But then it's less far than you'd think. The starting-point for most of the ideas in the Timetric platform for us cofounders was building tools for scientists (who aren't programming specialists) to manage really obscene amounts of data. The thing is, the best scientists usually weren't the best programmers – they'd spent their time studying atoms, not bits – so there was a real problem; there were a bunch of inaccessible problems because no-one had the expertise they needed in both areas.
It's just a profligate waste of talent, really.
File off "science" for that problem and you can see where we're going with Timetric.
Is the primary audience of your product scientists? From what I can see the uses you promote seem to be primarily journalists. Are you working on a similar basis for them? ie a tool that lets them get on with writing and finding stories rather than correcting dataset anomalies? Do you see gridworks/Google Refine and tools like freebase and infochimps as competition? Panopticon? Chart.io? Sorry for the barrage of questions, my background is data vis and your business and business model fascinates me. Good to see more startups in london too!
msy: no, our primary market's people who want macro/socioeconomic/industry data – and, yes, that includes journalists (our friends at the Guardian Data Blog have done some really nice work using Timetric).
It's more explaining the thought-process. An economist, or analyst, or journalist shouldn't have to be a programmer to do their job. That's our job.
Well, now that respectable people are joining startups too, perhaps my dad will stop telling me to stop this startup silliness and get a real job... grin
I'm glad to see that startups (especially in London where it's far less common than California) are becoming more and more of an option for people with already steady jobs looking for something new.
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[ 1147 ms ] story [ 2285 ms ] threadBut if you look at the public macro on timetric.com - we've got something like 1.6m freely-available time series - it'll give you a decent flavour.
Much good luck to you guys, large datasets have always held a magical lure for me, you never know what you're going to turn up.
But then it's less far than you'd think. The starting-point for most of the ideas in the Timetric platform for us cofounders was building tools for scientists (who aren't programming specialists) to manage really obscene amounts of data. The thing is, the best scientists usually weren't the best programmers – they'd spent their time studying atoms, not bits – so there was a real problem; there were a bunch of inaccessible problems because no-one had the expertise they needed in both areas.
It's just a profligate waste of talent, really.
File off "science" for that problem and you can see where we're going with Timetric.
It's more explaining the thought-process. An economist, or analyst, or journalist shouldn't have to be a programmer to do their job. That's our job.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/sep/22/timetric-fin...
Yeah right, keep dreaming.