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/

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/

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/

Inspyder Power Search Review

Inspyder Power Search is a crawling and scraping application which is more for straightforward scraping, using both XPath and Regex. The program has a simple, nice interface making it easy to learn and employ it.
Inspyder is designed for multiple purposes:

    Regex application
    Using Xpath for finding html elements
    Extract Match performing
    Wildcard matching
    Scrape by crawling as many pages as possible and applying a predefined pattern

The reference to the tutorial is here.

This application functions well with combining both XPath (ex. extract some hiden page elements: titles or image “alt” attribute text) and Regex (point and click interface). It enables to work with both techniques at the same interface to crawl or scrape data. So, if for certain pages one needs to set extraction patterns using both XPath and Regex, this tool fits the best.

Concerning the disadvantages, I would mention the lack of pages navigation techniques; that is, the crawler works to scrape all similar (of the same domain name) pages; no explicit navigation is possible. It’s possible only to exclude certain pages from program crawl. The crawler evidently does not perform web forms filling or captcha bypassing.

Other application features are:

    Scheduling of crawling and scrape jobs
    Email notification upon completion of the scheduled crawling job.

The following picture gives a brief view of how the Inspyder works for scrape:

The export can be performed in 2 formats, CSV and XML:

There are also several advanced options (explicitly shown in the image below):

    crawler delay
    crawler timeout
    user agent disguise
    max file size definition
    max crawl depth definition
    crawler threads (multi-threading) setting
    JavaScript processing

Summary

This simple scrape application, Power Spider, works well for casual, non-commercial scrape tasks, as well as to let developers to explore HTML page structures and work to find and to apply XPaths. One may also use Regex testing upon a set of pages with this program.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/inspyder-power-search-review/

Outsourcing Data Entry - A Right Move

Competition that is what it is all about. Every business on the planet has a competitor and the writing on the wall is simple, stay a step ahead, which is easier said than done. Customer is the key to all business and keeping the customer happy means repeat business and proper growth. That would require companies to do research, plan marketing strategies, and always have quick access to data to process customer request. This article is not to talk about what is data entry? Or what is data processing? Rather it is to give you enough reasons to find an outsourcing partner who would get the job done for you.

Why Consider Outsourcing

Ever felt overwhelmed with work, too many things to take care of and you have a lot of catching up to do? Well that's where the idea of outsourcing comes in. Finding an outsourcing partner who could share that load and give you what you need, the way you need it and to the time that you set, is something worth looking into. Outsourcing eases your financial load; you could get the job done at a lesser cost externally than in-house. This would mean less pressure on the financial side of things.

Ever wondered how much of your time is consumed in areas that do not require it, when it could be well spent on some core parts of the process. Outsourcing your work will help take care of that. You could give your full to parts of your business that requires attention, confidently knowing that work is still getting completed half way around the globe by people who are knowledgeable about your business and understands your business process.

The workforce is always a concern. Finding the right person for the job is a task in itself and is also expensive. So without the right person on the job, you could be getting less quality and slower turn-around-time than what you bargained for. Business is money and low quality and slow work is only going to let you end up losing it than making any. With an outsourcing partner in place, the workforce, the quality, the infrastructure is a non-issue. The work is done faster at half the cost.

Now every business has some sort of risks involved and outsourcing is no different. Outsourcing would mean the transfer of key information of process and compromising on what needs to be kept hush. Also, you might not have complete control of the business activity. Fortunately, there are ways to arrest these sorts of risks. As far as keeping things under wraps is concerned one could sign in an agreement that would bind both parties in keeping information from leaking out. Making sure that your outsourcing partner is as transparent as glass to you when it comes to the people and budget should cover the problem of having control.

When choosing your outsourcing partner choose one with an accomplished track record. Investigate if the company you choose to partner with has some good accounts to show. Feedback for those accounts should help you decide if you are making a good investment or not.

Zahir Thomas is an expert author for writing article about data entry. Vserve Solution offers various services like image processing service, product catalog management, forms processing etc. Please visit our website http://www.vservesolution.com for more information.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry---A-Right-Move&id=5221839

Utilize Online Data Entry Services From India For Extended Profits

Numerous companies are seeking help for data entry services in order to better manage their company database. Many changes and innovations have taken place in this field that has greatly facilitated and accelerated often tedious and time consuming processes. There are a multitude of data entry companies offering useful solutions to businesses of all types. Hiring an online data entry company in India is an economical option. These outsourcing companies provide high quality work to businesses around the world.

Many firms have started passing their data entry work on to third party firms in an effort to save on overhead costs. The burden of employing a full time data entry associate on a salary basis and providing them with all the benefits of regular employees is immense, whether the work load is large of small for a particular month. Hiring a consultant will enable you to only incur costs when necessary.

Data is a very important part of any business. Therefore it is critical that it is handled with experienced hands and skills. Well managed data can be used in an endless number of ways to better plan and manage the undertakings of a business. As a part of data entry services, data conversion is gaining popularity. The companies are using the latest techniques and tools for designing data entry solutions. In order to make data useful for anyone, its conversion is important. Data that requires a longer duration of processing time should be outsourced for better efficiency of information flow.

Different types of businesses make use of these services. They primarily have an immense database to manage, for which to India is a cost effective option. For instance, pharmaceutical companies, educational institutes, law firms, E-Commerce sites, and others make use to data entry services for higher profits.

Outsourced data entry services have been very beneficial for companies by increasing sales, yet lowering labor expenses. They help in expanding the client base internationally, which enables global access to international customers with ease. Generally the data that is complex and takes longer processing times should be outsourced for better, timelier results. Some businesses can even take advantage of data conversion, document processing, and catalog development if they need it.

There are many advantages of outsourcing data entry services to developing countries like India. Here the workforce is cheap yet highly skilled. Thus, businesses can get better quality of work at relatively lower prices in comparison to companies in developed countries. There are a tremendous number of data entry service providers. One of these firms will be a great tool to take your business to the next level.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Utilize-Online-Data-Entry-Services-From-India-For-Extended-Profits&id=1387446

Professional Data Entry Services - Ensure Maximum Security for Data

Though a lot of people have concerns about it, professional data entry services can actually ensure maximum security for your data. This is in addition to the quality and cost benefits that outsourcing provides anyway. The precautionary measures for data protection would begin from the time you provide your documents/files for entry to the service provider till completion of the project and delivery of the final output to you. Whether performed onshore or offshore, the security measures are stringent and effective. You only have to make sure you outsource to the right service provider. Making use of the free trials offered by different business process outsourcing companies would help you choose right.

BPO Company Measures for Data Protection and Confidentiality

• Data Remains on Central Servers - The company would ensure that all data remains on the central servers and also that all processing is done only on these servers. No text or images would leave the servers. The company's data entry operators cannot download or print any of this data.

• Original Documents Are Not Circulated - The source files or documents (hard copies) which you give to the service provider is not distributed as such to their staff. This source material is scanned with the help of high speed document scanners. The data would be keyed from scanned images or extracted utilizing text recognition techniques.

• Source Documents Safely Disposed Of - After use, your source documents would be disposed of in a secure manner. Whenever necessary, the BPO company would get assistance from a certified document destruction company. Such measures would keep your sensitive documents from falling into the hands of unauthorized personnel.

• Confidentiality - All staff would be required to sign confidentiality agreements. They would also be apprised of information protection policies that they would have to abide by. In addition, the different projects of various clients would be handled in segregated areas.

• Security Checks - Surprise security checks would be carried out to ensure that there is adherence to data security requirements when performing data entry services.

• IT Security - All computers used for the project would be password protected. These computers would additionally be provided with international quality anti-virus protection and advanced firewalls. The anti-virus software would be updated promptly.

• Backup - Regular backups would be done of information stored in the system. The backup data would be locked away securely.

• Other Measures - Other advanced measures that would be taken for information protection include maintenance of a material and personnel movement register, firewalls and intrusion detection, 24/7 security manning the company's premises, and 256 bit AES encryption.

Take Full Advantage of It

Take advantage of professional data entry services and ensure maximum security for your data. When considering a particular company to outsource to, do ask them about their security measures in addition to their pricing and turnaround.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Professional-Data-Entry-Services---Ensure-Maximum-Security-for-Data&id=6961870

Data Mining - You Have to Be Smarter Than the Data and That's the Rub!

The Department of Homeland Security is using all kinds of computer tools to do data mining and they are gathering the data from businesses and government records, where ever they can find them. Many decry these methods but all the information that the government has on each individual citizen is information that they do indeed own. When you do business with a certain company chances are of the information you give them is theirs to give out to whoever they choose, based on their privacy policy, which you submit to.

Some people believe that Department of Homeland Security has stopped collecting data and that is not true. Yes, some personal identity information, they are not allowed to seek without a court order, but for the most part the government has the opportunity to data mine all sorts of information that is already out there in the public record, the government record or with businesses that the government does contract with.

Additionally, all the is data mining done by Department of Homeland Security, has to do with trends and commonalities. By revealing this information, they can find anomalies in the data that alert them that something is going different or unexpected. This helps them predict patterns of behavior and know when something is out of place. The Department of Homeland Security is allowed to go through chat rooms, online blogs, the Internet, personal home pages, video surveillance footage and they also scan every phone call for data.

Why are they doing this? They are doing this to find data that jumps out at them and signals that something is going wrong. With the help of mathematicians, linguists, artificial intelligence and logicians is amazing what they can come up with. Is the government reading your blog? Yes, they are reading your blog, but is not as if they are snooping, they use search engine type spiders to go through all the pages on the Internet.

What else is the software good for or how can these strategies be used better? By knowing what types of people live in a certain area, or what type of events are occurring along with the amount of chatter going on in a specific area, or with a specific group of people that are linked in some way - the Department of Homeland security can predict an international terrorist attack or a "black swan event" such as someone going berserk at a post office.

Will they actually be able to prevent and predict events in this way? Theoretically, it is possible and such technologies are getting us to a closer place where we will soon know just how good we are predicting the future. Something to definitely contemplate in 2008.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---You-Have-to-Be-Smarter-Than-the-Data-and-Thats-the-Rub!&id=884014

Data Entry Services Are Meant To Ease Your Workload

Data entry services provided by the firms are growing very rapidly with a huge demand. It may sound that data entry is a simple task to do but it is not so simple and plays an important role in running a successful business. We all know that data and information related to any company is very crucial for them. Data are priceless for any firm, no-matter they are small or big. The companies provide you highly customized business solutions depending on your requirement.

The companies also provide various range of services for all kinds of textual data capturing from printed matter, manuscripts, and even web research. Very advanced technologies are used to convert large quantities of paper work and image based task to electronic data that is usable in database and in the management system. Any kind of data is very essential for an organization whether it is manual or electronic.

There are many companies that provide highly accurate data entry services with complete confidentiality and high level of accuracy. These services are undertaken by banks, retail organizations, medical research facilities, universities, insurance companies, newspapers, large corporate enterprises, direct marketing and database marketing firms, school and trade associations to make their organization a successful and profitable enterprise.

Outsourcing is a business strategy which is highly being used by businesses to take care of the data entry services. In fact, the process of outsourcing has made things simpler for business owners and the businesses are running successfully. The companies that are involved in outsourcing work do provide these services efficiently to those firms who are burdened with heavy workload. If you are running a business of your own and want to manage it properly and run smoothly, then all you need to do is to hire data entry services.

Availing the benefits of outsourcing works in the form of data entry services can prove tremendous for your company. If you outsource your extra burden of work to a company then in such case, you can make growth plans and strategies for your organization. The companies will console you about the high quality of services and the accuracy they provide for the business that needs data to be extracted from any source.

Data entry services is an information technology enabled services that provides you wide range of services. The professionals working for you are trained and extremely talented who are ready to provide you high end services with full dedication. Since, you are spending money for this, so you must take the best services and choose those companies who can cater to your needs according to you.

Data entry services is not a complex application but it's extremely time taking and this the main reason for a company that hires this service so that they can save their time and money. Every business has many more things to consider for their growth prospects and for this reason they don't want to waste their time and money in such stuffs. The professionals are especially trained according to the requirement of the work depending on how critical the work is. Hiring for this service is definitely a wise decision for your business prospects. These types of services will surely help you to make big profits in the business. The strategy and techniques applied to any business is the key to success.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-Are-Meant-To-Ease-Your-Workload&id=538877

Data Entry Outsourcing - 6 Key Benefits of Outsourced Data Entry

The effective data typing services are must and have to outsource because of globalization. Without information, no company can go ahead and become successful. At every point of making decisions, proper information is essential. So data is one of the most important parts in any organization. There must be proper management to keep the business running smoothly and effectively.

If you want reliable source for data handling, hire typing service company to outsource data entry task. Currently, solutions for every type of business needs are available at reasonable rate. As business grow, it is very hard to manage huge information. So, companies are turning to data entry outsourcing.

Here are the key benefits of data entry outsourcing:

1. All-in-One: data entry firms are offering numbers of services like, data processing, scanning, information formatting, document conversion, indexing and others. They also understand your requirement and deliver the output required format such as Word, Excel, JPG, HTML, XML and Other.

2. Resolve the Issues: As company grows, there are many issues arise like information about employees, benefits, healthcare for them, tuning with rapidly changing technologies, latest business information and others. If organization outsources some of their responsibilities, various issues get resolved quickly and automatically.

3. Better Services: You can expect superior data management and high quality services from outsourcing companies. They have experienced and skilled professionals with latest technologies to deliver unexpected result and stay ahead of other.

4. Least Cost: You can lower down your capital cost of infrastructure and other cost of salary, stationery and other, if you outsource data typing task. Through offshore companies, you can easily save up to 60% on data typing services.

5. Higher Efficiency: If your employees are free from routine and uninteresting process of entering information, they can deliver better result. Ultimately, this can increase the job satisfaction level and efficiency. You can expect high output at lower costs.

6. Place of Outsourcing: You must think about the outsourcing country. India is chosen by various companies for data typing outsourcing. At India, you can get benefits of better quality, enough infrastructure, quick delivery, skilled experts at very low rates.

You can easily reduce tons of time-consuming and boring responsibilities by outsourcing.

Bea Arthur is a quality controller at Data Entry India that provides Data Entry Services, Data Conversion Services and Data Processing Services. They are having more than 17 years of experience in data entry outsourcing.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing---6-Key-Benefits-of-Outsourced-Data-Entry&id=4253927

Remuneration of Outsourcing Data Entry

Outsource Data entry is a fast growing industry. The world of business is dynamic, fast paced, and in constant change. In such an environment the accessibility of accurate, detailed information is a necessity. Entry is the main component of any business firm. Online data entry is a very lengthy and tiresome work, so the best option for companies to take care of this is through data entry outsourcing services.

The more you know about the market, your customers and other factors that influence an organization, the better you can understand your own business. Services by professionals appointed for this task play a crucial role in running a business successfully. In today's market, data entry solutions for different types of businesses are available at very competitive prices.

Core Benefits of Outsourcing Services

Affordable Cost: In this way, the companies can reduce the expenditure of resources and increase the efficiency and productivity. As the result of which, increase are the obvious outcome.

High Quality Work: data entry outsourcing services is getting fast track quality work as per the requirements. As bulk assignments delivered everyday without compromising on the quality issue, outsourcing data entry services is fast becoming the first choice of most of information technology companies.

Time saving and High Efficiency: Everything in or out of organization is primarily done to get maximum possible benefits in minimum possible time. Therefore, as one of the important benefits of outsourcing is that it minimizes time spending and this consequently leads to high efficiency in the business process.

Efficient Data Management: Since the data is entered afresh into different formats, it is managed and digitized to give an affable appeal, besides, high accuracy levels.

Easing out Burden: Benefits of outsourcing, is the easing of burden of companies, who are involved in strategic processes, which play an involved role in profits. By outsourcing the time-consuming, the company gets relieved of unnecessary pressure and can concentrate over the new projects.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Remuneration-of-Outsourcing-Data-Entry&id=2122790

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.



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

Data Mining For Professional Service Firms - The Marketing Mother Lode May Already Be in Your Files

No one needs to tell you about the value of information in today's world--particularly the value of information that could help grow your practice. But has it occurred to you that you probably have more information in your head and your existing files that you realize? Tap into this gold mine of data to develop a powerful and effective marketing plan that will pull clients in the door and push your profitability up.

The way to do this is with data mining, which is the process of using your existing client data and demographics to highlight trends, make predictions and plan strategies.

In other words, do what other kinds of businesses have been doing for years: Analyze your clients by industry and size of business, the type and volume of services used, the amount billed, how quickly they pay and how profitable their business is to you. With this information, you'll be able to spot trends and put together a powerful marketing plan.

To data mine effectively, your marketing department needs access to client demographics and financial information. Your accounting department needs to provide numbers on the services billed, discounts given, the amounts actually collected, and receivables aging statistics. You may identify a specific service being utilized to a greater than average degree by a particular industry group, revealing a market segment worth pursuing. Or you may find an industry group that represents a significant portion of your billed revenue, but the business is only marginally profitable because of write-offs and discounts. In this case, you may want to shift your marketing focus.

You should also look at client revenues and profitability by the age of the clients. If your percentage of new clients is high, it could mean you're not retaining a sufficient number of existing clients. If you see too few new clients, you may be in for problems when natural client attrition is not balanced by new client acquisition.

The first step in effective data mining is to get everyone in the firm using the same information system. This allows everyone in the office who needs the names and addresses of the firm's clients and contacts to have access to that data. Require everyone to record notes on conversations and meetings in the system. Of course, the system should also accommodate information that users don't want to share, such as client's private numbers or the user's personal contacts. This way, everyone can utilize the system for everything, which makes them more likely to use it completely.

Your information system can be either contact information or customer relationship management software (a variety of packages are on the market) or you can have a system custom designed. When considering software to facilitate data mining, look at three key factors:

1. Ease of use. If the program isn't easy to use, it won't get used, and will end up being just a waste of time and money.

2. Accessibility. The system must allow for data to be accessible from anywhere, including laptops, hand-held devices, from the internet or cell phones. The data should also be accessible from a variety of applications so it can be used by everyone in the office all the time, regardless of where they are.

3. Sharability. Everyone needs to be able to access the information, but you also need privacy and editing rights so you can assign or restrict what various users can see and input.

Don't overlook the issue of information security. Beyond allowing people the ability to code certain entries as private, keep in mind that anyone with access to the system as the ability to either steal information or sabotage your operation. Talk to your software vendor about various security measures but don't let too much security make the system unusable. Protect yourself contractually with noncompete and nondisclosure agreements and be sure to back up your data regularly.

Finally, expect some staffers to resist when you ask them to change from the system they've been using. You may have to sell them on the benefits outweighing the pain of making a change and learning the new system--which means you need to be totally sold on it yourself. The managing partner, or the leader of the firm, needs to be driving this initiative for it to succeed. When it does succeed, you'll be able to focus your marketing dollars and efforts in the most profitable areas with the least expense, with a tremendous positive impact on the bottom line.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-For-Professional-Service-Firms---The-Marketing-Mother-Lode-May-Already-Be-in-Your-Files&id=4607430

Outsource Data Entry - A Wise Business Decision

Getting the benefits of outsourcing data entry services for your business will be a wise choice. Many offshore companies guarantee quick and accurate data entry services. These companies offer data entry services from industry expert professionals and flexibility as per user requirements. All recent reports say, trend of outsourcing low priority work will continue to grow gradually.

In earlier days, outsourcing was thought as a temporary option of meeting particular objective, is now becoming the best industry option. Viewed as a temporary business solution, outsourcing is now a strategically important business decision. Outsourcing your services will reduce your costs with improved services.

Advantages of Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing gives you many business advantages include:

- By outsourcing one can easily concentrate on core business competencies and goals.
- In these cut throat competitive time, outsourcing is a cautious way of controlling expensive staffing cost. Person can get outsourcing services on per transaction basis, which ease the hurdles of having the possibility of firing staff members.
- By outsourcing you can get the advantage of economies of scale. If you work with an outsourcing company you will save your valuable money, probably boost your operational efficiency.
- By outsourcing your data-entry work your cost will be on per transaction basis which will allow you to easily predict your budget and give you the best budget planning.
- By outsourcing organizations do not have to worry about meeting time lines. As many outsourcing companies guarantee of in-time delivery which was already specified in user agreement and will not be longer concern to worry.
- Most of the outsourcing companies located in cheap offshore countries like India, Indonesia etc and having expertise of handling data entry operations.

Thus by outsourcing data-entry work organizations can get advantage in terms of time, money and efficiency which will obviously increase business productivity.




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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.




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Organizations Outsourcing Data Entry to Data Entry Companies

Gradually, Companies are adapting outsourcing option as business strategy. It is strategy of hiring a company to carry out definite tasks rather than engaging employee for such. Most of the companies outsource their supportive activities. Now, workforce of company can give special attention to the key business activities. You can depend on the expert for specific support activity.

Data entry is one of the most utilized outsourcing services. Organizations are commonly utilizing this service for better support. There is high demand of data entry companies so the firms are growing very fast.

Information is the most critical asset of any company. Executives can able to make good business decisions by getting essential information correctly and collectively. Thus, Organizations are searching for high quality and experienced copy typing solution. Generally, companies are seeking for below mention qualities:

> Very detail oriented solution
> Highly trained employee
> Good creation and managerial ability in handling customized project plan
> And security that meets the requirement

There are various industries that require data typing solution. Any company can outsource their requirement to increase the performance of core activities. Let's take an example of university. There is bulk of admissions every year and too much collection of data. It is not easy to manage every record as paper document. So, data entry can help to protect important information through digitization of data.

There is a wide range of data typing solutions offered by outsourcing companies. Here is the some data typing outsourcing services from huge list like medical research, banking form filling, manufacturing firms, insurance companies and direct marketing through emails.

You can surely get tremendous opportunity for business expansion and growth by having benefits of data entry services. The data typing outsourcing companies can deliver very effective and accurate output. They have enough setup and skilled employee for quick delivery. Certainly, you can lower the cost by outsourcing the requirement. Upgraded technologies help companies to make trust on outsourcing companies. There are various data typing companies using special authentication system to improve data security.

Advice: "Rather than managing huge staff and offering benefits to them, as a wise company outsource your entry requirement."



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