Meet @henry__morris! He’s the inspirational serial entrepreneur that set up PiC and upReach. They’re amazing businesses that focus on social mobility. We interviewed him for PDFTables.com He’s been using it to convert delegate lists that come as PDF into Excel and then into his Apple iphone. It’s his preferred personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it’s […]
I am finishing up my MSc Data Science placement at ScraperWiki and, by extension, my MSc Data Science (Computing Specialism) programme at Lancaster University. My project was to build a website to enable users to investigate the MOT data. This week the result of that work, the ScraperWiki MOT website, went live. The aim of […]
In late June, 375 Europeans + 1 attended the Big Data Value Association (BVDA) Summit in Madrid. The BVDA is the private part of the Big Data Public Private Partnership. The Public part is the European Commission. The delivery mechanism is Horizon 2020 and €500m funding . The PPP commenced in 2015 and runs to […]
We know that lots of you use data from our astonishingly simple Twitter tools in visualisation tools like Tableau. While you can download your data as a spreadsheet, getting it into Tableau is a fiddly business (especially where date formatting is concerned). And when the data updates, you’d have to do the whole thing over […]
Inspired by my long commute and the pretty dreadful EDM music blasting out in my gym, I’ve found myself on a bit of a podcast kick lately. Besides my usual NPR fare (If you’ve not yet listened to an episode of This American Life with Ira Glass, you’ve missed out), I’ve been checking out the […]
Hands up everyone who’s ever used Google Docs. Okay, hands down. Have you ever noticed how many different ways there are to ‘share’ a document with someone else? We have. We use Google Docs at lot internally to store and edit company documents. And we’ve always been baffled by how many steps there are to […]
Open data activists, start your engines. Following on from last week’s announcement about publishing open data from ScraperWiki, we’re now excited to unveil the first iteration of the “Open your data” tool, for publishing ScraperWiki datasets to any open data catalogue powered by the OKFN’s CKAN technology. Try it out on your own datasets. You’ll […]
ScraperWiki is looking for open data activists to try out our new “Open your data” tool. Since its first launch ScraperWiki has worked closely with the Open Data community. Today we’re building on this commitment by pre-announcing the release of the first in a series of tools that will enable open data activists to publish […]
You may have heard from twitter that last Wednesday, Nick Hurd, the Cabinet Minister for Civil Society, paid a visit to ScraperWiki HQ. Nick has been looking into government data and transparency as part of his remit, and asked if he could come and have a chat with us in Liverpool. Joined by Sophie and […]
On 2 July 2012, the US Government debt to the penny was quoted at $15,888,741,858,820.66. So I wrote this scraper to read the daily US government debt for every day back to 1996. Unfortunately such a large number overflows the double precision floating point notation in the database, and this same number gets expressed as […]
