Cloud-based Business ideas

Are you interested in starting a cloud based business? If yes, then below are the top ten cloud based business ideas you can start from home.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “internet-based computing whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand.”

Given the explanation above, popular platforms like Slideshare, Skype, Gmail, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Amazon AWS and Cloudfront, Dropbox and WordPress can reasonably be included in a list of cloud applications; because they all hold your data (presentation slides, emails, videos, blog posts, etc), so you don’t have to worry about them.

Cloud computing provides a much more reliable alternative to keeping files on your own computer; a mode of storage that has been rendered insecure due to the emergence of various types of viruses and other threats to information security.

On the surface, cloud computing has many advantages over traditional methods of data storage. For example, if you store your data in a cloud-based retrieval system, you will be able to get back your data from any location that has internet access. And you wouldn’t need to carry around your physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve your information. In fact, in the absence of security concerns, you could even allow other people to access the data, thereby turning a personal project into collaborative effort.

Like any other innovation that offers huge solutions for individuals and businesses, cloud computing has created huge opportunities for entrepreneurs who have a knack for computers and ICT. If you have a solid background in ICT and in-depth knowledge of cloud computing, then starting a cloud-based business might just be a life-changing business move for you. Without wasting time, below are 10 cloud-based business ideas that you can exploit for long-term income:

Top 10 Cloud-based Business ideas

1. Cloud computing consulting

Many individuals and businesses are becoming aware of the benefits of cloud computing and its advantages over traditional storage methods. But most people feel completely at sea when it comes to understanding how to move their systems and files onto the cloud storage platform. You can make a lot of money helping such individuals and businesses migrate to the cloud.

2. Tutoring

For security and other reasons, many individuals and businesses would fret at the idea of hiring a freelance contractor to help them with their migration to cloud. Rather, such individuals would prefer to learn how it works, so that they can handle the migration themselves.

Similarly, many businesses would prefer hiring you to train their in-house staff on the application of cloud computing. So, you can make a lot of money from just teaching people how to apply cloud computing to their businesses.

3. File hosting

If you have the required background and expertise, then you can make a lot of money by setting up your own platform for helping people hold their files in the cloud. That is, you can set up a cloud storage solution like Dropbox, Google Doc, Amazon AWS and Evernote, and charge people for helping them hold their files.

4. Cloud platform engineering

With a solid background in software or systems engineering, you can make money working as a cloud platform engineer. This position goes beyond helping individuals and businesses migrate to cloud; it also involves actually handling all of the technicalities and intricacies involved. After the initial setup process, you would be called on at intervals for maintenance and routine checks. And of course, you will get paid each time.

5. Cloud computing technologist

This involves working with companies that provide cloud-computing solutions. As a cloud-computing technologist, you will work with the company’s engineers to set up the company’s platform and packages. You will also help to set a user-friendly interface for their customers.

6. Cloud OS developer

A cloud OS developer analyzes, designs, programs, debugs, and modifies software enhancements and/or new products used in local, networked, or internet-related computer programs, primarily for end users.

As a cloud OS developer, you will also be required to test applications and interact with users to define system requirements and necessary modifications. You will earn a lot of money working for companies as an independent contractor. And there is no limit to the number of companies you can work with.

7. Cloud automation engineering

Working as an automation engineer, you will be responsible for deep automation of cloud services that will enable the company’s software development team to rapidly prototype, build, and deploy product offering to their customers. You will need to deeply understand cloud architectures and arrangements.

8. Cloud software engineering – This simply involves developing software that will ease the use of the cloud platform.

9. Web hosting

Yes, the popular web hosting is an application of cloud computing, since you will help individuals and businesses hold their web files and keep the secure. So you can set up you  own web hosting company and make money.

10. Blogging (on cloud)

Because many people are yet to fully understand how cloud works, you can make a lot of money in the long term by starting a blog that discusses everything about cloud computing.

Source:http://www.mytopbusinessideas.com/cloud-based/

Screen scraping: How to profit from your rival's data

Screen scraping might sound like something you do to the car windows on a frosty morning, but on the internet it means copying all the data on a target website.

"Every corporation does it, and if they tell you they're not they're lying," says Francis Irving, head of Scraper Wiki, which makes tools that help many different organisations grab and organise data.

To copy a document on a computer, you highlight the text using a mouse or keyboard command such as Control A, Control C. Copying a website is a bit trickier because of the way the information is formatted and stored.

Typically, copying that information is a computationally intensive task that means visiting a website repeatedly to get every last character and digit.

If the information on that site changes rapidly, then scrapers will need to visit more often to ensure nothing is missed.

And that is one of the reasons why many websites actively try to stop screen scraping because of the heavy toll it can take on their computational resources. Servers can be slowed down and bandwidth soaked up by the scrapers scouring every webpage for data.

"Up to 40% of the data traffic visiting our clients sites is made up of scrapers," says Mathias Elvang, head of security firm Sentor, which makes tools to thwart the data-grabbing programs.

"They can be spending a lot of money for infrastructure to serve the scrapers."

Scottish Grand National Betting aggregators often target the odds offered on particular sports events

And that's the problem. Instead of serving customers, a firm's web resources are helping computer programs that have no intention of spending any money.

Data loss

What's worse is that those scrapers are likely to be working for your rivals, says Mike Gaffney, former head of IT security at Ladbrokes, who spent a lot of his time at the bookmakers combating scrapers.

"Ladbrokes was blocking about one million IP addresses on a daily basis," he says, describing the scale of the scraping effort directed against the site.

Many of those scrapers were being run by unscrupulous rivals abroad that did not want to pay to get access to the data feed Ladbrokes provides of its latest odds, he says.

Instead, they got it for free via a scraper and then combined it with similar data scraped from other sites to give visitors a rounded picture of all the odds offered by lots of different bookmakers.

"It's important that your pricing information is kept as close to the chest as possible away from the competitor but is freely available to the punter," says Mr Gaffney.

The key, he said, was blocking the scraping traffic but letting the legitimate gamblers through.

The sites most often targeted by scrapers are those that offer time-sensitive data. Gambling firms offering odds on sports events are popular targets as are airlines and other travel firms.

The problem, says Shay Rapaport, co-founder of anti-scraping firm Fireblade, is determining whether a visitor is a human looking for a cheap flight or an automated program, or bot, intent on sucking all the data away,

"It's growing because it's easy to scrape and there are so many tools out there on the web," he says.

The best scraping programs mimic human behaviour and spread the work out among lots of different computers. That makes it hard to separate PC from person, he adds.

In many countries scraping is not illegal, adds Mr Rapaport, so scrupulous and unscrupulous businesses alike indulge in it.

House of Commons Scraping has helped make parliamentary debates and voting records more accessible

"A lot of big companies scrape content," he says. "Sometimes it's published on the web and re-packaged and sometimes it's just for internal use for business leads."

Talking heads

Frances Irving, head of ScraperWiki, says that not all of that grabbing of data is bad. There are legitimate uses to which it can be put.

For instance, says Mr Irving, good scraping tools can help to index and make sense of huge corpuses of data that would otherwise be hard to search and use.

Scrapers have been used to grab data from Hansard ,which publishes voting records of the UK's MPs and transcribes what they say in the Houses of Parliament.

"It's pretty uniform data because they have a style standard but it was done by humans so there's the odd mistake in it here and there," he says.

Scraping helped to organise all that information and get it online so voters can keep an eye on their elected representatives.

In addition, he says, it can be used to get around bureaucratic and organisational barriers that would otherwise stymie a data-gathering project.

And, he says, it's worth remembering that the rise of the web has been driven by two big scrapers - Google and Facebook.

In the early days the search engine scraped the web to catalogue all the information being put online and made it accessible. More recently, Facebook has used scraping to help people fill out their social network.

"Google and Facebook effectively grew up scraping," he says, adding that if there were significant restrictions on what data can be scraped then the web would look very different today.

Source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23988890

Hiring A Pro Air Duct Cleaning Service

When hiring a company that gives you air duct cleaning services you should use normal sense. Do some background investigation of the organizations you are thinking about. With the world-wide-web you can readily discover about any organisations you are looking at and uncover out if they have a history of enterprise complaints. You ought to ask any firm you are thinking about hiring questions about your air conditioning technique and make confident they are knowledgeable about their perform.

Are they licensed? A large number of states call for suppliers that clean air ducts to be licensed, if they should be and are not then this is a definite red flag. It’s also extremely critical to acquire an estimate in writing and inform the business that any significant adjustments in what they charge desires to be authorized by you prior to they continue functioning.

As with all factors of household repair and maintenance cleaning out dirty ducts is critical. Allowing ductwork to turn into excessively dusty can have a damaging influence on your health and could possibly lessen the life of your air conditioning method. Anytime contemplating hiring any corporation to work on your dwelling make certain you are informed about them. Do a small research, ask them concerns, and obtain estimates in writing. Any respected company ought to be content to talk with you about the work they will be performing as properly as give you a written estimate.

Hiring a organization that gives air duct cleaning services is just like hiring any other contractor, as lengthy as they are a reputable enterprise they really should present you with high quality service. So if you discover a lot of dust about your air conditioning vents don’t ignore the difficulty or place it off until it gets to be out of hand. Employ a enterprise that presents air duct cleaning solutions to assistance protect the wellness of your loved ones and the overall performance of your air conditioner.

Source:http://www.tampabaycleaning.com/176-hiring-a-pro-air-duct-cleaning-service-4

Basic Rules to Use for Your Data Entry Business

Setting up a data entry business from home sounds like a daunting prospect, but with a few basic requirements in place and the knowledge of what to look out for, it is much easier than it sounds.

So What is Required?

Essentially, all a person needs to get started with a data entry business is a computer with a regular Internet connection, MS Word, Excel and/ or Access and an ability to type reasonably quickly and, naturally, accurately. An Adobe reader to view or work on PDF files may also be necessary.

Then, of course, they will have to find work. This is where it gets a little more difficult, because many of the myriads of data entry opportunities advertised on the Internet will ultimately turn out to be elaborate scams set up to deceive people into handing over their money.

This should not, however, discourage an individual from trying. There are also many genuine, well paid jobs out there, and it is simply a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Knowing what to look out for and how to check out potential providers of work will protect an individual looking for work from becoming a victim to scam artists.

Finding Data Entry Work

By following a set of basic rules, it will be possible to avoid scams and get started without major pitfalls and costly mistakes. They are basically just three simple tips on checking out a potential person or company offering work.

Rule Number One - Avoiding Programs

The first rule is never to get involved with people, companies or so-called programmes offering work for which the individual looking for work has to pay to start with. Real employers pay for work, they don't ask people to pay them!

Let's face it, nobody would expect to pay to get a job interview on their High Street or on an industrial estate. The same applies to Internet based work. If it is genuine, no advance payment will be required.

Rule Number Two - Checking the Company

Even if there doesn't appear to be an obvious problem with a potential employer, the best advice is to check them out thouroughly before submitting any work. Some companies have been known to accept the work and then fail to pay for it.

Although this is comparatively rare, it does happen and a quick enquiry at one or both of these two websites: Better Business Bureau, referred to as the BBB for short, or the second site, Small Business Administration, known as the SBA, will reveal if a company can be trusted to pay on time.

Posting a query on a public forum can also be an excellent resource when trying to determine the authenticity of a company. If there is a problem, someone will know and respond to the query with a warning.

Rule Number Three - Checking the Work

An additional way of checking includes taking a good look at the way in which the provided work to be done is presented. A good, genuine employer will detail how they want the finished work to look, including details on file formats, formatting of text, the deadline for submission and rates of pay.

File formats usually include DOCS or RTF, excel or occasionally access files, PDF, HTML or SGML. Often the work is provided in the actual format it should be returned in.

The applicable rates of pay should equally be outlined clearly, usually the rates are per quantity submitted, rather than consisting of fantastic promises of easy money. Data entry, like any other work, is not easy money; earnings have to be worked for. Anyone promising otherwise can be regarded as dubious at best and should be double-checked, before falling into a trap.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Basic-Rules-to-Use-for-Your-Data-Entry-Business&id=6558026

Benefits Of Article Writing Services

Even if you are a good author, you could want to think about employing post creating providers for your on the web company. High quality articles improvement needs treasured time and talent, and making use of post writing companies makes it possible for you and your personnel to focus on other critical aspects of your business. When you allow other people take care of branding, search engine optimization, and consumer-friendly articles generation, you can dedicate more time to building your merchandise, assisting your customers, and every little thing else that sets your company apart from the competitors. Here are some of the positive aspects of large-quality report creating solutions.

Readable, Intriguing Articles or blog posts

No matter what product you promote or support you provide Jeff Carter Jersey, your website needs to cater to your clients. You need to have articles that not only pitches a sale, but that readers will really engage prolonged enough to develop interest in your business. Fantastic write-up writing solutions specialize in delivering grammatically ideal, nicely-structured pieces which efficiently and entertainingly deliver your business's unique offering place. Retain the services of great writers, and you'll have far more time to really deliver on that place.

Branding, Authority, and a Loyal Readership

At a time when thousands of websites seem to supply the identical merchandise, solutions, and material, branding is crucial to your lengthy-term achievement. When folks visit your website, they want to see new, fresh material that delivers a message they have not currently read through tens or hundreds of times. They want something distinctive. Fantastic writers will set up the uniqueness of your enterprise by adapting to and additional building your website's fashion. They will also research your niche in buy to write articles with a tone that speaks right to your readers' deepest desires. By employing a fantastic content support, you can create yourself as an authority in your discipline and create a loyal group of readers who will ultimately turn out to be buyers.

Commitment and Professionalism

One of the largest difficulties with basic Search engine optimization and internet style firms is that they target on also a lot of projects and sub-projects at as soon as Drew Doughty Jersey, creating an overall item that is decent but unremarkable. They exemplify the "jack of all trades, master of none" clichA? and their customers endure simply because of it. On the other hand, a committed article writing services puts its total team's target into creating and editing superior posts for your website. Hiring a creating crew in addition to a net design service could expense a lot more in the brief phrase, but the impeccable articles you get will spend for itself hundreds of times more than with large site visitors and conversion prices.

Search engine optimisation Material that Converts

Numerous world wide web development companies appear at Search engine marketing and user-friendly content as totally separate entities. The dilemma with this mentality is that purely "search engine-pleasant" content articles are usually rife with uninteresting filler articles and unreadable, key phrase-stuffed sentences. To stay away from littering your stylish web site with this type of fluff , you need to have to have articles that is each highly readable and optimized for site visitors Jonathan Quick Jersey. Good article creating firms expertly weave key phrases and LSI terms into your messages to create articles or blog posts which will attain substantial search engine rankings and convert the readers who click on them.

Source:http://bpel.xml.org/blog/benefits-of-article-writing-services

Data journalism’s ‘secret weapon’, data newswires, and the newest data-scraping tools for journalists.

When investigative reporter and journalism instructor Chad Skelton needed help writing a curriculum for a data journalism course, he turned to NICAR-L, the email listerv for the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting, for advice.  Skelton says that virtually every data journalist in North America is plugged in to the NICAR listserv, making it data journalism’s “secret weapon.”

In 5 tips for a data journalism workflow, the online journalism blog advises newsrooms to find and tap into “data newswires” in the same way newsrooms have used traditional newswires like AP and Reuters.

The newest data-scraping tool for non-coding journalists, Import.io, launched in public beta this week. Import.io allows data scraping from any website, and can create a single searchable database using information from several sources.

South Africa hosted a two-day hackathon this week, which was the first Editor’s Lab hackathon held in Southern Africa. The event was organized by the Global Editor’s Network (GEN), the African Media Initiative (AMI) and Google.

And finally, Owen Thomas writes on readwrite.com that the media world has a lot to learn from technologists like Jeff Bezos and Keith Rabois.

Source:http://strata.oreilly.com/2013/09/data-journalisms-secret-weapon-data-newswires-and-the-newest-data-scraping-tools-for-journalists.html

Building a Website Scraper using Chrome and Node.js

A couple of months back, I did a proof of concept to build a scraper entirely in JavaScript, using webkit (Chrome) as a parser and front-end.

Having investigated seemingly expensive SaaS scraping software, I wanted to tease out what the challenges are, and open the door to some interesting projects. I have some background in data warehousing, and a little exposure to natural language processing, but in order to do any of those things I needed a source of data.

The dataset I built is 58,000 Flippa auctions, which have fairly well-structured pages with fielded data. I augmented the data by doing a crude form of entity extraction to see what business models or partners are most commonly mentioned in website auctions.

Architecture

I did the downloading with wget, which worked great for this. One of my concerns with the SaaS solution I demoed, is that if you made a mistake in parsing one field, you might have to pay to re-download some subset of the data.

One of my goals was to use a single programming language. In my solution, each downloaded file is opened in a Chrome tab, parsed, and then closed. I used Chrome because it is fast, but this should be easily portable to Firefox, as the activity within Chrome is a Greasemonkey script. Opening the Chrome tabs is done through Windows Scripting Host (WSH). The chrome extension connects to a Node.js server to retrieve the actual parsing code and save data back to a Postgres database. Having JavaScript on both client and server was fantastic for handling the back and forth communication. Despite the use of a simple programming language, the three scripts (WSH, Node.js, and Greasemonkey) have very different APIs and programming models, so it’s not as simple as I would like. Being accustomed to Apache, I was a little disappointed that I had to track down a script just to keep Node.js running.

Incidentally, WSH is using Internet Explorer (IE) to run its JavaScript; this worked well, unlike the typical web programming experience with IE. My first version of the script was a cygwin bash script, which involved too much resource utilization (i.e. threads) for cygwin to handle. Once I switched to WSH I had no further problems of that sort, which is not surprising considering its long-standing use in corporate environments.

Challenges

By this point, the reader may have noticed that my host environment is Windows, chosen primarily to get the best value from Steam. The virtualization environment is created on VirtualBox using Vagrant and Chef, which make creating virtual machines fairly easy. Unfortunately, it is also easy to destroy them. I kept the data on the main machine, backed up in git, to prevent wasting days of downloading. This turned out to be annoying because it required dealing with two operating systems (Ubuntu and Windows), which have different configuration settings for networking.

As the data volume increased, I found many new defects with this approach. Most were environmental issues, such as timeouts and settings for the maximum number of TCP connections (presumably these are low by default in Windows to slow the spread of bots).

Garbage collection also presented an issue, since the Chrome processes consume resources at an essentially fixed rate (their memory disappears when the process ends). The garbage collection in Node.js causes a sawtooth memory pattern. During this process many Chrome tabs open. The orchestration script must watch for this in order to slow down and allow Node.js to catch up. This script should also pause if the CPU overheats; unfortunately I have not been able to read CPU temperature. Although this capability is supposedly supported by Windows APIs, it is not supported either by Intel’s drivers or my chip.

Successes

A while back I read about Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and tried to apply its principle of assuming failure to my system. Ideally a parsing script should not stop in the middle of a several day run, so it is necessary to handle errors gracefully. Although the scripts have fail-retry logic, it unfortunately differs in each. Node.js restarts if it crashes because it is running tandem with Forever. The orchestration script doesn’t seem to crash, but supports resumption at any point, and watches the host machine to see if it should slow down. The third script, the Chrome extension, watches for failures from RPC calls, and does exponential backoff to retry.

Using the browser as a front-end gives you a free debugger and script interface, as well as a tool to generate xpath expressions.

Possibilities

The current script runs five to ten thousand entries before requiring attention. I intend to experiment with PhantomJS in order to improve performance, enable sharding, and support in-memory connections.

Source:http://www.garysieling.com/blog/building-a-website-scraper-using-chrome-and-node-js