Big data. We’ve been hearing it all too often as of late. The world is coming to realise that the amount of information spread across the web could lead to innovation after innovation. But how do we find it and how do we harness it? One London startup can answer that for some users.
Import.io aims to make extracting data from the internet incredibly simple. This demo on import.io’s website shows it is as easy as highlighting an example of the bits of data you want from the website and the algorithm sorting out the rest. It launched last October at the Strata startup showcase, where it won the audience choice award. At the most recent Strata conference in Santa Clara import.io won the judges’ award.
“In some cases, you just want to extract from a static webpage. Other times you want to interact with that website, so we allow you to record the interaction you would make to get to a page of data. You’ve decided your input and your output is the data that you’ve marked up, which means that you can actually ask a direct question of a website and get the data you need out.”
Not only does import.io allows users to scrape what they want but the team also seek out potential databases to create connectors of their own. For example, they have collaborated with the events listing startup Planvine, who publishers such as Trinity Mirror are already using.
“Say somebody needs to get information to health services based on a postcode” Nick says. “There are websites out there to do that and you can create an import.io “connector” to one so you just put your postcode in and you get your data out. Effectively, you are building an API to that website to make that happen.”
Import.io was born out of Kusiri, a powerful data research tool created by the same founders. The new company was a chance to make that software more accessible to small and medium enterprises.
“We’re trying to make it as straightforward as possible,” says Nick. “I think our UI is pretty clean and neat. It is easy to create a connector and you can do it in a few minutes whether you are a developer or a civilian.”
What partially shocked some of us Interhacktives watching a demonstration of import.io at the last Hacks/Hackers London was how you could do in a few minutes what would have taken us a lot more time using the scraping tools that we know. Nick thinks that the product will simply make life easier for journalists working in this field.
“I remember being at a data conference and there was a guy on stage who founded a company which taught journalists how to code and extract data from the web. I remember him coming to talk to us after we presented and saying “Yes, this is fantastic because this simplifies it”.
“It doesn’t mean people don’t need to learn how to code but this just makes the data gathering element that much simpler. It allows journalists to concentrate more on the writing and what the story is and seeing patterns in the numbers rather than worrying about how they’re going to get the data.”
Exciting, huh?
Take a look at import.io working with mapsdata to create a visualisation in minutes.
You can download import.io from the homepage on their website.
Import.io are on Twitter at @importio. You can follow Nick at @nick_importio