our Online Data Entry services please visit us at: http://www.offshoredataentry.com/ OR send your entire data entry requirements at: info@offshoredataentry.com and we will revert back within 24 hours with cost effective solutions.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Innovative-Online-Data-Entry-Services&id=6442656

Tuesday 17 September 2013

Various Data Mining Techniques

Also called Knowledge Discover in Databases (KDD), data mining is the process of automatically sifting through large volumes of data for patterns, using tools such as clustering, classification, association rule mining, and many more. There are several major data mining techniques developed and known today, and this article will briefly tackle them, along with tools for increased efficiency, including phone look up services.

Classification is a classic data mining technique. Based on machine learning, it is used to classify each item on a data set into one of predefined set of groups or classes. This method uses mathematical techniques, like linear programming, decision trees, neural network, and statistics. For instance, you can apply this technique in an application that predicts which current employees will most probably leave in the future, based on the past records of those who have resigned or left the company.

Association is one of the most used techniques, and it is where a pattern is discovered basing on a relationship of a specific item on other items within the same transaction. Market basket analysis, for example, uses association to figure out what products or services are purchased together by clients. Businesses use the data produced to devise their marketing campaign.

Sequential patterns, too, aim to discover similar patterns in data transaction over a given business phase or period. These findings are used for business analysis to see relationships among data.

Clustering makes useful cluster of objects that maintain similar characteristics using an automatic method. While classification assigns objects into predefined classes, clustering defines the classes and puts objects in them. Predication, on the other hand, is a technique that digs into the relationship between independent variables and between dependent and independent variables. It can be used to predict profits in the future - a fitted regression curve used for profit prediction can be drawn from historical sale and profit data.

Of course, it is highly important to have high-quality data in all these data mining techniques. A multi-database web service, for instance, can be incorporated to provide the most accurate telephone number lookup. It delivers real-time access to a range of public, private, and proprietary telephone data. This type of phone look up service is fast-becoming a defacto standard for cleaning data and it communicates directly with telco data sources as well.

Phone number look up web services - just like lead, name, and address validation services - help make sure that information is always fresh, up-to-date, and in the best shape for data mining techniques to be applied.

Equip your business with better leads and get better conversion rates by using phone look up and similar real-time web services.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Various-Data-Mining-Techniques&id=6985662

Monday 16 September 2013

Recover Data With Secure Data Recovery Services

Failure of hard disk drive, server, or RAID array can lead to loss of data stored in the computer and also stop ongoing work. Both these aspects can be extremely detrimental to the interests of the computer user, whether an individual or a business entity.

It is essential that at such a stage data recovery process is set in motion immediately to maximize the possibility of recovering the entire lost data and to make the computer operational. The first step would be to contact a reputable online services provider such as Secure Data Recovery Services. They have a network of it's locations throughout the United States.

Essential Attributes Of Data Recovery Services

If data recovery is of prime importance to you, choose the online recovery services that specialize in all types of them. These include hard drive, RAID recovery, Mac, SQL, and Tape recovery. You must ensure that the data one selected by you should be able to extract vital and critical data from any interface hard disk drive. For example, IDE, EIDE, SATA "Serial ATA," PATA "Parallel ATA," SCSI, SAS, and Fiber Channel. The data one should also be able to recover data from single drive, multiple-drive, and RAID array setups. They should also be able to service all major brand drives.

The most important attribute of Secure Data Recovery Services is that they have qualified, experienced, and professional technicians. They should be able to diagnose the cause of the failure and set it right. These technicians are trained to work continuously till the time a solution to your problem is found. The service also has all modern tools and instruments. The work is carried out in Clean Rooms so that no dust particle can enter the hard drive. All these services are provided to the full satisfaction of the clients and at competitive prices.

Loss of data can be a nightmare. Secure Data Recovery Services have the technical know how, experienced and qualified technicians, necessary tools, Clean Room, and the will to complete the recovery work as quickly as possible.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Recover-Data-With-Secure-Data-Recovery-Services&id=5301563

Sunday 15 September 2013

Using Charts For Effective Data Mining

The modern world is one where data is gathered voraciously. Modern computers with all their advanced hardware and software are bringing all of this data to our fingertips. In fact one survey says that the amount of data gathered is doubled every year. That is quite some data to understand and analyze. And this means a lot of time, effort and money. That is where advancements in the field of Data Mining have proven to be so useful.

Data mining is basically a process of identifying underlying patters and relationships among sets of data that are not apparent at first glance. It is a method by which large and unorganized amounts of data are analyzed to find underlying connections which might give the analyzer useful insight into the data being analyzed.

It's uses are varied. In marketing it can be used to reach a product to a particular customer. For example, suppose a supermarket while mining through their records notices customers preferring to buy a particular brand of a particular product. The supermarket can then promote that product even further by giving discounts, promotional offers etc. related to that product. A medical researcher analyzing D.N.A strands can and will have to use data mining to find relationships existing among the strands. Apart from bio-informatics, data mining has found applications in several other fields like genetics, pure medicine, engineering, even education.

The Internet is also a domain where mining is used extensively. The world wide web is a minefield of information. This information needs to be sorted, grouped and analyzed. Data Mining is used extensively here. For example one of the most important aspects of the net is search. Everyday several million people search for information over the world wide web. If each search query is to be stored then extensively large amounts of data will be generated. Mining can then be used to analyze all of this data and help return better and more direct search results which lead to better usability of the Internet.

Data mining requires advanced techniques to implement. Statistical models, mathematical algorithms or the more modern machine learning methods may be used to sift through tons and tons of data in order to make sense of it all.

Foremost among these is the method of charting. Here data is plotted in the form of charts and graphs. Data visualization, as it is often referred to is a tried and tested technique of data mining. If visually depicted, data easily reveals relationships that would otherwise be hidden. Bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, bubble charts etc. provide simple, easy techniques for data mining.

Thus a clear simple truth emerges. In today's world of heavy load data, mining it is necessary. And charts and graphs are one of the surest methods of doing this. And if current trends are anything to go by the importance of data mining cannot be undermined in any way in the near future.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Using-Charts-For-Effective-Data-Mining&id=2644996

Friday 13 September 2013

Data Entry Services by a Virtual Assistant

Data Entry is a basic requirement for any business and it may appear to be simple to supervise and handle, this engage a lot of procedures that require a proper handling. Enormous modifications have taken place in the field of data entry and because of this data processing work has become really easier then before. So if you are looking to make data entry services useful to maintain the information and data of your company, you need a skilled virtual assistant. These days it is almost impossible to say Data Entry Services are costly; however, the fact is this by outsourcing a data process to country like India will be a good option for an organization to find a quality services with cost-effective solutions. All you need to choose you will hire a VA for the job you wanted to complete within a particular time frame, with quality and a cost-effective solution or to hire an in house employee for which you have to pay employee benefits such as sick pay, employee insurance, vacation pay, worker's compensation and much more. You are the best person to decide, you want to outsource the job to a virtual assistant who only charge for the job they work for after all this is your business.

Data Entry is one of the important features for your business and as a result you must make sure that this is dealt in a right direction. Outsourcing Data Entry service to a virtual assistant is not only a part of a business. With the enormous flow on the ground of Information Technology Data Conversion service is evenly significant. Data Conversion is the process to renovate the data in which data is converted from file source to another file type such as extracting the data from PDF file to excel spreadsheet and business world need these conversion for efficiency in performance. Virtual Assistant's are skilled enough to convert almost any file type to another for a business owner to access the data in any format.

By outsourcing your data entry jobs to a virtual assistant in India has been found very cost-effective solutions with quality of the job. Outsourcing Data Entry Services is one of the rise these days and the reason behind this is business owners has enjoyed the success of outsourcing the job to a virtual assistant. The major benefit of getting data entry services complete by a virtual assistant in India is they work really cheap and the work done by them is of top quality job. So if the data entry services provided by a virtual assistant are cheap and of top quality there is completely no possibility why someone would not take the benefits of a VA services.

Amit Ganotra is a skilled virtual assistant providing services like Data Entry, Data Processing, Data Conversion, Data Mining, Data cleaning, OCR Cleanup, Article Submission, Directory Submissions, Web Development. For more information about the services we provide please visit the website.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-by-a-Virtual-Assistant&id=1665926

Wednesday 11 September 2013

Data Mining - Critical for Businesses to Tap the Unexplored Market

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is an emerging field and is increasingly gaining importance in today's business. The knowledge discovery process, however, is vast, involving understanding of the business and its requirements, data selection, processing, mining and evaluation or interpretation; it does not have any pre-defined set of rules to go about solving a problem. Among the other stages, the data mining process holds high importance as the task involves identification of new patterns that have not been detected earlier from the dataset. This is relatively a broad concept involving web mining, text mining, online mining etc.

What Data Mining is and what it is not?

The data mining is the process of extracting information, which has been collected, analyzed and prepared, from the dataset and identifying new patterns from that information. At this juncture, it is also important to understand what it is not. The concept is often misunderstood for knowledge gathering, processing, analysis and interpretation/ inference derivation. While these processes are absolutely not data mining, they are very much necessary for its successful implementation.

The 'First-mover Advantage'

One of the major goals of the data mining process is to identify an unknown or rather unexplored segment that had always existed in the business or industry, but was overlooked. The process, when done meticulously using appropriate techniques, could even make way for niche segments providing companies the first-mover advantage. In any industry, the first-mover would bag the maximum benefits and exploit resources besides setting standards for other players to follow. The whole process is thus considered to be a worthy approach to identify unknown segments.

The online knowledge collection and research is the concept involving many complications and, therefore, outsourcing the data mining services often proves viable for large companies that cannot devote time for the task. Outsourcing the web mining services or text mining services would save an organization's productive time which would otherwise be spent in researching.

The data mining algorithms and challenges

Every data mining task follows certain algorithms using statistical methods, cluster analysis or decision tree techniques. However, there is no single universally accepted technique that can be adopted for all. Rather, the process completely depends on the nature of the business, industry and its requirements. Thus, appropriate methods have to be chosen depending upon the business operations.

The whole process is a subset of knowledge discovery process and as such involves different challenges. Analysis and preparation of dataset is very crucial as the well-researched material could assist in extracting only the relevant yet unidentified information useful for the business. Hence, the analysis of the gathered material and preparation of dataset, which also considers industrial standards during the process, would consume more time and labor. Investment is another major challenge in the process as it involves huge cost on deploying professionals with adequate domain knowledge plus knowledge on statistical and technological aspects.

The importance of maintaining a comprehensive database prompted the need for data mining which, in turn, paved way for niche concepts. Though the concept has been present for years now, companies faced with ever growing competition have realized its importance only in the recent years. Besides being relevant, the dataset from where the information is actually extracted also has to be sufficient enough so as to pull out and identify a new dimension. Yet, a standardized approach would result in better understanding and implementation of the newly identified patterns.





Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---Critical-for-Businesses-to-Tap-the-Unexplored-Market&id=6745886

Monday 9 September 2013

Data Mining

Data mining is the retrieving of hidden information from data using algorithms. Data mining helps to extract useful information from great masses of data, which can be used for making practical interpretations for business decision-making. It is basically a technical and mathematical process that involves the use of software and specially designed programs. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data mining is gaining a lot of importance because of its vast applicability. It is being used increasingly in business applications for understanding and then predicting valuable information, like customer buying behavior and buying trends, profiles of customers, industry analysis, etc. It is basically an extension of some statistical methods like regression. However, the use of some advanced technologies makes it a decision making tool as well. Some advanced data mining tools can perform database integration, automated model scoring, exporting models to other applications, business templates, incorporating financial information, computing target columns, and more.

Some of the main applications of data mining are in direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, the oil and gas industry, scientific tests, genetics, telecommunications, financial services and utilities. The different kinds of data are: text mining, web mining, social networks data mining, relational databases, pictorial data mining, audio data mining and video data mining.

Some of the most popular data mining tools are: decision trees, information gain, probability, probability density functions, Gaussians, maximum likelihood estimation, Gaussian Baves classification, cross-validation, neural networks, instance-based learning /case-based/ memory-based/non-parametric, regression algorithms, Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixture models, K-Means and hierarchical clustering, Markov models, support vector machines, game tree search and alpha-beta search algorithms, game theory, artificial intelligence, A-star heuristic search, HillClimbing, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms.

Some popular data mining software includes: Connexor Machines, Copernic Summarizer, Corpora, DocMINER, DolphinSearch, dtSearch, DS Dataset, Enkata, Entrieva, Files Search Assistant, FreeText Software Technologies, Intellexer, Insightful InFact, Inxight, ISYS:desktop, Klarity (part of Intology tools), Leximancer, Lextek Onix Toolkit, Lextek Profiling Engine, Megaputer Text Analyst, Monarch, Recommind MindServer, SAS Text Miner, SPSS LexiQuest, SPSS Text Mining for Clementine, Temis-Group, TeSSI®, Textalyser, TextPipe Pro, TextQuest, Readware, Quenza, VantagePoint, VisualText(TM), by TextAI, Wordstat. There is also free software and shareware such as INTEXT, S-EM (Spy-EM), and Vivisimo/Clusty.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining&id=196652

Friday 6 September 2013

What Poker Data Mining Can Do for a Player

Anyone who wants to be more successful in many poker rooms online should take a look at what poker data mining can do. Poker data mining involves looking into all of the past hands in a series of poker games. This can be used to help with reviewing the ways how a player plays the game of poker. This will help to determine how well someone is working when trying to play this exciting game.

Poker data mining works in that a player will review all of the past hands that a player has gotten into. This includes taking a look at the individual hands that were involved. Every single card, bet and movement will be recorded in a hand.

All of the hands can be combined to help with figuring out the wins and losses in a game alongside all of the strategies that had been used throughout the course of a game. The analysis will be used to determine how well a player has gone in a game.

The review will be used to figure out the changes in one's winnings over the course of time. This can be used in conjunction with different types of things that are going on in a game and how the game is being played. This will be used to help figure out what is going on in a game and to see what should be done correctly and what should not be handled.

The data mining that is used is handled by a variety of different kinds of online poker sites. Many of these sites will allow its customers to buy information on various previous hands that they have gotten into. This is used by all of these places as a means of helping to figure out how well a player has done in a game.

Not all places are going to offer support for poker data mining. Some of these places will refuse to work with it due to how they might feel that poker data mining will give a player an unfair advantage over other players who are not willing to pay for it. The standards that these poker rooms will have are going to vary. It helps to review policies of different places when looking to use this service.

Poker data mining can prove to be a beneficial function for anyone to handle. Poker data mining can be smart because of how it can help to get anyone to figure out how one's hand histories are working in a poker room. It will be important to see that this is not accepted in all places though. Be sure to watch for this when playing the game of poker and looking to succeed in it.

The use of poker data mining as well as poker software is being increasingly used by many poker players in order to learn and improve their game.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Poker-Data-Mining-Can-Do-for-a-Player&id=5563778

Thursday 5 September 2013

Data Entry Services in India Are Getting Famous in the World!

Outsourcing has become the most profitable business in the world. This business is growing in India and other part of the world. These services are getting famous in the world and most of the business owners are saving their lots of money by doing outsourcing to different countries where India comes in top in the outsourcing. By outsourcing your offline and online information entry jobs, your company will maintain properly organized and up-to-date records of the employees and other important stuff. These jobs are usually done in the home environment.

India is very popular in providing the BPO services for their customers. There is large scale of BPO service providers running their business in India. The employees working in these offices are also very competent and trained. Data entry services in India is very popular all around the world because of having the access of BPO experts and the web data extraction experts.

What these BPO services provide you?

There are many business across the globe running on the outsource services, BPO services in India provides the ease of life to the business owner want quick and fast data entry work.

There are many well reputed firms working in India and doing their best to finish and deliver comes punctually. They're professional well equipped with the newest technology and software and more importantly with the professional labor work. They are fully trained and expert in their niche so if a business owner take the services then they get the in time work and quality. When you will select any BPO expert then you will find the following data entry expertise in these professional companies.

1. You will find the handwritten material with the help of experts.
2. Knowledge entry of e-books, directories, image files and etc.
3. You will also get the best services of data processing.
4. Business card knowledge entry
5. Bills and survey services which will help you to Maintain and correct records.
6. Alpha numeric data entry services
7. Data entry free trails.

Thousand of online BPO jobs are also available on the Indian big job portals and other data entry work. These services and work force reduce your workload and will enhance your productivity of your business. Outsourcing the right choice by any business owner because it reduces your total cost and you get the perfect and reliable work. When you approach to any professional service provider firm in India then it reduce the turnaround time and you get the professional data entry services.

Accurate, fast and reliable services are offered in India by the Bpo companies. Please visit Data Entry Services for more information.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-in-India-Are-Getting-Famous-in-the-World!&id=4708858

Wednesday 4 September 2013

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

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

The Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We have come to this what we call the information era where industries are craving for useful data needed for decision making, product creations - among other vital uses for business. Data mining and converting them to become useful information is part of this trend which makes businesses to grow to their optimum potentials. However, a lot of companies cannot handle by themselves alone the processes data mining involved as they are just overwhelmed by other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes into play.

There have been a lot of definitions introduced but it can simply be explained as a process that includes sorting through huge amounts of raw data to be able to extract valuable information needed by industries and businesses in various fields. In most cases, this is done by professionals, business organizations, and financial analysts. There has been a rapid growth in the number of sectors or groups who are getting into it though.

There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of these are presented below:

Wide Array of services included

A lot of companies are turning to data mining outsourcing because it caters a lot of services. Such services include, but not limited to congregation data from websites into database applications, collecting contact information from various websites, extracting data from websites using software, sorting stories from news sources, and accumulating business information from competitors.

A lot of companies are benefiting

A lot of industries are benefiting from it because it is quick and feasible. Information extracted by data mining outsourcing service providers are used in crucial decision-making in the area of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relation management, health care, scientific test and other experimental endeavor, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

Have a lot of advantages

Subscribing for data mining outsourcing service offers many advantages because providers ensure clients of rendering services with global standards. They strive to work with improved technology scalability, advanced infrastructure resources, quick turnaround time, cost-effective prices, more secure network system to ensure information safety, and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to concentrate in their core business operations and therefore can improve overall productivity. No wonder why data mining outsourcing has been a prime choice of many businesses - it propels business towards greater profits.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Truth-Behind-Data-Mining-Outsourcing-Service&id=3595955

Monday 2 September 2013

Data Extraction - A Guideline to Use Scrapping Tools Effectively

So many people around the world do not have much knowledge about these scrapping tools. In their views, mining means extracting resources from the earth. In these internet technology days, the new mined resource is data. There are so many data mining software tools are available in the internet to extract specific data from the web. Every company in the world has been dealing with tons of data, managing and converting this data into a useful form is a real hectic work for them. If this right information is not available at the right time a company will lose valuable time to making strategic decisions on this accurate information.

This type of situation will break opportunities in the present competitive market. However, in these situations, the data extraction and data mining tools will help you to take the strategic decisions in right time to reach your goals in this competitive business. There are so many advantages with these tools that you can store customer information in a sequential manner, you can know the operations of your competitors, and also you can figure out your company performance. And it is a critical job to every company to have this information at fingertips when they need this information.

To survive in this competitive business world, this data extraction and data mining are critical in operations of the company. There is a powerful tool called Website scraper used in online digital mining. With this toll, you can filter the data in internet and retrieves the information for specific needs. This scrapping tool is used in various fields and types are numerous. Research, surveillance, and the harvesting of direct marketing leads is just a few ways the website scraper assists professionals in the workplace.

Screen scrapping tool is another tool which useful to extract the data from the web. This is much helpful when you work on the internet to mine data to your local hard disks. It provides a graphical interface allowing you to designate Universal Resource Locator, data elements to be extracted, and scripting logic to traverse pages and work with mined data. You can use this tool as periodical intervals. By using this tool, you can download the database in internet to you spread sheets. The important one in scrapping tools is Data mining software, it will extract the large amount of information from the web, and it will compare that date into a useful format. This tool is used in various sectors of business, especially, for those who are creating leads, budget establishing seeing the competitors charges and analysis the trends in online. With this tool, the information is gathered and immediately uses for your business needs.

Another best scrapping tool is e mailing scrapping tool, this tool crawls the public email addresses from various web sites. You can easily from a large mailing list with this tool. You can use these mailing lists to promote your product through online and proposals sending an offer for related business and many more to do. With this toll, you can find the targeted customers towards your product or potential business parents. This will allows you to expand your business in the online market.

There are so many well established and esteemed organizations are providing these features free of cost as the trial offer to customers. If you want permanent services, you need to pay nominal fees. You can download these services from their valuable web sites also.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction---A-Guideline-to-Use-Scrapping-Tools-Effectively&id=3600918

Sunday 1 September 2013

Data Mining Is Useful for Business Application and Market Research Services

One day of data mining is an important tool in a market for modern business and market research to transform data into an information system advantage. Most companies in India that offers a complete solution and services for these services. The extraction or to provide companies with important information for analysis and research.

These services are primarily today by companies because the firm body search of all trade associations, retail, financial or market, the institute and the government needs a large amount of information for their development of market research. This service allows you to receive all types of information when needed. With this method, you simply remove your name and information filter.

This service is of great importance, because their applications to help businesses understand that it can perform actions and consumer buying trends and industry analysis, etc. There are business applications use these services:
1) Research Services
2) consumption behavior
3) E-commerce
4) Direct marketing
5) financial services and
6) customer relationship management, etc.

Benefits of Data mining services in Business

• Understand the customer need for better decision
• Generate more business
• Target the Relevant Market.
• Risk free outsourcing experience
• Provide data access to business analysts
• Help to minimize risk and improve ROI.
• Improve profitability by detect unusual pattern in sales, claims, transactions
• Major decrease in Direct Marketing expenses

Understanding the customer's need for a better fit to generate more business target market.To provide risk-free outsourcing experience data access for business analysts to minimize risk and improve return on investment.

The use of these services in the area to help ensure that the data more relevant to business applications. The different types of text mining such as mining, web mining, relational databases, data mining, graphics, audio and video industry, which all used in enterprise applications.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Is-Useful-for-Business-Application-and-Market-Research-Services&id=5123878