Released on: 5, August 2008
, Author: OutWit Technologies
, Audience: Software related
OutWit Technologies releases OutWit Hub , a powerful data collection engine fitting in a free Firefox 3 extension.
PARIS, France, July 31, 2008 OutWit Technologies, publisher of innovative software based on its original Web collection platform, announces the release of OutWit Hub as a free Firefox 3 extension.
The program is the first multipurpose Web harvester allowing the general public to easily collect media and data from the Internet and reuse them in the most common applications.
The program gathers dozens of semantic recognition and automatic extraction features to ease Web searches, create scrapers, collect images, sort and organize the information and produce personalized mashups.
The idea is no longer to respond to users' queries with lists of pages where they can find their answers but with the answers themselves says J.C. Combaz, CEO of OutWit Technologies. If you are looking for photos of sport cars, search engines will give you thumbnails with links to pages containing the images; OutWit will directly put the high resolution pictures in a folder on your hard disk. If you want stock quotes, search engines will tell you where to find the figures; OutWit will put them into a spreadsheet on your desktop.
The OutWit software is based on three simple concepts:
- The program dissects the Web page into data elements and enables the users to see only the type of data they are looking for (images, links, email addresses, RSS news ).
- It offers a universal collection basket, the Catch , into which the users can drag and drop any structured or unstructured information, links or media, as they surf the Web,
- It browses automatically through series of pages allowing users to harvest all sorts of objects in a single click.
OutWit saves considerable time and effort automating repetitive tasks: putting together a contacts database, collecting all available documents and PDF files on a topic, extracting daily job ads in a well formatted spreadsheet, or getting hundreds of high-resolution photos of movie stars
With simple intuitive features (like the one-click full-screen slideshow on a given topic or the collection basket where to drag & drop data while surfing) as well as sophisticated scraping functions and data structure recognition, the program targets a broad range of user categories. However, as the first outfit based on the OutWit Kernel library, the Hub is primarily destined to showcase the platform's features to advanced users and allow them to develop their own applications around the new technology.
About OutWit Technologies:
Headquartered in Paris, France, OutWit Technologies focuses on increasing the efficiency and pertinence of Web research, for professional use or for pleasure, eventually enabling the Internet community to participate in the advent of the Semantic Web.
The company, initiated by a veteran of software publishing and online services, has led since its creation an R&D program on its innovative approach to Web search, semantic recognition and extraction of information.
Its technical team counts some of the recognized European talents in Mozilla development. The project has already led to the filing of several international patents and academic partnerships. In parallel to its B2B activity with prominent telecom operators, OutWit Technologies chose to broadly distribute its platform as a base for simple general public applications.
Today, with OutWit Hub, and the associated library OutWit Kernel, the young startup is offering the fruit of two years research and development as a versatile platform for Mozilla Firefox.
For more information about OutWit Technologies, visit www.outwit.com.
