As a team, we’re very proud of the product we built, now used by over 125k developers, data scientists and businesses" ... from FAQ: "service will shut down Feb 29, 2016"
In fact, they are so proud, they're giving all but ~2 weeks notice to said 125K developers, data scientists, and businesses to migrate off the platform? That is an abysmally small amount of time and if I was a paying customer, i'd be furious.
Sort of plays right into the whole argument being made over on another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105198) that companies shouldn't rely too heavily on proprietary tools to solve their data challenges.
Palantir is the poster child for black box software company that keeps trying to sell you more expensive licenses for their mystery algorithm. I know they've had some success in the government sector but I've seen them make a real mess of things in the private sector. At my last company their system just became a giant paracite where data went in and stuff came out the other end but it was entirely unclear what happened in between. The more we looked into the mystery middle ground the uglier it got.
There is no mystery algorithm. It's just cheap college labor working obscene hours to pump out "data analysis" scripts. The sad thing is that it actually works. The places that hire palantir are so mired in bureaucracy and process that whatever palantir builds seems to be better. Of course, just like SAP and Accenture you're now kinda locked in with support contracts.
Modern tools like spark and mesos in theory let you do what palantir does and then some but it assumes your internal IT team is semi-competent which more often than not is not a correct assumption.
Maybe it tops out early, but I'm given to understand junior salaries are also very competitive. (Maybe this is less true by comparison in the States -- it's fairly true here in the UK.)
We at CloudScrape.com are happy to welcome you onboard our platform - you get 20 hours of scraping runtime for free and the ability to navigate much more complex websites, opening up tons more opportunities then you've had previously. And we're here to stay :)
Kind regards,
Henrik Hofmeister, CTO, Co-Founder @ CloudScrape.com
Yup. I signed up with an account to play with it once. Never used it after the initial week. I wonder how many others of that 125k were just drive by test drives.
This is really bad news for us, and the tone of the announcement grated. Two weeks notice is very bad form, I'm having to come back from vacation to fix this.
When we evaluated options a year ago, kimono was the best fit. We'd happily have paid, and did ask. I don't understand what happened... Did they run out of funding?
Here is a statement that can give you some insight
"Kimono Labs explained that in the two years since launching, it wasn’t able to have the impact that it wanted, and that the acquisition by Palantir will give the team “unmatched support, resources, and the ability to work on things we could not tackle alone as a small startup.”"
from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/15/palantir-acquires-kimono-l...
ParseHub is much better at getting websites from shitty, complicated sites. Kimono was great for something simple, but I found ParseHub to be a more powerful and flexible web scraper.
If you have been burned by free services like this shutting down, give https://scrapehero.com a try - we love our customers and they love us back. We dont plan to abandon them with a 2 week notice.
We've had enterprises that depended on Kimono come to us; which isn't surprising anymore :) Hope others will give Grepsr a try as well! - https://www.grepsr.com/
Kind of bummed on the two weeks notice, but I'm sure there's some pressure and tradeoff the team had to make, which I guess softens the blow a bit (for me at least).
As a team, we’re very proud of the product we built, now used by over 125k developers, data scientists and businesses" ... from FAQ: "service will shut down Feb 29, 2016"
In fact, they are so proud, they're giving all but ~2 weeks notice to said 125K developers, data scientists, and businesses to migrate off the platform? That is an abysmally small amount of time and if I was a paying customer, i'd be furious.
On the other hand, congrats to Kimono team!