Just came across a different type of API just now… It’s the world’s first API for semantic discovery. From long time back, I used to dream about the API or some Web service which could easily understand the context and classify information using its special intelligence, today its reality. Yes guys, check out Semantic Hacker they have released API today itself. This API can return you the context / Semantic Signature of any information you enter.

See it yourself in action, I just pasted one article from my blog (tips for Indian service providers) [Right now it limits upto 2000 chars only – so that’s okay…]

And press submit

You can see how smartly, it has given out the categories to which this topic belongs. Even google search is not capable of doing that as of now, so I can confidently say that something like this is going to change the way of search. No more punishments of using wrong keywords, and no more would web stay as old boring thing – you would actually start interacting with it, like you do with other humans (in future..).

SemanticHacker offers API free of cost, which can be found here. Some of examples and tools here.

If you like to learn more about semantic web, you could start by this book called Programming Collective Intelligence by O’Reilly. I’ve already purchased a copy a month back but not started yet. I’ll post a review whenever I’m done with it. This is really nice book though from what I’ve seen in first few chapters.

-Abhimanyu Grover

We have just launched BullsCash.com, a new finance news portal which collects news from almost 80-100 different sources and aggregates them together. It can be said to be first Indian Finance news portal in its own kind. It aims to help people in collecting quality information in lesser time. How much time would you spend daily reading news about shares, Mutual funds, IPOs etc from 100 sources?? And how many of them would be irrelevant or not important for you? BullsCash tries its collective approach to fetch all news from different channels and then estimates it worth…

How BullsCash helps?

• Time Saver: BullsCash reduces time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates. People under finance sector in India spend hours in reading irrelevant/unimportant news. It lets you go through important news only – that too in min. time.
  
• Web-Based: No need to run any software or configure anything. You can just start using it as your source of information.
  
• Filtering & Ranking: BullsCash crawlers checks news links for their popularity and vote them accordingly.
  

BullsCash crawls majorly following news portals as of now:

• Money Control
• Multiple Channels on Economic Times
• Multiple Channels on Business Line

We are targeting for more advanced and smart crawlers which are capable to cover even more and more sources online and vote automatically based on the popularity of a particular link.

Features for Future:

• More sources to be covered
• Better Algorithms to mark important news
• Personalized approach for different people
• Source suggestion

We hope this application will help people in finance industry. Once this website start gaining members and traffic, we’ll soon work out on our plan for its expansion and will also schedule the features.

Abhimanyu Grover

Michael Schrenk demonstrates some nice web bots and spidering techniques in his great book called Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers. Spidering is a subject which is least discussed on internet and you could not find any good libraries on it easily. A lot of examples and techniques are provided throughout the book. Author has also provided some demo libraries using which you can start almost instantly.

This is a kind of essential book if you’re a newbie and looking to get your hands on new fields.

• Now in the age of Web2.0, Most of our projects involve building spiders, crawlers and other type of web bots.
• Developing a webbot involved whole new mindset.
• Once you start learning, you will automatically get new ideas for your clients and your own processes.
• Learn from the author’s 11 year career of writing webbots and spiders.
• Helps implementing Automation in your life.

This book has certainly lot more to offer than what I wrote… Highly Recommended!!

- Abhimanyu Grover