In business, you always need to know what your competitors are doing. To survive you must perform competitive intelligence activities and monitor the broader market for new developments that could affect your company, your products and brands, suppliers, and distributors.

Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively, and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you will significantly increase your margins and profitability.

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During the development of our DataVault™ service we came across some areas of the code that did not seem well suited to TDD. These were areas of the code which had dependancies on external sites that we needed to access using the HttpWebRequest / Response objects. As anyone who’s attempted to write code using these objects is aware they are intrinsically difficult to mock; Continue Reading >>

Our proprietary screen scraping technology can be configured to the a customers exact specification to retrieve information from any web site, and more importantly can keep that information up to date. This is ideal for competitor product & price analysis, legacy data migrations, building up the data necessary for price comparison web sites, website change detection and web research

Once retrieved this data can be provided in numerous formats including Excel, CSV and XML

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In a previous post I talked about how we can change the way the SharePoint 2010 document libraries handles opening documents when we click the on the out of the box name column. That post took a manual approach to modifying the xsl but in the real world we want things automated and powershell provides the automated goodness we need to make things happen.
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In a previous blog I talked you though a little console app which I wrote while on a train one morning that checked the validity of any url stored in xml (namely infopath) documents held in Sharepoint.

The next thing on the agenda was to set about integrating the code with our Sharepoint implementation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against console apps, but it just didn’t seem like the right solution, after all it was going to need to be scheduled to run silently and frequently, and trying to MSDeploy to the windows task scheduler just seemed dirty. No, the right thing to do was going to be to implement it as a Sharepoint Timer Job.
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Currently the method being adopted by many web masters to display tweets on their web sites does not support retweets (RT). Recently there was an update to allow the parameter include_rts=true to be inluded within the url used to retrieve the tweets but unfortunately this is not compatible with Blogger.js as it only effects the .rss and .atom feeds (and not the .json feed).

We have now released a word press plugin that resolves this issue and enables you to easily replace the code you might currently be using with a single line change that will add retweets to your pages.

This update also enables you to include a twitter feed with your wordpress blogs because the same <ul id="?"/> tag will add a twitter feed anywhere it is placed within your entire site.

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Currently the method being adopted by many web masters to display tweets on their web sites does not support retweets (RT). Recently there was an update to the twitter api which allows the parameter include_rts=true to be included within the url used to retrieve tweets but unfortunately this is not compatible with Blogger.js as it only effects their .rss and .atom feeds (and not the .json feed).

Recently we released a fix for this which involves taking your twitter data as an atom feed (which supports the include_rts=true parameter) and converting this to a JSON object using the google developers api. This means that we are then able to use the code in blogger.js to display the tweets (including retweets).
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Web sites change, they exist one moment, and then when you least expect it, “poof” they disappear. Thing is, they are only likely to be missed if they contained something interesting in the first place, and the problem with that is if they did contain something interesting then there is likely to be a human being somewhere that will have linked to them in a document or a web page somewhere. And there’s the rub…. who pro-actively checks the validity of the links on their site or in their documents, I mean lets face it, we all have a million better things to be doing don’t we?
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