Import.io and Connotate: One Year Later
March 3, 2020
There has been an interesting shift in search and content processing. Import.io, founded in 2012, purchased Connotate. Before you ask, “Connotate what?”, let me say that Connotate was a content scraping and analysis firm. I paid some attention to Connotate when it acquired Fetch, an outfit with an honest-to-goodness Xoogler on its team. Fetch processed structure data and Connotate was mostly an unstructured data outfit. I asked a Connotate professional when the company would process Dark Web content, only to be told, “We can’t comment on that.” Secretive, right.
Connotate was founded in 2000 and required about $25 million in funding. The amount Import.io paid was not revealed in a source to which DarkCyber has access. Import.io, which has ingested about $38 million. DarkCyber assumes that the stakeholders are confident that 1 + 1 will equal 3 or more.
Import.io says:
We are funded by some of the greatest minds in technology.
The great minds include AME Cloud Ventures, Open Ocean, IP Group, and several others.
The company explains:
Starting from a simple web data extractor and evolving to an enterprise level solution for concurrently getting data that drives business, industry, and goodness.
What’s the company provide? The answer is Web data integration: Identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume content from a user-provided list of urls. To illustrate the depth of the company’s capabilities, Import.io defines “prepare” this way:
Integrate prepared data with a library of APIs to support seamless integration with internal business systems and workflows or deliver it to any data repository to develop robust data sets for advanced analytics capabilities.
The firm’s Web site makes it clear that it serves the online travel, retail, manufacturing, hedge fund, advisory services, data scientists, analysts, journalists, marketing and product, hospitality, and media producers. These are a mix of sectors and industries, and DarkCyber did not create the grammatically inconsistent listing.
Import.io offers videos which provide some information about one of its important innovations “interactive extractors.” The idea is to convert script editing to point-and-click choices.
The company is growing. About a year ago, Import.io said that it experienced record sales growth. The company provided a link to its Help Center, but a number of panels contained neither information nor links to content.
The company offers a free version and a premium version. Price quotes are provided by the company.
Like Amplyfi and maybe ServiceMaster, Import.io is a company providing search and content processing with a 21st century business positioning. A new buzzword is needed to convey what Import.io, Amplyfi, and Service Master are providing. DarkCyber believes that these companies are examples of where search and content processing has begun to coalesce.
The question is, “Is acquiring, indexing, and analyzing OSINT content a truck stop or a destination like Miami Beach?”
Worth monitoring the trajectory of the company.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2020
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