We’ve got something big coming, folks! Soon we’ll be taking the wraps off our new AlchemyGrid service release, containing over four hundred (400!) new features and site enhancements. You asked, and we listened!

Stay tuned for more information ..

We’ve just enabled another big update to our AlchemyGrid Beta service: Web-based API Creation!

Using this new service, Internet users can visually grab content from any website, turning that content into a programmable web API! Extract information from your favorite website, and expose it as XML, CSV, HTML, JSON, RSS, and more. Our system supports automatic API key provisioning and other fun features, as well as a variety of content extraction modes:

1. Single Value - Extract a single data field from any website. Useful for grabbing an individual piece of information from a page, such as a comments count, price, etc.
2. Series of Values (same type) - Extract a list of values of similar types. This mode is great for grabbing a series of pieces of information, like article headlines or product names, from a website.
3. A “Record” (containing multiple values) - Define a “data record” on a webpage, and extract multiple values for the record. Useful for grabbing several pieces of related information from a website (example: an article title, author, and date).
4. Series of “Records” (containing multiple values) - Define a series of “data records” on a webpage, and extract multiple values for each occurring record. This mode is great when extracting information from search result pages, news homepages, or other websites that contain lists or series of records each containing a “group” of values (example: a series of news stories, each with a title, link, and author).

This release makes it easy to extract any type of data from a webpage, with most extractions taking just a few seconds to create. We’ve posted a screencast that illustrates the extraction definition process, available here. An example API created with this system can also be seen here.

Why not create your own web API? You can do it here. Creating APIs is free, works instantly, and does not require the installation or download of any software. Start building the programmable web!

Wow! What a great response we’ve received regarding our new AlchemyGrid web-service! It landed on the front-page of both Del.icio.us and Digg.com (receiving over 600 diggs!), and we’ve also gotten some great blog coverage. To all our new Beta users: Keep the feedback coming! We’re taking your comments to heart and really enjoy receiving your opinions.

The new AlchemyGrid platform is a hosted, web-based version of the AlchemyPoint system we’ve been developing for some time. It provides content clipping, data extraction, and a variety of other capabilities to users “in-the-cloud”, without requiring any natively installed software or plugins. While currently in the early Beta stages, many users are already taking advantage of the AlchemyGrid’s widget creation and content proxying capabilities to enhance their blogs or better-distribute their content.

Current AlchemyPoint desktop Beta users now have direct integration with our new hosted AlchemyGrid platform, through the “My Content” section of their local AlchemyPoint Control Center interface. This AlchemyGrid service integration makes it easy to publish, share, and synchronize your content clippings, mashups, data extractions, and widgets.

We’ll be posting more information on the AlchemyGrid and our AlchemyPoint desktop integration in the coming weeks!

EDIT: Beta users: AlchemyGrid now supports Widget export to Microsoft Live.com!   If your favorite blogging / personalized homepage service isn’t yet supported for widget export, let us know!

Hey folks! For the past several months we’ve been quietly releasing AlchemyPoint updates to our current Preview user population every 2-3 weeks. Normally we don’t blog about these updates, focusing more on engaging our user-base directly to garner feedback. However, a significant new AlchemyPoint version is about to be released, and we’re pretty excited about it!

So what’s new in this version? Tons of stuff:

1. Integration with our AlchemyGrid cloud-based mashup, content scraping, and widget platform.
2. The ability to ‘publish’ your mashups, content clippings, and content scrapes for public consumption.
3. Major internal code/pipeline improvements (optimizations, multi-part MIME support, the list goes on and on).
4. The new AlchemyPoint ContentStore (a relational, persistent datastore — more on this in future posts!)
5. Flock web browser support, support for decoding new Microformats standards, etc.
6. Tons of new pre-defined mashups, mashup commands, and mashup conditions.
7. Native REST-based Screen Scraping API.
8. “Widget Publishing / Export” functionality (see below)

Widget export has us particularly excited. This really neat capability allows any content you “clip” using AlchemyPoint can be turned into a widget, suitable for export into most every major blogging platform, personalized homepage service, or your website / custom blog. You can even export content directly as an OpenSocial widget!

Here’s an example widget (CNN’s latest stock market information), embedded live:

Creating widgets like these is easy, taking just a few seconds. This capability is just a taste of what’s new in this release. We’ll be diving into other feature additions in the weeks to come.

Today we’re proud to announce the availability of AlchemyPoint for the Macintosh. Over the past few months, our team has worked hard to ensure AlchemyPoint provides the greatest possible experience on the Mac. Many thanks go out to all the AlchemyPoint Beta-testers that worked with us during this period (especially Stuart, who was critical in resolving some last minute “OS X Leopard” issues).

AlchemyPoint is the first-ever mashup / ’structured web’ platform natively available for the Mac. This includes the entire AlchemyPoint platform: Our web browser front-end and our powerful mashup server back-end.

With AlchemyPoint for the Macintosh, non-technical users can visually mash up their favorite websites and navigate the Internet using our ’semantic’/’structured’ web capability. Technical users and software developers will benefit from AlchemyPoint’s amazing developer’s platform, a powerful tool for constructing new Web 2.0 applications and enterprise services.

Installing AlchemyPoint is easy. Download and mount our DMG, and drag our program icon into your /Applications folder. That’s it!

Mac users can download the Preview here.

We’ve just posted 3 new tutorials to our company website, detailing some of the more advanced web manipulation / content scraping capabilities within AlchemyPoint. These include:

Automatically Highlighting ‘New’ CNN Headlines

Bolding TechCrunch Articles That Mention ‘Google’

Scraping a ‘Music Artist’ Name From a Music Review Website

We’ve also begun to open up access to the AlchemyPoint Developers Wiki. Currently the Wiki contains information on our ORSC ([OR]chestr8 [S]erver [C]onfiguration) XML file format. ORSC is the low-level XML “language” that all AlchemyPoint mashup ‘actions’ and ‘primitives’ are written in. You can utilize ORSC to “program” the AlchemyPoint platform, enabling the construction of a variety of content-intensive applications, mashups, or enterprise services.

The AlchemyPoint Developer Wiki, along with this initial set of documentation on our ORSC XML language, is Orchestr8’s first step in exposing the amazing mashup platform that runs underneath our Firefox frontend. You can utilize ORSC to build your own Web-Server, Mail-Server, Distributed-Communications-Grid, RSS/ATOM Feed Aggregator, or any number of other applications.

It’s worth noting that both our demo websites EmailTwitter and MashFeeds.com were built entirely using the AlchemyPoint platform and our ORSC language. This includes absolutely 100% of these websites: Their HTTP server, SSL encryption, new user registration, database access, everything!

Yesterday, we also pushed out a new AlchemyPoint Preview update. This new version contains a number of bug-fixes and feature enhancements. We’ve got a bunch of exciting stuff coming out over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

We’ve just posted a number of AlchemyPoint content manipulation tutorials to our company website.

If you’re an AlchemyPoint Preview user and want more information on how to utilize our platform, please take a look.

These are the first of a series of tutorials we’ll be releasing in coming weeks. Future tutorials will focus on some of AlchemyPoint’s more advanced capabilities such as RSS/ATOM feed creation/manipulation, chart/graph generation, and so on.

We’ll also soon be enabling public access to the AlchemyPoint Developers Wiki, which contains detailed information on our underlying ESB platform, tips on how to construct your own protocol listeners or clients, and other mashup construction topics.

Starting today (Oct. 1st), Orchestr8 is now an official sponsor of Read/WriteWeb!

Read/WriteWeb is a leading tech weblog, focused on Next Generation Web Technology. It has a large and highly influential readership, and is ranked among Technorati’s Top 50 blogs in the world.

Read/WriteWeb is read by a large number of executives, decision-makers and thought leaders in the Web and Media industry, and has built up a solid reputation over time for top-quality analysis and insightful writing. Their continued coverage of issues surrounding the Semantic Web and Mashup Technology make this sponsorship a great fit for us.

It’s been a week since we launched the AlchemyPoint Technology Preview, and we’ve received some great initial feedback! Reviews of the software can be seen at Mashable and Webtopmania. There’s also been good overall response from the initial set of Preview users, and some valuable product feedback.

If you haven’t signed up for the Preview already, do it here.

Today, we’re announcing our first Preview Update. It contains a number of fixes, enhancements, and other stuff that didn’t make it into our initial release. All existing AlchemyPoint users will be notified of this update via our product auto-update mechanism.

A summary of this update is provided below:

• Compatibility Fixes

We’ve improved compatibility on non-standard system configurations, and increased the overall robustness of our installation process. If you had any problems installing the initial Preview, give this new version a try.

• Hidden Toolbar Mode

AlchemyPoint now offers a “hidden” display mode, compacting the browser toolbar into a single button that’s displayed in the browser’s navigation bar. Suggestions and other product capabilities are available directly from this button. Users can dynamically switch between “full” and “hidden” display modes, depending on their preferred mode of operation.

• AlchemyPoint Context Menu

Suggestions and other AlchemyPoint product functionality can now be accessed from a convenient right-client context menu, from within any web page.

Also bundled with this update are a variety of new suggestion mashups:

Query Expansion - Detects if you’re performing an Internet search, and suggests useful search query alternatives:

Article / Page Tags - Extracts ‘key phrases’ (tags) from webpage article titles and page titles, and provides the ability to search for more information on these tags:

Related Websites - Suggests other Internet destinations that are similar to the website you are currently viewing:

Any comments / feedback regarding this Preview update is appreciated: feedback@orch8.net

* UPDATE SEPT-27-07 * - We’ve just updated the Preview, resolving an issue some users were experiencing with Google Reader, MyMaps, and a few other websites.  Since only some users were experiencing these issues, we’re making this update optional.  To download this update, utilize the original download link / invite code provided in your Preview Activation e-mail.

AlchemyPoint enables end-users to endlessly manipulate, transform, and combine web content. One of our favorite types of manipulations is the ability to cut & paste web content, even dynamic content (search results, etc.).

Here are some examples:

Combining Myspace.com and Facebook.com People Search

Adding Better-Business-Bureau Reports to Yahoo Yellow Pages Listings

Adding 10-day Weather Forecast to Google Homepage

What’s notable is that these mashups are visually created using a computer mouse, in less than a minute, without any coding whatsoever.

With AlchemyPoint, users can create, share, and reuse mashups, entirely from the web browser. If you’d like to try it out, sign up for our Technology Preview today!