Theneeds

Launched in 2013, Theneeds has quickly become one of the worldwide leading content discovery platforms. Theneeds helps users to discover and share news, articles, videos, social posts and much more, all customized to meet their individual needs. Theneeds collects, ranks and filters online content and matches it with the right audience, saving users hours of clicking through irrelevant websites and presenting them exciting and interesting topics they might otherwise have missed.

Theneeds is as easy as it gets: All users have to do is sign up and select their main interests and Theneeds will take care of the rest. Utilizing advanced algorithms, Theneeds takes the selected categories along with information about the user and combines it to deliver content that is tailored to the specific interests of each user. The algorithms in the background follow the user’s browsing activity to learn changes in interests and behavior and keep the delivered content up-to-date. At the same time, users can actively teach Theneeds about their preferences by “Liking” or “Killing” pieces of content.

Based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded by former Accenture executives and engineers, Gabriele Pansa and Luca Albertalli, together with former CS researcher and mathematic PhD Emanuele Cesena. And while there are a few competitors out there, Pansa explains how Theneeds sets itself apart from other discovery platforms: “Services like Flipboard or Pulse are partial, user-curated solutions, but a lot more can be done in the content discovery space by applying advanced Artificial Intelligence. Theneeds is well-positioned to provide users with a more relevant and streamlined discovery experience and that is why we are seeing our user base growing at a fast pace, both web and mobile. The web is getting more crowded than ever and we see a huge opportunity in making order in this chaos. Relevance, ranking, filtering, personalization, serendipity, are just some of the key elements of the challenge we’re facing”.

Theneeds now covers hundreds of interest categories across 13 channels, namely Shop, Read, Listen, Be Informed, Travel, Interact, Watch, Eat, Follow Sports, Play, Manage Money, Learn and Work. Based on the topics a user selects, along with an analysis of his or her Twitter or Facebook stream and interactions, the discovery machine captures within seconds what the user may be interested in and makes customized recommendat