We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s your news selected and filtered with artificial intelligence from Tiinker.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi I’m Alex North. Tiinker has been developed by Deep Grey Labs. We’re a young start-up in Sydney, Australia, focussed on bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning technology out of academia and into products and services people can use.

There’s masses of information published online every day – way too much for any individual to track. Tiinker lifts some of the burden by filtering and exploring to find content that’s interesting to you as an individual, hiding irrelevant or uninteresting stories.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Tiinker is great for keeping up with news in one or a number of interest areas. It gathers stories from thousands of news sources and picks out the interesting ones based on which articles you have previously found interesting.

Although you could visit all the sources individually, each one probably has only a few stories of real interest. Over time, Tiinker will learn to pick these out for you.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Tiinker has much more to come. We’re working now on some features to help you share stories you’ve found on Tiinker with friends and colleagues, and continually improving the content selection algorithms.

4) Why are you doing this?
From a broad point of view, we want to help apply the amazing research that goes on at our universities into things people can actually use. More narrowly, tiinker addresses the growing problem of information overload – something which affects us all in some way and will continue to do so unless we bring computing to bear on the problem.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Nothing, it’s free.

6) How will you make it pay?
Eventually with targeted advertising running on the site, but right now it’s ad-free as well.