OpenKapow

What is OpenKapow?

Using the kapow web-crawling bot technology, you can create your own REST and RSS easily and quickly, pulling out internet information from any websites ( which of course have not yet banned Kapow ) for other use, may it be personal or for profit. OpenKapow is more of a web scrapper than a mashup maker but REST services, RSS feeds and web clips that can be produced using it is enough to be backbone of all kinds of mashups. Good thing about OpenKapow is it’s free. There are also proprietary products from Kapow Technologies ( if you’re really interested about it ), of course these guys need to make bucks too.

How does OpenKapow work?

The idea is to create a web-scrapping robot that you program using a visual IDE called Kapow RoboMaker. It’s all point-and-click so it wouldn’t really require you much of programming skills. But of course having basic programming concepts will do some tricks, like conditional statements, error catching and looping. 

What are robots?

Robots, as mentioned above, is the programmable unit or entity of the OpenKapow technology. Robots operates like web-crawler/web-scrapper, grabbing bits and bytes of information from the web. Kapow robots can automate user activity in a website such as filling out forms, clicking on buttons, selecting options et cetera - you get the picture. Robots can also take in parameters or user inputs like search strings ( if you’re searching through Google or Amazon ), URLs to load sites from, et cetera. There are three types of robots - RSS robot, REST robot and Web Clip robot.

Can we get started now?

Of course!First, you have to download the IDE and you’re good to make some useful robots that you can use to build mashups for personal/organizational use or to create mashups with real enterprise/business value. But before you can start building and publishing your robots, you need to join the OpenKapow community first. Click here to join. You will be using your OpenKapow credentials to login to your RoboMaker ( so you can publish your robots - when published, only then we claim a robot useful ).

So what happens next?

Check out OpenKapow’s tutorial page and try doing small robots described there. It is recommended that you read the FAQ page first.

System Requirements:

• Windows or Linux
• 1Ghz CPU or better ( recommended )
• 1GB RAM or better ( recommended )
• 300 MB free disk space

Images grabbed from OpenKapow.com