Need To Know Information Solutions was created in 1988 to provide market and product development consulting services to new and established information companies, publishers and technology.  Founded by Jo Ann Mandinach, Need To Know is a virtual corporation drawing on the best people from her extended network of contacts in the media and high tech communities on the East Coast publishing worlds, Seattle, Europe, Silicon Valley, Austin and Multimedia Gulch in San Francisco to provide content acquisition and development , social media /community, partnering,  strategic consulting, usability testing -- whatever it takes to make our clients successful.

Jo Ann Mandinach

Jo Ann Mandinach has a unique view of the changing media and social media landscape, focusing on product development, content acquisition, and market/business development for the publishing and technology leaders of their day: The New York Times Information Bank, Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service, Knight-Ridder Information, Apple Online Services, Information Access Company, Verity, Personal Library Software (acquired by AOL) and Autonomy, The Well and various neat start-ups. Recent clients include a local social network, a decision-intelligence start-up offering content visualization and information discovery, a streaming financial portal and syndication network, a location-based mapping program integrating graphics with geographic searching and a business analytics company using visualization techniques to add intelligence to news and professional information.

Working with leading providers of intelligent searching and content management technologies, Jo Ann's understanding of publishers' needs makes her an effective evangelist.

Millions of people regularly use the World Wide Web and online services she helped create.  In her role as "rainmaker", she has established strong business relationships with targeted content providers, helping them leverage their brands as new media properties and effectively use the latest technologies to build customer loyalty. As a product developer, she has extensive in-depth experience helping Web and online services utilize community building, in-depth searching, convenient agent delivery and portal creation to develop and enhance compelling branded services. She believes users benefit from the "push" delivery of agents, the personalized "pull" of interactive community, and the in-depth information retrieval and analytic capabilities necessary for informed decisions.

As head of media channel sales for search technology leaders Autonomy and Verity (now both owned by Hewlett-Packard) and PLS (now owned by AOL), Jo Ann targeted and helped close new business from most of the leading web publishers and "deep web" commercial information companies.

 (See the full bio for a Who WAS Who of Web 2.0 and the Information Industry)