Montreal's Needium upgrades service to help merchants find customers through social media
Montreal-born startup Needium has upgraded its service to help merchants find customers on Twitter.
The 3-year-old "social media discovery platform" monitors and filters tweets to bring relevant social media users to small businesses. A real world example? You tweet that you're hankering for a meal, and you get a reply from a local takeout joint offering to satisfy you at a discount, whether or not you follow them or they follow you. Needium's new technology was revealed at Demo Fall 2011, a Valley-based showcase of innovation.
The startup, which has 16 employees, estimates up to 15% of tweets relate to food, entertainment, and travel needs.
Needium, which has raised $3 million in funding so far, uses a Ruby-based platform that is capable of handling Twitter's full firehouse of tweets and index tens of thousands of messages per second. Customers can access its service via an HTML-5 based web dashboard and eventually via a mobile app.
