Revolut, a fintech company, identified a need to enhance their customers' investment experience by providing them with real-time access to news stories and events that could impact their investment portfolios. The challenge was that news is crucial to trading as it provides signals that influence investment decisions. However, news moves quickly and investors who find out important news first have a considerable advantage over those slower to the source. The scale of global daily news makes it extremely difficult to identify high-impact news amongst the overwhelming noise. Revolut wanted to find a way to deliver relevant high impact news to their customers about any specific trading company through the app in real time, based on their customers’ portfolio preferences. This would not only provide a great user experience for investors, but also keep them engaged within the app, increasing the chances of them trading through Revolut.

Deck, a trail-blazing company, provides predictive tools to help political candidates identify the right people for their advertising and direct contact campaigns. However, moving away from traditional methods of political campaigning, such as telephone surveys, posed a significant challenge. The company needed to ensure that their predictive models, which are based on machine learning, are updated with the most comprehensive and up-to-date data. One of the most critical sources of data for Deck is news. Therefore, the company needed constant access to high quality, timely, and relevant news data at both national and local levels. The challenge was to find a reliable source that could provide such extensive coverage of news data.

Okapi, a leader in innovative risk assessment for the commercial real estate (CRE) industry, faced a challenge in accessing real-time, relevant news content from a multitude of diverse data sources. These sources, which included HR platforms, labor statistics, location-based data, market-specific data, and financial reporting information, were crucial to Okapi's service but were often difficult to access and irregularly updated. Okapi's machine learning engine relied on this data to create accurate risk analysis reports for their CRE clients, providing insights for portfolio management, tenant risk, and asset acquisition. To enhance the effectiveness of their data insight tools, Okapi sought to incorporate real-time news data into their risk-prediction algorithm, which they believed would provide up-to-date data and a 'peek into the future'.

The Panama Leaks, the largest leak of its kind, revealed how the world's rich and famous were moving and hiding money across the globe. The leak consisted of over 11 million documents showing how money was laundered through offshore accounts and entities. The documents implicated a wide range of individuals, from world leaders to soccer stars. However, the sheer volume of data presented a significant challenge. The documents, dating back to the 70s, included emails, contracts, transcripts, photos, and even passports. The challenge was to mine this massive data set for interesting data points such as people mentioned, organizations, locations, and topics discussed.

Ryanair, one of the largest airlines in Europe, faced a significant PR crisis when they had to abruptly cancel around 1,900 flights due to an internal administrative issue. This situation presented one of the biggest PR challenges the company had ever faced. The challenge was to manage the negative press and social media backlash effectively. The company needed to understand the extent of the negative coverage, the effectiveness of their PR strategies, and the impact of the crisis on their brand image. To answer these questions, they needed to analyze nearly 600 news stories about the cancellations and 30,000 Tweets mentioning Ryanair over the week following the announcement.

The WannaCry malware attack was one of the most significant worldwide cyber attacks in history. The attack began on May 12th and within a few days, it had infected over 213,000 machines in 70 countries, paralyzing computer systems in hospitals, factories, and transport networks as well as personal devices. The ransomware virus encrypted all data on the infected computers, with users only able to decrypt their data after paying a ransom to the hackers. The attack was enabled by tools that exploit security vulnerabilities in Windows called DoublePulsar and EternalBlue. These tools were originally discovered by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US, but were leaked by a hacker group called The Shadow Brokers in early April 2017. The challenge was to understand the media coverage of WannaCry before the news of the attack broke and afterwards, as details of the attack began to surface.