Quid, Inc. : In the News

Quid presents at The Russia Forum, February 6, 2012

Which Emerging Technologies will Kill the Traditional Bank?

Quid Senior Intelligence Associate, Anastacia Anishchenko, presented insights on Big Data and the future of banking at The Russia Forum 2012 (sometimes referred to as the "Russian Davos").

"There's this wealth of unstructured data that some banks are starting to accumulate, but very few are making really good use of it. There is huge potential there: the integration of this new,

unstructured data with the wealth of structured data that banks already have. If you look at what a lot of technology companies do with just unstructured data alone, you'll be amazed."

Anastacia's opening statement can be found between 5:50 min and 10:30 min.
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NPR, All Things Considered, January 30, 2012

What The FBI Wants In A Social Media Monitoring App

"If there's an attack that's just been carried out in north Afghanistan that they weren't aware of, there might be reports of that on the social media channels that they're watching," Gourley says. "[People] might be tweeting, 'I heard a loud bang,' or someone says, 'Maybe there's a bomb around the corner' or there are these kinds of reports. Now, each of these pieces kind of starts

to form a little bit of a mosaic and they start to combine this mosaic back together to say, 'We can be pretty sure that something happened here and here's what we think it is.' "
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VentureBeat, November 28, 2011 by Ciara Byrne

Quid makes million-dollar maps of technology’s past, present… and future

Quid uses natural language processing and semantic clustering techniques to define a set of “entities” such as companies or research groups in an emerging technology sector, and to map their relationships. Each company entity has a signature which is based on explicit events like who is it partnered with, who has it acquired, how much money has it raised. There are also the technologies with which an entity is associated, where it’s located, employee count,

traffic, sentiment and many other parameters....The typical Quid customer is a VP of strategy at a large technology company, government department or financial firm. Once the customer has a basic map of the sector, and where his own company and competitors fit in, he can look at adjacent entities and ask questions like, “Where is this space going to move?” or “Which technologies could be recombined?”
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New York Times, November 19, 2011

Technology Footprint: Starting Up in New York

An analysis of public records shows that more than 400 technology start-ups in New York City have raised money from investors in the last two years [source: Quid]. The vast majority of these companies have landed in Midtown South, within blocks of venture capital investors and veteran start-ups. The area’s affordable rent

and popular restaurants and bars are a big draw. Many of the companies are working to use technology to reshape the city’s established industries, like retail, finance, health care and entertainment.
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The New Zealand Herald, November 11, 2011 by Karyn Scherer

The digital downpour

A byproduct of the Too Much Information Age, big data describes the millions of digital files the world produces each day, and which are readily accessible online. The big achievement of big data companies is they have developed clever algorithms that are able to distill massive amounts of information into forms that

can be much more easily understood by the human brain.
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PopSci, November 3, 2011 by Stuart Fox

A Company's Algorithms Reveal Hidden Connections Among All That Data:
Understanding Complex Systems

To customers interested in a short time horizon, up to 18 months or so, the clusters of nodes provide the important information. Those nodes are where the action is now, areas where companies should strike while the iron's still hot. To customers looking out further, five to ten years out, it's the white space between the nodes,

empty spots that represent untapped opportunities for growth or new areas for interdisciplinary research, that communicate the most useful information.
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O'Reilly Media: Strata Summit 2011, September 21, 2011

Sean Gourley, Quid CTO, presents at Strata

At the recent Strata Summit: The Business of Data conference held in New York in September, 2011, Quid CTO Sean Gourley spoke on "The New Corporate Intelligence." Sean discussed the Quid mission, "augmenting our ability to perceive this complex world," and how this is not about big data, but about using big data to make big decisions.

Sean touches on string theory and how it relates to dimensionality reduction. He explains how we combine mathematics and visualization to make extraordinarily complex systems intelligible, identifying explicit connections, implicit connections, and traction. Finally, Sean provides illustrations of insights that emerge for clients through Quid software.
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The Phenomlist, August 28, 2011

The Top: Big Data Scientists

Quid provides software that transforms big data sets into insights for companies and governments. There, Amy prototypes algorithms and works with other engineers to get the algorithms into production.

“We have these growing databases that are full of nuggets of really fascinating information,” she says. “I go to databases, pull a huge amount of information, and work to develop algorithms

that bring out the structure inside of that."

"What she’s doing now excites her because, she says, “it’s only the last couple of decades we’ve had big data sets about human networks. There’s been an enormous explosion in research into what do networks actually look like, and it’s a really fascinating area to have focused on,” she says. “There are always more algorithms to try out and get your head around.”
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TechCrunch, July 25, 2011

Atomico, Conway, And Founders Fund Put $10 Million Into Quid; Max Levchin Joins Board

You guys might remember Quid from our “Does Quid have the most pretentious website of any startup ever?” post, where we discussed its choice of primary versus secondary typeface and implored the company to get a primary business model before it made a fuss about fonts.

Quid CEO Bob Goodson tells me that that pretty snarky post was actually a boon for Quid, and

attracted ultra high quality engineers including a “computational linguist” named Orion Buckminster Montoya who felt that he would fit in perfectly with the startup’s highfaluting culture. They also have a guy named Bong on their team! (Quid got the same artist who does all the Wall Street Journal drawings to make portraits of its engineers, of course, below).
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CNET News, July 25, 2011

Quid pros land $10 million in funding

New Zealander and former decathlete Sean Gourley says it's only a matter of time before his company Quid will know more than the United States government. "How much is information worth?" he asked rhetorically during at a recent lunch meeting with CNET, as he showed off Quid's software that uses data, math, and visualizations to help clients make billion-

dollar decisions.
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VentureBeat, July 25, 2011

Sector analytics provider Quid nets $10M, Max Levchin joins as an advisor

Quid, a provider of analytics for specific job sectors, announced today that it has raised $10 million in its third round of funding and has added PayPal co-founder and Slide founder Max Levchin to its board of advisors...The company previously raised $4 million across two rounds of funding that included the Founders Fund and angels Gordon Crovitz, Allen Morgan, James

Hong and Niko Dounchis. Levchin was also an angel in those rounds.
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CNN Money, July 1, 2011

Can software replace VCs?

Apparently there is a new data analysis product called Quid that is able to detect what sectors in a given industry are ripe for innovation, and direct venture capitalists toward the best opportunities... I have a vision of sitting back on my perch like Dr. Evil, eating bon bons and petting a Chihuahua while my squadrons of data bots root out insurgent companies laying in wait

to explode onto the market with a bang. Awesome.
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TED Blog, June 17, 2011

TED Fellows Friday with Sean Gourley

The basic goal of Quid is to collect information about global systems in the world: everything from technology to conflict, to political unrest… and to structure this information in such a way that it can be stored and used to feed into different mathematical models. We can then put those models up into advanced visualizations to allow decision makers in governments,

corporations, finance and the non-profit space to make their decisions about the global systems that are changing rapidly.”
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MIT Technology Review, April 14, 2011 by Jim Giles

Can an Algorithm Spot the Next Google?

Ajay Royan of Clarium Capital, an investment firm in San Francisco, is trying out Quid as a way to highlight technological areas of interest. Royan says that Quid’s ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated areas of research could make it a powerful tool. Advances in energy, for example, might rely on

a development in materials science. Quid could help identify a startup or research lab that has already made that link. “They’ve made the nodes in the technology network visible,” says Royan. “That helps us understand the relationships between them.”
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Harvard Business Review, March 2011

Vision Statement: Locating Your Next Strategic Opportunity

Where and how do strategists find growth opportunities? Sometimes by literally drawing a map, using a technique called semantic-clustering analysis… Such maps expose surprising relationships between and across sectors and, even more tantalizing, the white spaces among them - which can offer firms

strategic opportunities to connect companies operating in different markets, to take existing products into new sectors, or to innovate with products and services no one has even dreamed up yet.
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The Telegraph, February 6, 2011 by Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor

Technology Entrepreneurs are Driving UK Towards Recovery

Feature article and graphic in the Sunday Telegraph (London) describes Quid’s analysis of strong technology innovation clusters in the UK (alternative energy, gaming, music, fashion e-commerce, and payment technology), as well as global technology clusters where the UK is underrepresented (education, healthcare IT,

lighting, batteries).
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PopTech 2010, October 20, 2010

Tracking Innovation

Sean Gourley is a mathematician who has spent the last seven years using math to understand war and insurgency. He is now applying that understanding to develop ways to map technology companies - in search of the “technology genome.”
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The New York Times, October 21, 2010

Will the Quants Invade Sand Hill Road?

…We also heard recently about Quid, a Peter Thiel (surprised?) backed startup that is building out new technologies to quantify startup growth and put numbers to what previously had been an opaque market.

Quid is looking to track things like job listings,

customer wins and funding valuations at first, second, and third funding rounds to give venture investors a better yardstick - and better quantitative tools - in valuing startups.
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BusinessWeek, September 16, 2010

Quid Takes the Lid Off Silicon Valley

…Quid software can help to pinpoint where innovation is happening, emerging trends, and who is funding them. Finding high-quality information about a public company such as IBM (IBM) or General Electric (GE) is simple. Sorting out which startups are working on synthetic biology is far trickier… Quid stealthily

researched thousands of private companies, building a database that includes legal filings, financing information, hiring decisions, and consumer sentiment…
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TechCrunch, September 15, 2010

Quid Emerges from Stealth to Map the World's Technologies

…Quid’s data platform aims to map the world’s technologies, allowing companies to gain more insight on specific sectors… Quid’s data is accessed by companies and government entities via a web application that allows users to run reports and more. And Quid already has a number of high-profile clients using its platform,

including Microsoft. Quid will face competition from Gartner and Forrester.
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Bloomberg, September 13, 2010

Quid Emerges From YouNoodle, Delves Into Data on Private Firms

…The idea is to pinpoint where innovation is happening, what trends are emerging and who is funding them, said Bob Goodson, one of Quid’s founders. While public companies disclose financial results and research plans quarterly, private-company information is less transparent. That’s where Quid comes in, using its

relationships and research to fill in the gaps… “We use Quid data and analytics to keep 2,000 managers aware of the latest trends and facts from the world of emerging business,” Cliff Reeves, director of the emerging-business team at the Redmond, Washington-based company, said in an e-mail.
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Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive
this Complex World™

Quid in the News