Statistics Editor of FT joins London startup | Hacker News Reader

Statistics Editor of FT joins London startup

blog.timetric.com

41 pointstow2117 comments

Link to the original story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/sep/22/timetric-fin...

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

Yeah right, keep dreaming.

No chance - my parents still are. It's cause they love us, really...

Congrats to Andrew, Toby, and Dan for making such a great hire. It bodes well for the next months!

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.

This isn't the fellow who does BBC Radio 4's brilliant "More or Less" program is it?

Nope, that's Tim Harford ("the Undercover Economist"): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/1628489.s....

yay timetric! still fuzzy as to what you guys actually do :) (i suck at maths)

Index the world's economy. Specifically all the bits people will pay for insight into. :)

an example or two are in order.

I'd actually love to give you a concrete example but, well, commercial confidentiality. We'll be launching paid services very soon.

But 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.

Selling tools during the goldrush always was a winning strategy, it's a long long way from "atomistic studies of glass behaviour" :)

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.

Yep. http://www.lexical.org.uk/science/thesis/.

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.

Interesting. Are you just providing graphed data or how far are you taking this for your users? Moving averages and derivatives? Regression analysis?

Moving averages – yes, though it's tricky to get to them right now. The remainder: watch this space.

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