I must admit I needed sometimes to be sure of what this website is presenting because the domain name talks about "yourtime", which is "my" time, but I couldn't find anything related to me at a glance. Shouldn't it be "ourtime.intridea.com" ?
Excellent idea btw, I love companies taking care of employees in such ways.
Not necessary unemployment, maybe conversion. Perhaps cleaning industries will take care of providing and deploying hydrophobic substances in toilets, firms, public services etc.
Or maybe as you suggest it will create a completly new market. It depends entirely on the ability of these companies to move forward.
I find it a bit the overkill.
If you'd like to implement Python in the browser, at least make sure to write a good implementation. An implementation written in JavaScript, is not a good implementation.
Yeah, sure, say that to Facebook & Twitter founders (to name the most known). People can sometimes have sufficient genius to handle creating then founding if the product is valuable.
Concerning efficiency this is true CSS / XPath processors, at least, both offer very nice performances.
But download 70KB of HTML each time you only need a single data, where the API request cost only a few (avg < 2KB), can be such a pain if you need to do this frequently. This can be handled by a scalable configuration but I find it a bit the overkill.
I think the author just completly missed the point with API vs Screen scraping.
The API allows for accessing structured data. Even if the website changes once, the datas would be accessible the same way through the API.
Whereas, the author, would have to rewrite his code each time an update his made to the front-office code of the website.
A simple API providing simple json response with http basic auth is far more efficient than a screen scraping program where you have to parse the response using HTML / XML parsers.
Excellent idea btw, I love companies taking care of employees in such ways.