Eclipse by BroadLook Technologies
Tuesday, June 1st, 200406/01/2004
EXERPTED FROM THE FORDYCE LETTER June 2004 review of Eclipse.
by Mark E. Berger
I am glad I had the opportunity to review another great product this month, Eclipse, by BroadLook Technologies. We have written about BroadLook in this column a number of times relating to their flagship product, BroadLook Engine and also their free data capture utility, Rosetta.
Eclipse takes data capture to a new level by capture data directly from links and formatted tables, and spidering hyperlinks to capture data on the linked page without opening it. As useful as this product might be toa recruiter, marketer or researcher, it is a very simple program. The top half is an Internet browser and the bottom half is for your captured results.
One of the main features is “Get Links”. Many times when you are looking at a list of hyperlinks, the actual website URL may or may not be visible (except by looking at your status bar at the bottom of your browser). By highlighting your target links and clicking the Get Links button Eclipse produces all the URL’s in a table format for you. You have many options here to clean and edit your data including splitting columns, renaming column headings, state code usage, etc. Once cleaned up a bit this data can be exported to a spreadsheet or fed into another Internet research tool, including the BroadLook Engine.
Another main feature is “Get Table”. Tables are often difficult for data capture tools but Eclipse makes it look easy. Select your table, click Get Table and you are returned a column for each field in the table you captured. You have the same sophisticated data cleansing tools and export ability with this feature as well.
Many lists of hyperlinks are not linked to a homepage but to another page with related data. Eclipse can spider a list of URL’s and create “capsules” of information related to a specific link. Capsules are these bits of data captured from behind a link, not available directly from the page you are spidering. You may pickup contact names, addresses and phone numbers from these links. In the old days, you would have to click on each target link one by one, parse the data, go back to the main list, click on another one…over and over.
This technology is a serious benefit and time saver for any researcher. Can’t close out without at least mentioning the training, which for many recruiters is just as important as the product itself. BroadLook offers first class training for Eclipse as well as its BroadLook engine. I attended the Eclipse training in preparation for this article and it is performed via a live web conference with a BroadLook trainer. Unlike many training scenarios, BroadLook offers all it’s training under an “open-drop-in” concept; training is done within a group and users can sign up for multiple training sessions. In addition, BroadLook has a series of pre-recorded web conference trainings where you can log in to the BroadLook support system and watch at your pace. I also watched the included Eclipse Demo, which was very informative. The training and support exceeds expectations and their innovative model is starting to catch on with other vendors. Pricing: $1295 per copy but $795 for current users of the BroadLook engine. I want to thank Donato Diorio, President and CEO, for his help with this article.
For more information you can visit the BroadLook Technologies homepage at Broadlook.com and view an Eclipse demo. Anyone with any questions or comments can also reach Donato at (262) 754-8080 or via email at ddiorio@broadlook.com.