I’m excited about the recent buzz around real-time data and its importance in driving today’s business decisions.

I recently attended both the Web 2.0 Summit and IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) conference.  I found it interesting that two very different venues both put a lot of focus on the growing importance of real-time data

At IOD, Stephen Mills, SVP and Group Executive of IBM SWG, was asked about the single most exciting, innovative aspect of Information Management today.  He replied that applications today are more predictive because they leverage more real-time data than ever.  Technology enables us to deal with larger quantities of data and apply intelligence in real-time to predict the future (and prevent catastrophes such as power outages, epidemics, and terrorist attacks), which help us do a better job of planning our businesses.  The net-net is making a “smarter planet” for the future.

Which reminds me of this “IBM Smart Products:  Creating Insight for your business” video where I talk about the importance of reporting with relevant and timely data to make your business more competitive.

The Web 2.0 Summit also placed a strong emphasis on the power of real-time data.  The closing session featured Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly discussing the future of the internet. Tim B-L mentioned how he originally invented the World Wide Web based on a fellowship at CERN where he worked on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition.  Basically the internet was invented to be a “sandbox” to find and share data. The discussion then moved to how the Web one day will be powering dynamic applications or widgets that can connect to any data available on the web. I could not help equating this to mashups connecting real-time to real-time web data.

My prediction is that the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive and distributed and real-time web data will be a fundamental necessity for businesses to make real-time predictions.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

As a frequent traveler I often stay at Marriott hotels and noticed they recently upgraded and redesigned their website.

Why is this interesting in a blog about Web Data Services?

Marriott has just done what so many other companies are doing these days – they are modernizing their website with a user-friendly, dynamic AJAX-based interface to enhance user experience.

While AJAX is helpful for creating interactive web applications like a hotel reservation system, it’s very bad news for business users who depend on collecting web data with home grown scripts and primitive web scrapers to empower business applications like Market Intelligence, Financial Research, and Buzz Analytics.

But don’t despair. Kapow Technologies just released version 7.1 of Kapow Web Data Server which includes support for even the most sophisticated AJAX toolkits, including Google Web ToolKit.

That said I couldn’t write this blog post without testing it out myself.

So I powered up RoboMaker 7.1, typed in www.mariott.com, and did a simple search for hotels near San Francisco airport.

Then a dynamic map (powered by Microsoft bing) appeared showing the locations of the 10 nearest Marriott hotels.  I wanted to create a loop over the ten hotels on the map, so I simply clicked on hotel number 1, clicked the insert loop command, and in a few minutes I had created a Kapow robot that could extract hotels directly from a highly dynamic, AJAX-based map.

Tell me about any other product on the planet that can do this in 2 minutes!

Check out the picture below, and be sure to think about Kapow Web Data Server when your current Web Data Extraction tools break in the world of modern AJAX powered web sites.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Check out Part 3 of our podcast series, “New Web Technologies Give Businesses a Leg Up by Creating Structure from Unstructured Data”, and hear Stefan, Dana Gardner, and Seth Grimes discuss the growing importance of text-based content and information.  Companies and government agencies are using real-time text analytics as a web data service to bring about a new generation of business intelligence, from reputation management and 360-degree analysis of information, to discovering early warning of medical epidemics and preventing terrorist attacks.  And to do this well, you need automated tools.

Learn more from our Reputation Management and Terrorist Intelligence demos.

And please check out our other podcasts:

Part 1:  The Future of Business Intelligence:  “Web Data Services and Web-based information pave the way for better decision making” with Dana Gardner and Howard Dresner
Part 2:  How Web Data Services and Business Intelligence come together:  “Web Data Services extend data access and distribution beyond the RDB-BI straightjacket” with Dana Gardner and Jim Kobielus