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/

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Advertising on the Web and Data mining

The challenge of effective web advertisement primarily involves placing relevant ads on user requested web pages. Those ads must be relevant to a page receiver, that is relevant to the page context and/or directly to the user. What algorithms are being used for this? What trends are there now in business intelligence and data mining for digital advertisement solutions?
Web Ad Placement

There are some vital factors for web ad placement that we state below:

    Positioning. The position of the ad on a page greatly influences its clickability. The click probability decreases exponentially as the position/sequence increases.
    Similarity to the user’s search queries. The ad attractiveness correlates with the query terms.
    Specialized media (topic oriented magazines/ blogs with a high ads click-through rate). Statistics prove that users do prefer a web page relevant ad rather than unrelated messy stuff.
    User relevant. The web media use the advantage of having some information about the user. This enables them to choose the ‘right’ ad for ‘the user’. Statistically and cumulatively one may determine a visitor’s interest for certain things, for example:
        search queries (correlates with point 2)
        social nets and related groups
        email content exchange  (being used extensively by Google - ethicalness is not quite clear)
        bookmarks and backlinks

Of course, lots of privacy issues get involved here; that we will leave for future discussions.
Search queries dependent ads

Much of the effectiveness of search advertising comes from the “adwords” model of matching search queries to advertisements. Search ads are placed among the results of a search query. Advertisers bid for the right to have their ad shown in response to certain queries, but they pay only if the ad is clicked on. The particular ads to be shown are selected by a complex process, which we consider in this post. It embraces search terms that the advertiser has bid for, the amount of their bid, the statistical probability that the ad will be clicked on, and the total budget the advertiser has offered for the service.
On-Line Algorithms

What algorithms are to be applied in placing ads in modern web business? The algorithms for getting ads, that are relevant to search queries, must be of the on-line nature. Strictly, on-line algorithms are those where data input is fed into the algorithm, without having the entire input available from the start. It very much looks like signal processing (DSP), where the input stream is not evident from the start. Input data stream might also be so fast, that the processing latency is of much higher importance compared to static presented data input. But this is not of our present scope.
‘On-line’ here refers to the nature of the algorithm, and should not be confused with ‘on-line’ meaning ‘on the Internet’

The main characteristic under our scope is that the on-line algorithm cannot access the data in any order (unlike the off-line algorithm). Even when it cannot grasp all the data, the algorithm must make some decisions. The list of online algorithms you might look at are here.
Using off-line algorithms for ad placement, we just observe search queries for a time period, and consider the bids advertisers made on search terms, as well as their advertising budgets for the time period. Thus the algorithm can then assign ads to the queries in a way that maximizes both the revenue to the search engine and the number of impressions that each advertiser gets. But since users who issue queries can’t wait for the aggregate results, on-line algorithms enter in here.

With on-line algorithms we may use past data for computing (like click-through rate), yet we cannot assume having certain queries or events in the future.
Greedy Algorithms

Since we can hardly calculate the maximum benefit with non-full-scope input data, why not be ‘greedy’ with every step of process, that is to calculate maximum profit at each step hoping to get optimum benefit in the total (global). This is the definition of greedy algorithm. Many on-line algorithms are of the greedy algorithm type. These algorithms make their decision in response to each input element by maximizing some function of the input data and the past information (like clicking behavior or the ad’s budget remaining). These greedy strategies in general do not always produce an optimal solution. So we consider next term.
Competitive ratio

Competitive ratio is the minimum rate of the online algorithm compared to the optimum off-line algorithms for the same case/problem over all possible inputs (especially the worst case). c = efficiency(online)/efficiency(offline) in the worst case. Through some calculation one may prove that generally for the greedy algorithm in ads problem the competitive ratio is not less than 1/2.
Balance Algorithm

But there are other than greedy algorithms, giving better a competitive ratio. Besides the maximum present revenue balance, the balance algorithm considers also the greatest remaining budget of an advertiser in order to decide which ad to show. Its ultimate competitive ratio (simplified adwords model) will go close to 0.63 as the number of bidders and queries grow. However it does not work optimally in some extreme cases.

So the Generalized Balance algorithm takes into consideration two more things:

    each advertiser’s budget should be used, not just the greatest remaining budget
    the benefit of higher bid values (product of the bid and the click-through rate)

Example

In this example we compare the simplified situation for off-line and greedy on-line algorithms in ad placement.

Advertiser ‘A’  has bid 10 cents on the search term “cookie”. Advertiser B has bid 20 cents on both the terms “cookie” and “fruit”. Both have monthly budgets of $100. We have no past statistics on either of these terms. We presuppose that only one ad is  to be to displayed with one query. The obvious thing to do is to display B’s ad, because they bid more (greedy approach).

However, suppose there will be lots of search queries this month for “fruit” but very few for “cookie.” Then A will never spend its $100 budget, while B will spend its full budget even if we give the query to A.

The worst case that can happen is that 500 “fruit” queries arrive, followed by 500 “cookie” queries (see the figure below, at right).  The greedy algorithm will assign the first 500 ads to B, earning $100, and then has no ad for the next 500, earning nothing. The competitive ratio in this case is equal 2/3.

Specifically, if there will be at least 500 more queries for either “fruit” or “cookie,” then there is no harm, and potentially a benefit, in giving the query to A. It will still be possible for B to spend its entire budget, while we are increasing the amount of A’s budget that will be spent. This argument makes sense both from the point of view of the search engine, which wants to maximize total revenue, and from the point of view of both A and B advertisers, who presumably want to get all the impressions that their budgets allow.
If we could know the future, then we would know how many more “fruit” queries and how many more “cookie” queries were going to arrive this month. If that number is below 500, then we want to give the query to B to maximize revenue, but if it is 500 or more, then we want to give it to A. Since we don’t know the future, an on-line algorithm cannot always perform as well as an off-line algorithm.
Summary

These basic theses and the simplified example have shown the challenge and also an elementary approach (greedy, on-line) to ad placement related to search queries. In following post we will consider more advanced algorithms for data mining applied to web advertising.




Source: http://extract-web-data.com/advertising-on-the-web-and-data-mining/

What Are the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Data Entry Services?

A number of business firms now outsource their non-core back office tasks to external companies to save their money, time and effort. However, before assigning your data processing and data entry jobs to third party providers, it is good to consider the major pros and cons of outsourcing data entry services. With a clear insight as regards the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing, you can decide whether outsourcing is a right option for your business organization.

Professional Data Entry Services Offer an Assortment of Benefits

The important advantage of outsourcing these services is that it helps to streamline your business functions. When you assign your data entry jobs to professional BPO companies you can get the work done promptly in a short span of time. These services ensure an assortment of additional benefits such as:

• Saves your money: Outsourcing these services enables you to save on the money that would be required to appoint additional staff, and maintain the infrastructure essential to carry out the data processing tasks within your organization. You can avoid any additional outlay involved in terms of providing salaries, compensations, incentives and other allowances for your data processing staff.

• Business records in organized formats: Business process outsourcing services from reliable firms allow you to keep business records without any errors in properly organized formats.

• Reduce your workload: Well-planned services significantly reduce your managerial responsibilities, and save you the time and effort required to complete the monotonous and time consuming data processing jobs. These services enable you to concentrate on core competencies with improved efficiency.

• Enhance business productivity and cash flow: Outsourcing data entry services would help you enhance the efficiency and productivity of your corporate firm, which would in turn increase your sales leads and cash flow.

• Deliver better customer support: When you outsource the data processing jobs, you get more time to plan and deliver the best services for your customers, which would ensure better business benefits.

• Share your business risks: Business process outsourcing services provide you an opportunity to share your business risks with an external agency.

In other words, outsourcing data entry services help business entities to remain competitive in the business scenario through modernizing their core processes. Realizing these many benefits, many organizations are now assigning their data processing jobs to external companies.

Cons of Data Entry Outsourcing

• Lack of focus: At times, most BPO service providers might offer data entry services that do not match exactly with your specific requirements. This might affect your business operations.

• Accessibility to confidential data: When you outsource your core data entry jobs such as accounting, payroll processing, HR and recruitment, insurance claim processing and other tasks, the BPO companies would get a chance to access the more personal and confidential information of your organization.

• Inconsistency in output quality: If the provider you have chosen is inexperienced and lacks consistency, then it might lead to problems such as delayed submission of completed projects, processed files without accuracy and quality, inappropriate assignment of responsibilities, lack of communication and so on.

Partner with an Experienced BPO Company

Briefly, the pros absolutely override the cons of outsourcing data entry services. However, to get the best of merits from these services, ensure that you associate with an experienced company. Established business process outsourcing companies can deliver precise data processing solutions that best suit your requirements and budget limits, in rapid turnaround time.

Managed Outsource Solutions (MOS), a leading BPO Company, ensures precision and speed in its data entry services.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Are-the-Pros-and-Cons-of-Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services?&id=6271210

Core Benefits of Data Entry Outsourcing Services

Due to globalization of businesses and the world becoming a united marketplace, the need for effective data entry solutions have surfaced. Data is one of the most important parts of any company. Its appropriate management is very essential in order to keep the business running smoothly and effortlessly. In order to have reliable data handling, obtaining services from a data entry company helps.

In today's market, data entry solutions for different types of businesses are available at very competitive prices. An increasing number of companies are turning to data entry outsourcing services. Hiring offshore companies for outsourcing addresses the challenge of obtaining better work quality from qualified professionals in a cost effective and timely manner.

The benefits of data entry outsourcing services include:

a) When an organization grows, it has to face many issues related to employees, their benefits, keeping pace with new technology, employees' healthcare, having the latest business information, and so on. When a company outsources some of their responsibilities, many of these issues get resolved automatically. The same holds true for data entry service.

b) India is preferred by many companies for data entry outsourcing. Various back office functions are taken care of, and the benefits of quality processes, global delivery, and better infrastructure are enjoyed, thus enabling you to give attention to other core business issues.

g) Data entry solutions firms offer numerous services such as data processing, image scanning, data formatting, file conversion, data security, SGML/HTML coding, etc. These outsourcing companies can provide data in various formats including XML, MS Word, MS Excel, JPG, DBF, and HTML.

h) Better data management and a high quality of service can be expected with timely delivery from data outsourcing companies. They hire qualified and experienced professionals, and use the latest technology in order to get more clients and stay ahead of fellow competitors.

i) Data processing is used in businesses of all sizes and is very useful for them. It is more than just the implementation of data at the right place and time. They cover all important aspects of data handling and use them for your company's profit.

j) Online data entry outsourcing services minimizes the capital cost of infrastructure and management problems. There is a greater level of employee's job satisfaction due to a reduction of mundane and uninteresting data entry tasks. These companies make the best possible use of their international resources. You can expect high output at lower costs.

Data entry outsourcing can relieve lots of time-consuming and tedious responsibilities for a company. Outsourcing to India is the ultimate answer for the challenge of cutting costs and increasing profit margins.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Core-Benefits-of-Data-Entry-Outsourcing-Services&id=1548011

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

Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing is contracting with outside consultants, software houses or service bureaus to perform systems analysis, programming, and data center operations. In the U.S. in 2003, the term took on extra meaning, often referring to jobs being given to people in companies located in India and other countries. The main reason behind outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost.

Data entry outsourcing is limited to all types of data entry operations e.g. data conversion, document and image processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc.

The need for data entry is constant for some organizations for making day to day decisions. In such cases data entry is a regular and continuous requirement. The types of companies for which this is the case are financial institutions, hospitals, lawyers, court houses, oil companies, transportation companies, Ivy League colleges, pharmaceutical companies, universities, publishing companies etc. For some other organizations data entry may be just a temporary requirement. Accurate and easily accessible data is a necessity for all.

Accumulated data is a powerful management resource. Since data entry outsourcing at lower cost is available, the latent potential of the information accumulated in data which was dumped earlier is being usefully exploited by the organization where data entry is just a temporary requirement.

The combination of digitization of media and the rush to outsource has resulted in a wide range of customers from the UK, USA, France, Norway and more than 20 other countries coming to India, China etc for data entry outsourcing.

Most of the time-consuming data entry jobs are being done by outsourcing. For example, catalog management, which involves handling and maintaining paper catalogs, is not just time consuming, but also expensive. By converting your product catalogs to online and digital catalogs, making changes, and updating your product catalog becomes as easy as the click of a button once data entry has been completed.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing&id=222083

Outsourcing Data Entry Work

As the business world develops quickly, more and more companies are unable to manage large quantities of data coming fast and furious day in day out. They need to spend time and effort on other important issues related to their businesses instead of wasting all just on data entry.

So what they did next is to outsource those work to specialized companies and freelance individuals who will be keen to take over.

By outsourcing, they would be relieved greatly from the pressure of handling all those workload and focus on immediate tasks like marketing strategies, promotion, customer follow-up and support.

Moreover, outsourcing is cheaper and less time consuming from conventional recruitment which they ended up spending more money and time teaching the newcomers and making sure they understand quickly.

It is also the best option for all business needs requiring advanced pool of talent. Such as experienced and skilled professionals who would have no problem handling all related tasks entrusted by companies.

Now that full training is provided by companies, the client companies can be relieved from of training the employees again and again just to make sure they understand completely before entrusting the work to them.

Outsourcing data entry work also helps them to track down and update all incoming latest data 24 hours a day and 365 days a year on autopilot. Because of this, there is no limit as to how much work the client companies can outsource so long as they have the affordability and trust whoever they outsource to do a great job.

The most common work outsourced so far are bills, legal documents, invoices, manuals, medical billing, payroll, research reports, surveys, tax forms etc.

Most data processing companies have safety measures such as double keying process which involves rekeying data into different file formats. After which, the files are compared electronically with each other to provide accurate results to clients.

Henceforth selecting a legitimate company for outsourcing would help the companies get relief from most of the data processing problems.

Some companies are quite versatile in data processing and are more than willing to help clients in handling their projects irregardless of race and language.

Speaking of which, it is one of the main reasons for outsourcing being popular among clients to those companies. It also enables them to get the necessary output in their desired online format like CD-R, CD-RW, FTP just to name a few.

Apart from versatility, they have up-to-date technologies based on the current trends in relevant industry. These will get all the outsourced work accomplished quickly, flawlessly and easily.

As of today, outsourcing to developing countries is pretty common. This helps clients achieve their desired output for comparative lesser amount.

Just because those countries are developing does not mean the people are low standard in qualities. They are highly committed and well-trained to perform just as well as those in developed countries. The only difference is they are willing to accept lower rates and still deliver high quality work.

Overall, choosing a reliable company to outsource your work is a perfect solution to cut costs, get things done faster and free up your time on other things.

My-Data-Team is one of the few legitimate work-from-home data entry programs that delivers when it matters most.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Work&id=5376156

Outsource Data Entry Services - A Big "CATCH" For Your Business

A thread called globalization that goes on expanding commercial boundaries between business firms in every nook and corner of this world also triggers the chords of outsourcing. A company manages to stay afloat seeing off few deadly tides and some rampant swerving on its rugged path by safely moving on few crucial lifeboats called information. Without information any business-be it a thriving one or a newly started one- meets its fate called winding-up since at crucial junctures of its business life cycle is largely dependent on information. Only when your lifeboat is out of harm your passage across any terrain remains safe. On a similar note when dedicated people deployed by authentic data entry services help in organizing unprocessed data so that it becomes valid information your business is sure to sustain making the most of the clarity of the information in hand.

Outsourcing data entry is a good plan unless you figure out the best in that business and delegate them tasks that are quite feasible to undertake with due respect to the time frame. It is always better to have some companies beside to share some volume of tasks related to information as though your business strives to manage bigger projects the quality of delivery is quite there in that high range only if your business sticks to the level it can actually manage to hold. Is it necessary for the firm to place its toes on a thing that it knows is beyond its reach? As advised by many tycoons outsourcing such services is quite essential from a business' perspective to ensure same performance without any anomaly.

In the coming paragraphs let us look into why a business is advised to eye outsourcing data entry services as a serious option?

Cost Minimization

Business firms need not invest much in developing infrastructure that is quite necessary to carry out such services within your organization. No need for a company to train candidates and place them on jobs that certainly saves a lot of money, which can be wisely invested for maximizing profits.

Adaptability

This trait comes to fullest utility when your business firm sees an opportunity to diversify its business operations by resorting to operating with a mix of products or services. A relevant or appropriate task can be delegated to outsourcing services so as to let them do their best for your services independently. For this you may even think about deploying quite a lot of dependable data entry services out there.

Technologically Advanced

Whatever be the place of outsourcing there has to be technical progression or else there is no scope in outsourcing projects to that place. Every business that deals with outsourcing services would like to keep up with technological furtherance so as to stay active in the industry.

Completeness

As many data entry services, which take up outsourcing as a primary means of flourishing in the market, render complete business services related to data entry paying heed to the needs of the company that has outsourced. By complete I like to signify that a whole lot of services categorized into an assortment are rightly offered.

Highly Effective

India rules the world when it boils down to providing excellent results in projects that are being outsourced. A perfect infrastructure coupled with adept professionals who are all motivated to push their standards further thus helping your business grow highly effective.

With all these benefits inherently available with such companies making your mind as to outsourcing data entry services is a wise option strategically.

Finding a trustable firm rendering data entry services is not difficult any longer. Search for the reliable business establishments to outsource data entry and feel happy for having acted wise.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Entry-Services---A-Big-CATCH-For-Your-Business&id=4638218

4 Types of Outsourcing Data Entry Services

In present era of globalization, it is required for any type of business to manage all data and information handy and easy accessible. Data entry is a best option with its multitude advantages but it consumes your times. In this competitive business world no one can afford time so outsourcing is become most favorite term. And data entry services are become most popular term for outsourcing.

Internet and batter communication strategies made data entry outsourcing easier. Low pricing, rapid service and accurate result also attract business for outsourcing. There are many types of data entry services available in market depth here we are talking about most important 4 types as defined as below:

Online data entry: It is a process of entering information into online databases or applications. This service includes medical forms, shipping documents, insurance claims, e-books and catalogs data entry. Outsourcing companies have reliable resources like high-speed broadband connection and well configured computer system to accomplish the task rapidly and accurately.

Offline data entry: It includes offline form filling, offline database entry, URL list collection, offline data collection etc. It is most requirements of various types of businesses like telecoms, medical, insurance, social, commercial, financial and others. To complete this task speedily, offshore outsourcing company have skilled experts with good typing speed and latest IT equipments.

Numeric data entry: It is a process of managing digits or numeric information and data into various formats like HTML, XML, EXCEL, WORD and Access. In this service includes medical billing, examination results, identity details, business reports, survey report, estimated budget, numeric information and more... It is very complicated task, outsourcing company make it easier with its expertise. For outsourcing just send requirements in any format and sure get quality output.

Textual data entry: It is mainly used for E-book creation as it is easy to keep and easy to access anywhere. It involves mailing lists, word processing, yellow page listings, manuscript typing, e-books and legal documents. This service offer outputs in various formats like HTML, Frame Maker, XML, PDF, GIF, JPG, TIFF, PageMaker, Excel, Word and QuarkXPress.

All above services is vital for any sized business and organization. With the help of IT outsourcing services you can get effective solution with huge savings of time and cost.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?4-Types-of-Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=5275811

Outsourcing Data Entry and Data Conversion Services

Data Entry is one such aspects of any business that needs to be handled properly for expanding your business. Online Form Entry Services is one of the leading elements for running a business successfully. Online form entry services are ideally suited to high volume form entry applications such as CD-ROM publication, surveys and questionnaire, database and mailing list compilation, litigation support, electronic publication and multimedia system.

Form Entry plays vital role in every business area. Accumulated data is a powerful management resource. Online entry services cover most business and professional activities, including data conversion, image entry, document and image processing, catalog processing, image enhancement, image editing, and photo manipulation.

In this competitive world, data processing and storage of data in multiple formats is of great essence to every business. It makes the accessibility of data whenever it is needed. Sometimes it becomes headache, but Data conversion services are used to avoid such circumstances.

Data Conversion can be defined as the translation of data from one data format to other format.

Data conversion services include:

o Document conversion
o Book conversion
o CAD conversion
o PDF conversion
o XML/HTML/SGML conversion
o Catalog conversion
o Excel/Word/Email/Page Maker/DBF data format Services.

Affordable and Reliable form entry services provide numeric online entry, textual online entry, image entry, data format and also online data entry, offline data entry with strong quality and time bound. Form entry services also include data processing, image processing, forms processing, document processing, insurance claim processing, data mining and data cleansing services.

so, outsource your data entry work to reliable form entry provider and remove management headaches.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry-and-Data-Conversion-Services&id=1357038

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.



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

Data Entry - 5 Concerns While Outsourcing Data Entry

The world becomes open market for your business because of globalization. Business must set high efficiency level to encourage the output. Apart from core business, one has to perform non-core activities to smoothen the business performance. Managing information is one of the monotonous activities. You can go for data entry but it is, once again, mind-numbing and time-consuming task.

Companies can pick data entry firm in order to have accurate and reliable information handling. There are various data typing services available for different types of businesses for reasonable cost. However, there are continues growth of data typing firms; one must find the best practice and reputed firm to outsource.

Here are 5 concerns while outsourcing data entry:

Affordable Cost: it is the most concern issue of almost any firm that wants to outsource. It is very true that one can save up to 60% of their data typing cost if they outsource such task to country like India.

High Accuracy: The accurate output is also important factor that matters a lot while outsourcing. Without accurate information, companies can not take proper decision and make loss. A good data typing firm is offering 99.98% accuracy. So, there is no need to worry about such.

Time Frame: Companies require the information quickly. If you have huge information and want typing, choose the firm having numbers of professionals and using special techniques to quicken the task.

Data Confidentiality: After listening much about fraud and scam of data typing firm, companies are most concern about the security of data. If you will outsource the requirement to genuine and promising company, your issue of data security will get resolved.

Genuine: Is the firm genuine? Answer is simple. Get the track record of that firm as well as get input from the clients of that firm which you want to outsource.

Although there are such benefits of outsourcing data entry, organizations are staying away from outsourcing because of fraud. To avoid scam, always, ask for the trial or pilot project. So, you will get better idea about their promises and can choose better source for outsourcing data typing.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry---5-Concerns-While-Outsourcing-Data-Entry&id=4640239

The Benefits of Data Mining

Data mining can truly help a business reach its fullest potential. It is a way to assess how business is being affected by certain characteristics, and can help business owners increase their profits and avoid making business mistakes down the line. Essentially, through this process, a business is analyzing certain data from different perspectives in order to get a full rounded view of how their company is doing. Business owners can get a broad perspective on things such as customer trending, where they are losing money and where they are making money. The information can also reveal ways that can help a business cut unneeded costs and can help them increase their overall income.

Data mining software is one tool that can help a company assess and analyze their data in more efficient terms. It can be extremely user friendly and allow people to delve into their data from a variety of different angles and points of view. In more technical terms, data mining software allows you to see the correlations and patterns of one's own data compared with those across many other regional databases.

People have been using data mining for many years in different formats. Only since the technology has become available has data software been used. But there have been many ways in the past for companies to assess their data and use it to their advantage. By taking polls, or using store scanners, product codes and bar codes, people have been able to gather data, analyze it and use it to their advantage. But it cannot be denied that the availability of greater technology has greatly increased the ability to store or gather data, make predictions about outcomes and use customer trend reports to greater advantages. The ability to store infinite amounts of data has given business owners a great advantage and truly has helped increase sales and lower costs. This data mining has actually led to data being stored in data warehouses. In data warehouses, various organizations will integrate their mined data into one large data warehouse. The information accessible in data warehouses is available to further help companies reduce risk taking and integrate proper selling techniques to improve business.

Data mining also can allow companies to see where their best selling points are and give them the opportunity to take advantage of this information. For example, if a pharmacy places a display of lip balm at the cashier counter, data mining can detect how many people bought lip balm from the cashier counter rather people who bought the lip balm when it was placed at another point in the store. Data mining can determine where the most effective points of sale are throughout a store or if a certain promotion went well one time of the month, but did not go well at another time of the month. Companies can make offers based on the buying habits of their customers as well.

Data mining can truly help businesses reach their highest profitability by paying attention to customer trending.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Benefits-of-Data-Mining&id=4565509

Outsourcing Data Entry Services

Data or raw information is the backbone of any industry or business organization. However, raw data is seldom useful in its pure form. For it to be of any use, data has to be recorded properly and organized in a particular manner. Only then can data be processed. That is why it is important to ensure accurate data entry. But because of the unwieldy nature of data, feeding data is a repetitive and cumbersome job and it requires heavy investment, both in terms of time and energy from staff. At the same time, it does not require a high level of technical expertise. Due to these factors, data entry can safely be outsourced, enabling companies to devote their time and energy on tasks that enhance their core competence.

Many companies, big and small, are therefore enhancing their productivity by outsourcing the endless monotonous tasks that tend to cut down the organization's productivity. In times to come, outsourcing these services will become the norm and the volume of work that is outsourced will multiply. The main reason for these kinds of development is the Internet. Web based customer service and instant client support has made it possible for service providers to act as one stop business process outsourcing partners to parent companies that require support.

Data entry services are not all alike. Different clients have different demands. While some clients may require recording information coupled with document management and research, others may require additional services like form processing or litigation support. Data entry itself could be from various sources. For instances, sometimes information may need to be typed out from existing documents while at other times, data needs to be extracted from images or scanned documents. To rise up to these challenges, service providers who offer these services must have the expertise and the software to ensure rapid and accurate data entry. That is why it is important to choose your service provider with a lot of care.

Before hiring your outsourcing partner, you need to ask yourself the following questions.

* What kind of reputation does the company enjoy? Do they have sufficient years of experience? What kind of history and background does the company enjoy?

* Do they have a local management arm that you can liaise with on a regular basis?

* Do the service personnel understand your requirements and can they handle them effectively?

* What are the steps taken by the company to ensure that there is absolutely no compromise in confidentiality and security while dealing with vital confidential data?

* Is there a guarantee in place?

* What about client references?

The answers to these questions will help you identify the right partner for outsourcing your data entry service requirements.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=3568373