McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper company in the United States, improved news aggregation throughput by 5X – from 20,000 to 100,000 articles per month.
Web Intelligence Solution:
News Syndication
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Web Intelligence improves services, satisfaction, and profits
News providers and media companies face a growing challenge in assembling, monitoring and verifying news from diverse sources on the web such as media partners, local newspapers and government agencies. To be competitive, you must extract and monitor massive amounts of web content across multiple geographies and languages in real-time, and at the same time perform text transformation such as translation, extract meta information and filter out noise with 100% reliability.
Featured Customer Success Stories in News Syndication:
Challenge
- McClatchy syndicates content to customers like Lexus/Nexus, Factiva and other papers.
- They were looking for a way to streamline news aggregation for syndication.
Solution
- McClatchy uses Kapow to harvest and categorize content from local papers.
- Kapow eliminates hand coding by technical staff and provides self-service tools that news editors can use.
Results
- McClatchy collects over 3,000 news articles daily.
- Throughput has improved 5X, from 20,000 stories per month to 100,000.
ProQuest uses Kapow to automate web intelligence, enabling them to expand their line of university research and Spanish language articles.
Challenge
- ProQuest collects, organizes and publishes university research and Spanish language news articles, which are then repackaged and resold to education customers.
- The number of unstructured sources has grown significantly, and ProQuest needed to harvest research from public and private sources where electronic feeds weren't available.
- They also needed to aggregate and syndicate unstructured university research and Spanish language news articles
- They needed easy integration into existing syndication infrastructure.
Solution
- They use Kapow robots to automate web intelligence. This has enabled them to expand their product line of university research and Spanish language news articles.
- Competitive advantage is gained by independently harvesting the research supply chain.
- Kapow is a core component of their internet content acquisition (ICA) platform.
Results
- As a core element in their internet content acquisition platform, Kapow has had a direct and significant impact on revenues and margins.
- Kapow is an integral part of their value proposition as an information provider.
NewsBank, a content aggregator for small newspapers, reduced their development time for web intelligence scripts from 2.5 hours to 15 minutes.
Challenge
- Replace Perl scripts, which were costly to develop.
- Deliver newsfeeds to customers as RSS feeds.
- Harvest articles covering multiple pages.
- Eliminate “black box” tools. Give developers control of the harvesting process.
- Integrate the solution into their batch scheduler.
Solution
- With Kapow, collected news articles are written to a database and delivered to NewsBank customers as RSS feeds.
- A batch scheduler manages robot runs, which are executed several times a day.
Results
- Reduced development time from 2.5 hours for Perl scripts to 15 minutes for robot “scripting.”
- Increased sourcing. They are now harvesting articles from 300 sites.
- Reduced development and maintenance costs, enabling them to accomplish more with existing staff.
With Kapow, InfoGroup collects and refines data to the highest compilation standards from the widest range of web sources.
Challenge
- Top internet search engines, in-car navigation systems and operator-assisted directory services rely on InfoGroup as the source of truth.
- The challenge for InfoGroup was to maintain the highest data compilation standards and seek out additional sources of validated data.
Solution
- Kapow enables them to extract web data from a wide range of sources, including FCC filings from county court houses and basic company data from public websites to supplement the business and consumer data products they sell.
- Much of the information they receive is from subscription-based data feeds. They use Kapow for all custom data requests, which are not available from data providers.
- By automating web data extraction, the Business Content Group can support the diverse needs of all InfoGroup departments and divisions.
Results
- Improved quality of data they provide to their customers.
- Dramatically reduced or eliminated hours of manual web intelligence.
- They can now get to data sources they couldn't reach in the past.
A leading mobile phone manufacturer uses Kapow to monitor blogs, forums and social media sites for consumer commentary on their mobile phones.
Challenge
- They needed a more effective way to extract business intelligence on mobile phones and mobile phone customers from comments found on blogs, forums and industry websites.
- They were using a home-grown solution that was offsetting benefits with excessive maintenance and troubleshooting costs.
- They needed a robust platform for web data extraction and integration that could handle JavaScript, Ajax and other challenging source content.
Solution
- Kapow robots automated web intelligence, with no coding required.
- Collected web data is integrated directly to an internal database.
Results
- More comprehensive and accurate data for making product decisions.
- Easier maintenance and development with the Kapow platform compared to their previous home-grown solution.
- More robust technology for extracting data in JavaScript, Ajax and other difficult web content sources.