How Kimono Labs can turn any website into an API
Summary
The startup, which recently graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator program, launched in January and has big plans to shake up the web. As they were working on an app that could tell you what movies were playing on your next flight, they hit their pain point -- writing custom data scrapers was difficult and tedious, and it often took a long time. They also built an API for the Sochi Olympics that allowed users to enter queries about personal data of the athletes and the history of the teams. Since I have no web scraping skills, and this was a personal project born to address a specific need, the existence of this bot was contingent on finding a friendly, powerful, and cost-efficient tool such as Kimono," said Caratori. Javascript is what enables the Kimono tool to track and measure user activity (like clicks) on a third-party website within the clients browser.