import.io news, announcements and feature releases
A few weeks ago I decided to do some simple analysis of our deal flow at Import.io. In order to do this I pulled our data out of salesforce.com and did some simple manipulation in Excel. I wanted to see the % chances of deals being won versus lost and how long it took. But, […]
Thanks Delhi School of Marketing! Working towards taking your business to the next level? You actually need a lot of efforts, yet cannot skip over the importance of marketing tools as these aid you achieve planning goals faster. These specific set of tools are needed to make sure that your business is running smoothly and […]
Import.io exhibited at the Gartner Data & Analytics conference this week in Grapevine, TX as part of the British Consulate’s booth. After talking with attendees in data analytics roles and other vendors, I came away with several thoughts on data industry trends. Data analytics is about telling stories and forming predictions More organizations are starting […]
In a article for TechTarget’s SearchITChannel, Moshe Kranc, chief technology officer at Ness, describes how custom and commercial offerings, bolstered by machine learning, can now facilitate web data extraction. He offers Import.io a commercial solution. Import.io’s point-and-click interface enables the user to teach the system how to extract data for a given website, enhanced with machine learning to infer extraction patterns […]
Import.io is pleased to announce the appointment of Bob Moss to VP Engineering. Bob specializes in building, developing, and retaining excellent engineering teams ranging in size from Fortune 50 to start-ups. His background in engineering leadership positions at Hearsay Social, Mozilla, Yahoo, Packeteer, and Red Hat will contribute to Import.io’s progression, keeping up the momentum […]
We are excited to participate in the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Dallas, TX, March 6-8 where the focus is: Building and executing an effective, holistic data and analytics strategy Preparing for trends such as AI, Hadoop, IoT and Blockchain Maximizing the impact of your Business Intelligence, MDM programs Establishing effective information governance for better quality, […]
Import.io makes it easy to work with web data, and now we’re making it affordable too. Import.io is committed to giving back to the wider community. We are firm believers in the principle that data gained from the web can fuel powerful insights and important results. That’s why we have decided to offer our new […]
On the 2nd of April, we launched a new version of Import.io with many enhanced capabilities. The highlights include: 100% web based experience including an all-new web extractor Scheduler – schedule your extraction runs right from our UI Data Storage – allow us to store your data for you Upgraded JavaScript support Highly scalable backend […]
Today we are pumped to announce that we are joining 29 other amazing UK startups as part of Tech City UK’s Upscale program! The Upscale program will power 30 of the fastest growing UK tech companies on their scaling journey by connecting them with Scale Coaches who have a proven track record of growing successful […]
We are pleased to announce that Import.io (that’s us btw) has just raised a $13 million Series A round of funding. The new investment was led by Imperial Innovations, with participation from Wellington Partners, Oxford Capital, Open Ocean, Delin Capital and AME Cloud Ventures. “This new round of funding represents the biggest investment ever in web […]
Things are changing around here, and we think that’s a good thing! Every new feature or product update is designed to bring you more functionality and a better user experience. This one is no different.
This latest release gives you a whole new way to access the API creation workflow and a new way to use Bulk Extract.
The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed things are changing around here. Not only are we working on improving functionality, we’re also updating our look. Going for the whole sleek and modern thing. We’ll do a whole big reveal (and have our new designer talk you through the redesign) as soon as the […]
At import.io, we’re always trying to make getting and using data from the web easier and less painful. It’s what led us to create Magic – our famous one click to data feature. But, it’s been awhile since we’ve done something specifically for our developer community. Well devs, the wait is over. Welcome to the brand new API docs!
Hey guys! We are super excited to announce our first EVER partner integration!
Working with the team at Plot.ly in the week leading up to Christmas, we were able to put together a slick beta version of an integration that lets you send static data directly to Plot.ly’s awesome web-based graphing platform. Now that we’ve returned from Christmas and given it a little polish, we’re ready to hand it over to you guys!
Usage. It’s the ultimate driver of every business owner and CEO. We obsess over it. I have an entire 42” TV hanging over my desk with a real-time dashboard of numbers that measure this usage in different ways. I can access this dashboard on my laptop (where it is bookmarked), my tablet and even an app on my iPhone. It’s often the first thing I look at in the morning and sometimes the last thing I look at before I go to bed – much to my wife’s annoyance. Like I said, it’s an obsession.
And it’s not just because I’m a data nerd. Metrics matter. More accurately, usage matters. The more people use your platform, the more benefit they’ll get out of it, the more likely they are to tell others about it, and the more likely your product is to go viral. Usage is the key to success – and in tech, more is always better.
The boys in the algorithms department have been at it again! Today, we are proud to launch Import.io Magic – the absolute quickest way to turn a webpage into a table of data.
Simply paste the URL to the page you want data from into the box and hit the “Get Data” button. Our algorithms will do the rest. No training, no plugin, no downloading. You can do everything from the comfort of your own browser, it even works on your tablet and mobile device!
The Data Summit London earlier this year brought together some of the greatest minds in the tech and data scene. To take advantage of their brilliance we asked a few of the main stage speakers to contribute to our White Paper: The Future of Data. In it you’ll be able to read about “Growing Industries with Data” by Paul Joyce from Geckoboard, “Using Data to Predict the Future” by BigML, “The Importance of Data Literacy” by Martins Vaivars from Infogr.am, “Data Privacy Concerns Us All” by Charles Arthur from The Guardian, “Web Data in Government” by Andrew Fogg from import.io, and “Data Will Change Everything” by JP Rangaswami from Salesforce.
Download the White Paper: The Future of Data
Creating a good user experience is challenging. Especially when your product is technically complex, you have to strike that all important balance between functionality and simplicity. For those of you who have been with us for a while, you’ll know that our product (and website) have been through quite a few iterations over the last two years. It’s been an interesting journey, and the other day I had the opportunity to examine it in some detail when I was asked to give a talk on our UX experiences at Wellington Partners CEO Summit, for those who don’t know Wellington they are one of our fabulous investors and have been working with us since more or less day one.
At import.io, quality is always considered to be an integral part of the implementation. As a Quality Assurance (QA) Manager, I manage functional testing, automation and quality management. This means that it’s my job to implement process as well as to ensure updates and new features are working with superior quality or without breaking the existing functionality. Testing every individual piece of functionality can be a laborious thing and in order to make this process more efficient, we employ an offshore team in India. I recently had the pleasure to spend 2 weeks in India training them and it gave me a chance to make some interesting observations about the process of outsourcing.
Last Friday, the whole import.io team had a mini hackday – we’ve been working on our upcoming Data Summit event and wanted some cool things to show you all! You’re going to have to come along or watch our event videos to see the finished products, but I want to show you how we built out the data sources we needed to power our apps and solve some really cool problems.
Last night I had the great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion based on a talk given by Nicholas Lovell, author of ‘The Curve’.
Nicholas Lovell has created an interesting theory surrounding the question of how you make money when everything is being given away for free. He mostly works with games like Candy Crush (which is free) helping them to monetize their customers.
On May 24th we’re bringing together the best of the best in London’s tech community for the ultimate hackathon: the Hacker Olympics.
Unlike a regular hackathon, where you spend all your time on a single app or idea, the Hacker Olympics is made up of a ton of team-based mini-competitions, hacks and tasks. We’ve been busy concocting fun and interesting challenges with the guys from Twilio and SendGrid, and they’re designed to test you and your team in everything from coding skills to vintage gaming tactics.
In creating our Startup Manual, one of the first processes that we felt needed some improvements at import was the way we were organizing our time and managing tasks. As CTO – and head of the dev team – my visibility over what people were spending their time on was somewhat limited. So when we occasionally missed deadlines for feature development or a release, it was often difficult to work out why.
When the company was young and there were only a few of us, we didn’t really need a formal system of time tracking and task management because I could personally keep on top of it. As the team grew, we tried various different ways of monitoring our employees’ time and helping them manage their tasks to be more efficient. But, since there was no company wide policy, the adoption was a bit haphazard and it was hard to asses the results. We wound up in a situation where there were at least 3 or 4 different time tracking programs being used throughout the organization and no good way to combine them.
Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to fly out to the fabulous city of Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) 2014 – one of the hottest conferences in the tech scene. SXSW is the massive annual music, film and interactive conference and festival which brings a whopping $200million into the Austin economy.
We were lucky enough to score a booth in the interactive conference center for four glorious days. And here’s how it all went down…
The other day my CEO came back from a week-long trip to the Valley, and when I asked him how it went, he just shrugged and said “It was OK”.
The thing about the Valley, and I noticed the same thing when I was out there last summer, is that companies just seem to move at a different pace than they do in Europe. This can be a bit of a wake up call when you go out there and realize that you’re not quite as efficient as you thought you were.
In any industry it is essential that you understand your place in the market. Your place in the market refers both to the value you bring to your customers and how you compare to your competitors. Staying on top of who is doing what in your industry is paramount to building and maintaining your customer base. I find that this is especially true in the technology industry where startups often spring up and become overnight sensations (a la Snapchat).
In order to build the best product for your market, you have to take into account what your competitors are doing. You don’t want to be the only company still making people log in the old fashioned way, when everyone else is using social sign in. Ok, not the best example, but you get the idea.
As part of the algorithms team at import·io, my job is to always be on the lookout for ways to make getting data out of webpages even easier. A while back I was looking at the training stage of the workflow, and I thought to myself wouldn’t it be cool if we could automate this?
In our latest feature release we are giving you the ability to start doing just that. The newest way to extract data with import·io is called Auto Extract, and it uses a set of algorithms to detect the data on the page automatically. Right now, in its Beta stage, it only works on sites where the data is contained in an HTML table.
I read an interesting article the other day on The Next Web about a recent trend in startup founders’ salaries. Namely, that they are much lower than many people believe.
“While the image of the startup founder as a champagne-quaffing, private-jet-hiring spendaholic may still remain for some who remember the days of the first dotcom bubble, it’s a thing of the past for most…”
– Martin Bryant, The Next Web
We managed to make some pretty cool hackathon projects during our last week before Christmas, so we threw down the challenge gauntlet to see what you could come up with. We gave users the two weeks over Christmas to come up with their own hackalong project using import·io, and the results were really impressive!
Bruno created a product which automatically tracks changes in the documentation of thousands of different APIs and generates alerts of those changes as soon as they happen. To do this, he used two Crawlers to get data from the Mashape API Marketplace Public API Directory. The first crawler grabs the URL of each API available on the list; while the second one reads each API page and grabs the title, logo, description and documentation URL.
This year at our company offsite we spent most of our time trying to implement the OKR system developed by Google – now a hot topic among productivity advocates. I won’t bore you with the abstract pros and cons of OKRs (you can read up on those from a number of different sources); instead, I want to focus on our personal experience with trying to actually use them in the real world.
Team Owen hard at work in the import·io Christmas Hackathon Today we are catching up on the Hackathon news; both team’s Hackthon projects are now complete and a winner has been crowned! But but before we give you the results, let’s take a quick look back at how we got there: Team Doug: In team […]
Team Doug It’s day two of the import·io hackathon and both teams are well into development mode. Team Owen ventured out into the wide world to get user validation, while Team Doug spent their day creating a working prototype and curating their data sources. Both teams are in high spirits and believe their team will […]
The import·io Hackathon Begins! It’s day one of our internal hackathon. The rules are simple: Two teams have one week to come up with an amazing product that in some way uses data obtained using import·io. Each day we’ll update you on our progress – feel free to try out the products and vote for […]
Christmas is always one of my favorite times of year at import·io. Okay, so when I say Christmas, what I really mean is the two weeks surrounding the Christmas holiday – even I’m not crazy enough to work over the holidays. At import·io we take this time to observe two traditions which I believe are essential in the growth and development of the company: an internal hackathon and an off-site.
Luke Embden’s Mural in our New Office New Beginnings There comes a time in every startup’s life when you have to fly the nest and strike out on your own. It’s a lot like moving out of your parent’s house. You leave the comfort and security of a shared workspace and all of sudden realize […]
CDO Andrew Fogg after winning the PITCH competition at Web Summit Last week was a whirlwind of travel, pitching and events. TechCrunch Disrupt On Monday our CEO David White and CDO Andrew Fogg arrived in Berlin for the first round of the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe. The format for the Battlefield was […]
import.io and Placemeter the big winners in PITCH Award 2013, presented by Box at Dublin Web Summit Thursday 31st October: Companies from the USA and London were the big winners in Europe’s biggest international start-up competition which took place at the Dublin Web Summit. London Company import.io won the Later Stage Company Award while […]
import·io is competing in the Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt The Startup Battlefield We are really excited to announce that import·io is participating in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin today! During our presentation we’ll be announcing a major new product that we think you’re really going to love! We can’t tell you much (yet), […]
This weekend, Bamford and I spent the weekend at PayPal’s #battlehack. The venue was Level 39 in 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf – arguably the most impressive hackathon venue they could have chosen. 1 Canada Square The theme of the hack was to build an app to help London. We came up with LuvLDN – […]
L-R: CEO David White, CDO Andrew Fogg, Marketing Associate Sally Hadidi and Angel Investor Emmanuel Javal celebrating winning Audience and Judges’ Choice at GigaOm Structure: Europe TechCrunch Disrupt Last week we were in San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt, one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year. Monday was our official launch into Beta, […]