The Akooda team's innovative Words Of Iron advocacy project has become an online "Iron Dome" for Israel
The Akooda team's innovative Words Of Iron advocacy project has become an online "Iron Dome" for Israel
Already in the first week of the war, the promising start-up team joined the advocacy battle, when it developed the innovative initiative Words of Iron, which strengthens Israeli public diplomacy by promoting pro-Israel posts and removing false posts against it. "We took advantage of our team dynamics as a startup to work focused on quickly building a small advocacy startup."
Already in the first week of the war, Akooda, operator of the AI-Powered Ops Intelligence Platform that recently received an $11 million investment led by the world's largest seed fund NFX, was looking for a place where it could contribute and be meaningful.
Instead of dispersing the team and working on various projects, the company's CTO, Itamar Niddam, decided to work on an existing project as an experienced organic development team, in order to reach a working and functioning product as quickly as possible:
"Words of Iron is our contribution as part of the Israeli tech community to the "Advocacy Battle". As a company, at the beginning of the war we looked for where we could contribute, and when we saw that there was a gap in advocacy, we took advantage of our professional capabilities, approach and good dynamics together as a startup to build a good product very quickly, and make an impact."
The team, comprised of product managers, development and analysts, picked up activities in a short period of just a few days, including product planning, building an operational cloud system, with artificial intelligence and analytics gathering capabilities. After launch, the team built processes of maintenance and development of the system for the rest of the campaign.
Niddam explains that the product is very intuitive and simple to operate, and yields a significant impact. The system receives countless posts about Israel, from various sources (including Israeli official entities), and promotes the virality of positive posts, while at the same time working to successfully remove anti-Israel posts that contain false or inflammatory information.
"Our users enter the site, choose a platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) and receive the posts that are most important and urgent to promote or report, and the system prepares everything for the user: a response and sharing screen, and even produces pro-Israel content for them using AI."
In order to maximize the impact of the app, the team built a system to understand how users use the site. For example, hours of operation (Israel/US), popular posts, how many clicks people make at a time, in order to understand which time windows are the most ideal for activity.
"At the end of a few weeks, the results of the system are impressive, with tens of thousands of hits a day from Israel and the United States. The significant activity actually led to anti-Israel posts being taken off the network and disqualified by social networks," Niddam says.
You can find a link to the Words of Iron recruitment form here in Hebrew. It is available in English on the application.
