

Statistics Editor of FT joins London startup - tow21
http://blog.timetric.com/2010/09/22/welcome-to-simon-briscoe/

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tow21
Link to the original story:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/sep/22/timetric-
fin...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/sep/22/timetric-financial-
times-simon-briscoe)

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swombat
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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jacquesm
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.

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adw
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.

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adw
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.

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

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

