Nearly 3,000 miles away from campus, two MIT graduates met in a cafe in Los Angeles. What was intended to be an introductory chat turned into a deep conversation about how to use technology to radically improve the way we consume news online.
To get started on that journey, our debut product is a Google Chrome extension that helps news seekers save time and dig deeper. As you read an article, Acciyo appears to the right of your screen like a bookmark sleeve, using natural language processing to populate a timeline of everything published on that subject, kind of like previous chapters of a news story. We aim to make it easier for any news reader to get the context they need to read the news with ease.
The root of our name, accio, means "to summon" or "to fetch" in Latin. For those of you who recognize it as the popular Harry Potter spell - yes, that is the actual inspiration for our name. With backgrounds in journalism and media, experience in product marketing and design, and a little bit of magic ... we're on a mission to transform reading the news from a survivalist exercise into a rich, motivating experience.
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