Desktop Web Harvesting is a form of harvesting web intelligence, with an important distinguishing characteristic. With Desktop Web Harvesting, web content that's been harvested is not written to a database and stored for later use. It's imported directly into an Excel spreadsheet using the Kapow Web Connector for Excel, or provided as a feed to a desktop application that can consume XML data.

Example: the Widget Corporation runs robots on an hourly basis that collect on-line pricing information from 100 different websites that offer consumer electronics, downloading the results directly into Excel for pricing and product mix analysis. The same data is also delivered concurrently as an XML feed to a pricing analytics application for pricing optimization analysis.

Real Business Impact

The example above is a real example and Kapow has many customers today who are seeing tangible business benefits in terms of cost savings, increases in inventory turns and product churn rate, or identifying short-term pricing opportunities based on competitor’s out-of-stock position.

News Before It's News

One of the benefits of doing realtime business analysis is that you can gain market insights by stitching together pieces of information from multiple sources that form a picture that isn’t obvious from any of the individual data points. The U.S. Intelligence community calls this Asymmetric Intelligence and the financial services industry refers to it getting “news before it's news”. The data exists on the web for every industry to do this effectively – you just have to go out and get it.