On this page
The product
WAP—“With A Purpose”—was a browser extension for the moment when a news story makes you want to help but leaves you unsure where to begin. Open the extension beside an article and it suggested NGOs working on the subject, creating a short route from reading to action.
I developed the working extension and contributed across product, marketing, and intellectual-property questions. Our multicultural team of five built the startup prototype during the three-week European Innovation Academy in Turin, which I attended on a scholarship. WAP reached the technical top ten among more than fifty participating teams.
Why it mattered
The useful idea was not simply to classify an article. It was to use language technology to reduce the distance between concern and a credible next step. The prototype demonstrated that interaction in about fifteen hours of development spread across five days.
It also taught me how to choose what must be real in an early product. The interface, article analysis, matching, and NGO suggestions worked; the wider service and donation experience remained a startup proposal.
Technical notes
The extension sent the current article URL to a private API. A third-party service extracted topics from the article; the server then used word2vec similarity to compare those topics with descriptions of NGO activities. The highest-ranking organisations were returned to the extension.
It was deliberately rough code built under a severe deadline. The value of the prototype was proving the complete interaction, not establishing a production-ready ranking or vetting system.