Dapper is officially my favorite web application I’ve reviewed! And I only started playing with it early this morning. Dapper will change the way I use the internet!
They’ve executed on something I’ve been wishing for for quite some time. I’m SO glad I don’t have to build it now.
Dapper allows you extract data and create a web service out of ANY webpage. No need to understand grep, curl or complex scripting. They provide a visual interface for selecting the content elements that you want to capture from a page.
They’ve done a decent job with the interface for defining which content you want to scrape from a page though I think they can and will do more to make the parsing easier.
Once you’ve configured a Dapper, you can output the resulting data in an array of formats:
XML - A raw XML feed
HTML - A simple HTML display of the scraped data
RSS - A RSS Feed
Alert - Sends an email alert whenever the data on the page changes.
Email - Emails the data to any email address
Google Map - Creates a Google map with any address data from the data source.
Google Gadget - Creates a gadget to place on your Google homepage
Image Loop - Creates a scrolling display of all the images in the data feed
JSON - A JSON datafeed that you can utilize directly in your javascript apps
Link to Another Dapper - Allows you to use data from one Dapper in another Dapper
To top it all off, they’ve created API’s for PHP4, PHP5 and Java5 allowing you to easily access the data generated from your dapper.
The BILLIONS of pages out there that don’t have an API or RSS feed can now be parsed without a lot of effort. I firmly believe Dapper will be a game changing and disruptive internet service. Dapper will empower a new generation of web applications and mashups.
They are currently in beta with an expected August release. I’m completely excited to see what the Interent community does with this.
Yahoo just announced their new Search Builder service. Similar to Rollyo and Microsoft’s Live Search Macros the service allows you to build your own search engine and choose which sites and keywords you want to include and exclude from the search.
Once you configure your search engine, Yahoo provides the code for you to place it on your website. Not a whole lot different than what you’ll find at Rollyo, however Yahoo’s reach is sure to get more exposure for this.
I’m proud to announce Zigtag has qualified for the Dragon’s Den, thank you for everyone who voted for me.
It’s a super interesting concept in that I’ve got 30 minutes to convince them to invest in Zigtag at the end of the taping they either decide to invest individually, in a syndicate or not at all. We negotiate the investment and equity on the spot and if all the stars align, shake hands and have a done deal. THAT is a pretty pressure filled 30 minutes.
These investors have to have some serious instincts to be able to invest 5 or 6 figures in companies with about 30 minutes of due diligence. Pretty wild! Rumor has it they’ll see upwards of 100 deals in the next week. The show will air on CBC in Canada in October.
Tomorrow the five dragons I’ll be facing are:
* Kevin O’Leary, popular host of ROB TV’s SqueezePlay, he sold his educational software firm to Mattel for $3.2 billion dollars.
* Robert Herjavec, sold his IT security firm at the height of the dot.com boom for over a $100 million dollars.
* Lawerence Lewin, founder of La Senza, a chain of lingerie shops with more than 194 stores around the world.
* Jim Treliving, a former RCMP officer who now owns Boston Pizza. In 2005, his resturants generated well over $400 million in sales.
* Jennifer Wood, whose career in the cattle business started in 1990, and is now one of the most influential executives in the Canada’s beef industry.
The 5 dragons are all Canadian success stories. Self-made millionaires. I respect that!
Wish me luck! Hopefully I survive the attack of the dragons.
Hot Captcha is a super simple site that provides an alternative to the annoying “please type the following characters that humans can’t read so for SURE computers won’t be able to” boxes. Rather than some mangled text, they’ve used the Hot or Not API to bring up 9 images of people.
You get the three that ARE hot… you pass and your submission can go through. Don’t get all three you must be a bot!
Podcasts are hot and getting hotter. But advertising on podcasts is just getting started. One reason? Lack of content. That’s right it’s a chicken and egg problem.
Well Zigtag is giving your a free chicken right now! (Or is it an egg?)
Here is a 30 second advertisement for Zigtag. Add it to your podcast where you think an ad would be a great sell. Sure I’m not a paying advertiser… but your listeners won’t know it. They’ll hear the ad and realize they too should be advertising but actually should pay you some money.
It will be a great way to start advertising on your podcast, and it would be a great service for Zigtag as well. It’s hard to sell ads if you don’t have any ads already, so I’d love to be your first ad just to get the ball rolling!
You can download it from http://web2.0central.com/zigtag30.mp3 and add it you your podcast.
This idea was inspired by Kevin Burton’s Adsense angel funding idea where he asked bloggers to add his Adsense ID to some or all of their advertisements as a way of community funding for TailRank.
I’m not quite as smart as Kevin as his concept actually generated some income, but if anyone takes me up on this, hopefully a few more people come sign up at Zigtag and maybe you even get a real paying advertiser.
So, if you decide to add this add to your podcast, comment on this post and I’ll keep a running list of anyone who decides to show us support.
Reg
P.S. This was my first cut at creating a podcast ad using Garageband. I think it’s okay but love any feedback on the content or presentation. Blast away!
Web 2.0 Central profiles companies and startups building web based applications using technologies like Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Flash, RSS, Open API's and assorted web based application development tools.
Dapper - Mashup Maker to the EXTREME
