Articoolo

Business challenge

When the pilot release of its innovative web content development platform resulted in an overwhelming surge of user traffic, Articoolo sought a more flexible, scalable system architecture.

Transformation

Joining the IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator program, Articoolo launched its offering in a serverless IBM Cloud Functions environment designed to easily scale for user demand.

Results

Business challenge story

A founding vision for faster web content development

With web content development becoming increasingly vital for online marketing efforts, Articoolo Cofounder Doron Tal saw a promising business opportunity. “Web content is becoming everything in marketing,” says Tal. “The world is trying to catch up with this growing demand, and there’s a constant search for a quick, affordable solution.”

With industry experts Dr. Nir Haloani and Lilia Demidov, Tal founded Articoolo and focused on an innovative approach to the challenge. “Based on our expertise and previous experience, we wanted to find a way to use the power of artificial intelligence to create web content,” says Tal. “We wanted to develop an algorithm that would imitate the way the human brain works when it’s writing an article.”

Articoolo created a proprietary algorithm designed to help writers generate ideas and quickly produce articles, all based on simple topic requests. Users embraced the pilot solution, but when a surge in web traffic led to a server crash, the startup’s founders realized that the platform required a more flexible, scalable system architecture.

Transformation story

Effortless scalability in a serverless environment

Joining the IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator program, Articoolo found the technical and business development guidance needed to evolve its offering. “Getting into the IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator was the best thing that happened to us as a startup company,” says Tal. “We discussed our strategy with the Accelerator team and suddenly understood who our potential clients are in the business-to-business [B2B] world. Our vision was to help commercial organizations reduce the time and effort spent on content creation.”

Provisioning IBM Cloud hosting infrastructure and adopting serverless Cloud Functions technology, Articoolo established a highly scalable environment for extending its solution to an enterprise audience. “Articoolo cannot predict who will work with the system and when,” says Ronen Siman-Tov, Chief Technology Officer for the Alpha Zone Accelerator program. “Serverless computing is the perfect match when a platform will have lots of people coming and working with the system at certain times and will be idle during other parts of the day.”

Articoolo and the Alpha Zone Accelerator team developed a sophisticated architecture for the solution, which provides users with an interface for entering keywords related to a topic for web content development. Keyword entry triggers the Cloud Functions platform to scan a vast corpus of Articoolo data for related documents, shifting to crawl websites for information if the system does not uncover relevant documents in the database. The solution incorporates IBM Watson Alchemy Language and IBM Watson Visual Recognition services to analyze, summarize and restate information gathered from various sources, helping writers generate ideas and draft articles.
 

Results story

Event-driven architecture designed for enterprise demands

With event-driven Cloud Functions architecture, Articoolo’s platform can effortlessly accommodate fluctuating traffic and support unpredictable demand. “Entries like a URL coming through an API [application programming interface] gateway are considered triggers in Cloud Functions, and platform developers associate these triggers with actions using rules,” explains Siman-Tov. “Appropriate load balancing and management are triggered in Cloud Functions for Articoolo so the company doesn’t have to worry about how to handle any specific number of users.”

In addition to helping Articoolo create an enterprise-ready solution architecture, the Alpha Zone Accelerator team helped the startup refine its vision for its target audience. “With insight from the Alpha Zone Accelerator, we understood that our offering for B2B customers should be more of an ideation tool than a creation tool,” says Tal. “Our offering is designed to help fight writer’s block and provide a few first ideas for content development.”

Now well-positioned to help commercial enterprises meet their web content demands, Articoolo is conducting pilot projects with several large companies. “We are concentrating on clients in which content is a significant building block of the business,” says Tal. “Our goal is to deliver a reduction of up to 80 percent in the time spent writing web content, which will also mean significant cost savings for these companies.”

Articoolo

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Articoolo comprises a dedicated team of mathematicians, computer scientists, content writers and marketing experts focused on one vision: making web content development faster and more cost-effective. Based on a proprietary algorithm designed to mimic the human writing process, the company’s solutions include applications to help spark ideas, generate titles and create web content drafts.
 

Solution components

• IBM Bluemix

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