Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Bridget Rosewell, the other director, led a lot of the city analysis work, which
was really fascinating. She really pushed back against using overly complex
models and focused instead on pushing to ask the right questions, and getting
the data together to be able to tell the story that needed to be told. You had
to be asking the right question and you had to be getting the right data to be
able to tell the story.
This made me realize that rather than thinking I should figure out a much
more sophisticated way of analyzing the same macroeconomic trend data to
understand the economy, I should instead be thinking about how we could
bring other data to bear that would give us a deeper insight on the dynam-
ics of the economy. Could we find out about people's social connections or
people's professional connections and how they impacted the society? How
could you even see that and what data would you need to be able to see that?
And then, if we could see that, would we have a very different understand-
ing of how our economy works and what the flaws of it are? We still have a
hard time understanding really fundamental dynamics in our economies, like
business cycles and like the life cycles of companies—what data would let us
understand these better?
Gutierrez:
How does Quid fit into the research and strategy analysis
space?
Heineike:
There is a business intelligence industry with a lot of people who
are doing higher-level thinking research and strategy analysis jobs, where
they're trying to analyze, wrestle with, and figure out what the heck is going
on in their business and marketplace. We're, however, a bit of an oddball at
the moment, in that we're making data analysis products for those users. It's
useful to think about where we fit into the space by looking at our industry
and our technology as being two separate things.
In our industry, people are largely working to understand really big, important
questions, and using the answers to inform what businesses, and governments
should do. People in this industry are often working in consultancies or in
teams inside their organizations—in government departments or strategy
groups for example. They are normally experts in their field, or work with
experts. We're, however, much more technology driven.
From a technological perspective, I think we probably share a lot more in
common with people building software in other industries. So the technolo-
gies are related to organizations that ask questions like: How do you analyze
text at scale? How do you extract entities or meaning from corpuses? How
do you visualize large numbers of data points all at the same time and make it
interactive and beautiful? For example, our search technologies overlap with
consumer search products, and our visualizations have parallels with tools
built for bio-informaticians.
