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What a year 2018 has been for the data ecosystem! We believe the high-magnitude and rapid demand for alt-data (especially web data) from companies of various sizes across industries is a remarkable element of this year.
For PromptCloud, it has always been about moving the needle when it comes to democratization of web data access. We’re fortunate enough to have built a team that absolutely loves the ease of information flow offered by the internet and wants to share the same with the businesses across the globe.
We’re on a journey to make a dent in the alt-data space with laser-focused teams that are paranoid about the data quality delivered to our customers. In honor of our successful clients and their incredible growth powered by our talented data wizards, let’s spare a moment to celebrate PromptCloud’s year in review.
More data than ever
As Zettabytes of data get added to the web, the complexity of the sites is following similar incremental pattern. We also see that the scale at which businesses acquire web data is also growing by many folds. This essentially means that extracting high volume data from multiple complex sites via web crawling has become more difficult.
However, the nontraditional data is well poised to become the new normal since more and more companies have started generating immense value by outsourcing the service to specialized data partners like PromptCloud. WIth our decade-old expertise and cutting edge crawling infrastructure, this year 35% more records were delivered in comparison to last year.
Preferred data partner for big brands
Although we cater to companies of various sizes (from one-person startups to Fortune 10 enterprises), many new big names started working with us from this year. Here are the three most notable enterprises:
- Samsung
- Nokia
- Renowned consumer goods company based out of London
Revenue growth with an ever expanding client base
As a result of the above two, this year saw a steeper growth w.r.t revenues when compared to last year. We doubled up on our gross revenues while increasing our client base by 1.5 times. Moreover, this year saw tremendous expansion from our existing accounts as well owing to the growing data demands in the market. Not to mention, our clients are delighted to have partnered with us.
Fun never stops at PromptCloud
As Jonathan Safran Foer puts it, “nothing- not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug- establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together.’ We follow this to a T and embark on team dinners to share stories, jokes and make each other laugh over delicious food.
We also leave the city’s hustle-bustle for fun and adventurous outings.
We had an amazing time and great discussion at our meetup on social data visualization in collaboration with 91springboard, a company specialized in coworking spaces.
Given below are the highlights of the event:
- How alt-data ecosystem works.
- Importance of web data.
- How social data fits in the data ecosystem.
- How PromptCloud helps companies acquire and make sense of web data.
- Live `R` session to instantly download tweets, analyze (including NLP) and visualize.
- Practical use cases of social data with a focus on Twitter.
- Some of the best practices for web crawling.
Do get in touch with us if you are interested in understanding how web data can power growth strategy.
Platform enhancements
We always strive to improve our solutions in the best way possible. This year many upgrades were rolled to different solutions — from underlying crawling infrastructure to user experience.
Custom crawling service
In this service we set up custom and fully managed crawlers to deliver data from specific sites at desired frequency and preferred mode. Some of the notable improvements are the following:
- Crawler speed improvement — the architecture now delivers 40% higher throughput
- Automated handling of complex websites
- Easier one-click data download option
- Webhooks for data process automation
- Data merging in API
- Same-day crawl scheduling
- Introduction of PromptPoints — the data currency that saves money when you crawl data from new sites and refer your friends
JobsPikr
JobsPikr — our job feed solution which provides fresh job feed by extracting data from job boards and career sites also saw major upgrades. We have significantly improved the data coverage both in terms of number of websites (1000+ corporate sites and 19 job boards) and geographies (latest additions are – Australia and MEA).
Currently we’re working on another major overhaul that would be able to deliver job listings at granular level. Do keep a tab on JobsPikr’s site and social channels to get updated.
DataStock
DataStock offers off the shelf data sets that were generated from our custom crawling service in as is format for instant download. It has been well-accepted in the ML community and business analytics domain who use these for training algorithms and finding trends from historical data.
This year we added numerous data sets in job, travel and ecommerce category apart from introducing a free category.
Contribution to data community
Apart from contributing data sets on communities such as Data.world and Kaggle, we started submitting datasets on Zenodo to help researchers. In addition to this, you can also download free web datasets from DataStock; keep checking our free listings as we keep adding new datasets.
Giving back to the community
This year we collaborated with Goonj, a non-governmental organisation from India which undertakes disaster relief, humanitarian aid and community development across majority of the states. We helped them gather various used items for relief tasks and used our office space as collection point.
After the devastating flood in Kerala (God’s own country), every member of Team PromptCloud donated a day’s pay which was matched with an equal contribution from the company.
Next Up: 2019
We’re excited to welcome 2019 as some of the exciting improvements would be released and literally hundreds of sites have been lined up for data extraction from the beginning of the year. There would be many new clients with interesting business problems and complex websites for crawling.
Our bots will be bringing more data your way to help you grow your business with a human touch. Happy holidays and happy new year!
