How does your service work?

Once a customer has provided the details regarding the information they are interested in obtaining from a website or websites, we use our tools to define a project, composed of one or more extraction agents capable of navigating and obtaining the information and storing it in a relational format at the Mozenda data-center. A customer will then receive the data by a unique XML feed, FTP upload or e-mail. Agents which gather dynamic web-data can be scheduled to run as often as needed to ensure that the information that is stored in the data-center is up-to-date.

What are the formats I can use to export my project data

The two available formats are CSV (Comma Separated Value File), and XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

CSV is a simple comma-delimited file format that is used as an input format for various applications. If you have Microsoft Excel installed on your system, opening a CSV file will typically launch Excel and put the data into a spreadsheet for you automatically.

XML is a standard format for storing, importing and exporting data for multiple applications. An option for saving the XML file with Microsoft's .NET Dataset schema is also available when exporting your project data in XML format. This option gives developers the ability to easily use the project data in applications they may be developing.

By default, each projects and the corresponding agents it is made up of, contain a uniquely generated URL to an XML feed of the results contained within that project/agent.

How are project costs determined?

There is no cost for an evaluation and review of the work needed to be done to fulfill a project. Project costs are calculated based upon the following factors:

• The type of project. Is this a Static (one-time) or Dynamic (occurs at intervals) Project?
• The scope of the project. How many web-pages are involved in the extraction? How difficult is it to extract the data?
• Data-source volatility. How volatile is/are the website(s) that the data is being extracted from? (this applies to dynamic projects only)
• The frequency of the project. How often does the extraction run? (this applies to dynamic projects only)
• Date Volume. How many pages are you downloading and how much data are you storing on the system?

All projects involve a one-time creation fee. With the first extraction included in that fee. Subsequent extraction costs (as in the case with dynamic or real-time projects), are based upon scope and frequency. Future change fees may apply to projects which need to be changed because of source-site change which may break any agents capable of extracting information for a project (these fees only apply after the review and approval of the subscriber).

How are Dynamic Projects scheduled on the Mozenda data-center?

The interval at which a projects run is determined by the customer when the project is created. The smallest interval is every 5 minutes, the largest interval is once a month. It all depends on how often you think you'll access the data, and how up-to-date you'd like the data to be.

For instance, an individual interested in compiling daily statistics for companies listed on NASDAQ.com may have a project to that information that runs once everyday at 5:30pm. Whereas, another individual may have a project to weather information for 20 cities from Weather.com, and needs the project to run every hour.

In all cases, it's up to the customer how often they'd like their project to run, and the frequency can be easily configured at any time.

Real-time projects are also available. These types of projects run in realtime whenever a request for the project data is received by the Mozenda datacenter. If an agent has been created you can also run that agent "On-Demand" to refresh existing data whenever you choose.

What if I want to modify an existing project?

Simply email us your modification request and we will make the needed corrections. These requests are usually processed within 24 hours. Modifications can be as simple as renaming a field to adding new fields from new web-pages (adding new tables).

Do you provide a Tool set for customers to create and execute agents and managing their own projects.

We don't today, but are actively developing a customer management console that will enable customers to create projects, build agent robots, extract data, analyze the data, store the data and export the data in multiple formats and feed types. Once complete, it will be the most powerful web-based extraction tool available on the market. We expect to release the Management Console in Q4 2007. For a sneak peak, click here.