Import.io: Driving Insights from Web Data

Every company today depends on quality data to make business decisions. And there is more data today than ever before. However, the best data about a company doesn’t necessarily exist inside the organization in a tidy, internal database. Indeed, a company’s most important data source may be the web itself. Whether you want to monitor pricing on competitors’ websites or get a real time insight into how customers are responding to new products, the best information available is on the web. The problem is that web data is unstructured, highly fragmented, voluminous, “noisy” and distributed. Companies need machine-readable data and the web does not provide that. Since building a web data extraction solution in-house is too expensive, companies are in absolute need of a solution. Stepping up to these challenges, Import.io provides a web-based SaaS platform for converting the web into machine-readable data for analysis.

Import.io’s data extraction platform allows companies to easily extract data from any website, store the data sets in the cloud and then monitor trends, changes or comparisons. For example, one customer wants to know all of the locations of Subway Sandwich stores and wants to be notified when new locations open. Another customer wants to compare the prices of digital cameras across multiple websites and to be notified when there are price changes. Additionally, Import. io allows companies to take screenshots of each page that they extract data from in order to create an auditable record of the extracted data. “At Import.io we allow access to data from across thousands of websites in a scalable fashion. This data can be combined with other datasets, including proprietary data to be fed into the analytics system. The insights generated out of the comprehensive data helps companies stay competitive or gain a data-advantage in the market,” says Chris Brubaker, VP Marketing, Import.io.

The platform offers agility, quality, and accuracy via an easy-to-use user interface that allows clients to ‘point and click’ to extract data from any web page.