2. If you could describe your innovation in one succinct sentence, how would you describe yourself? Needle™ is a revolutionary platform that lets you acquire, integrate, clean, analyze and publish data on the web -- without programming!

3. How was your company founded, and what inspired its creation? ITA Software was founded in the mid-1990s by computer scientists from MIT, and quickly became recognized for their powerful airfare search algorithms. In 2004, ITA began researching a system that used machine learning technology to automate the aggregation of other types of travel-related data found on the web. That research blossomed into Needle: a platform that enterprises can use to inexpensively collect and maintain structured data of any kind.

4. What makes your company different from other companies in your market space? Needle's unique machine learning technology enables our users to collect and integrate data from multiple websites and feeds into a unified database with no programming, no database administration, and not even any software to install.

5. What has been your company's greatest accomplishment in the past year? In the past year, we took Needle from a research prototype to a commercial beta launch on needlebase.com. We also worked with the Village Voice to process their annual poll results in hours instead of weeks, and integrated hundreds of websites' continuously-updated festival and event data into a clean database with just two non-programmers.

6. What is your greatest asset? Needle's greatest asset is its skilled technical staff. Brilliant young computer scientists have teamed with software industry veterans to create a radically simpler approach to collecting and organizing data.