Looking for Innovation

As a startup focused on speed, we've long admired Fast Company and their influential list of Most Innovative Companies. In fact, we were doing our best to convince them we should be on the list when they threw out a far more interesting suggestion – what if we helped them make the list for 2016? It is truly an ideal use of the Quid software – combing through millions of news articles and company profiles globally to find ideas and companies on the forefront of each industry.

How the Fast Company List was Built

We started by looking for themes and new developments across 40 different sectors – everything from AI, Sports, and Healthcare to specific regions such as Africa, India, and Israel. The result was an actual map of innovation for each sector. Once we discovered the trends, we dug into the companies that are either instigating or capitalizing on those trends and delivered a list of 12-20 nominees for each to Fast Company. From there, the reporters and editors did what they do best – vet the candidates more fully as well as supplement it with their own expertise and reporting.

Visit Fast Company for their full list of Most Innovative Companies for 2016 and a short article from their staff about how they worked with Quid. 

To see how Quid performs on a custom search of your own, please contact us. 

What do we know about the Apple Car?

Since the Wall Street Journal released a report in February 2015 indicating that Apple has been developing a vehicle under the codename ‘Project Titan’, quiet speculation about an Apple Car kicked into high gear. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and there’s a lot of smoke down in Cupertino.

A number of publicly available signals can help us understand Apple’s activities — news chatter, hiring trends, patent filings, investments & acquisitions, etc. For a company in the limelight like Apple, this could mean years worth of disparate data to sift through…what’s signal, and what’s noise? What’s new information, and what’s already known? We’ve turned to Quid to allow us to easily collect and identify trends emerging from these data sets. We’ve also collaborated with John Suh, the Director of Hyundai Ventures in Silicon Valley, to interpret these digital breadcrumbs and speculate what the future may hold.

So what do we know?

Quid analyzed the past two years of news mentions of the iCar or Apple Car — over 10,000 articles — to crowdsource intelligence on Apple’s activities. Using Quid we can visually display which events are widely reported, which opinions are outliers, and how the discussion changes over time. Hiring provides one of the clearest signals of intent for Apple, with 24% of the total speculation about the Apple Car focused on the acquisition of automotive talent.

The timing is right for a force like Apple to change the competitive foundations of the automotive industry. Consumer preferences are changing, particularly with younger drivers. Millennials have access to alternative transit methods, including improved public transit and car sharing services. Younger generations are balking at the traditional dealership-based car buying experience (‘Where’s my ‘buy it now button’?). Consumer expectations about what’s in a vehicle (and what creates value) is also changing as more and more of the perceived value in a vehicle shifts to software-driven features.

Some automotive executives have quickly dismissed the threat from Apple, like Dieter Zetsche,the CEO of Daimler saying “If there were a rumor that Mercedes or Daimler planned to start building smartphones then they [Apple] would not be sleepless at night. And the same applies to me.” One can’t help but compare this response to the early days of the iPhone, when the then CEO Mark Lazardus of RIM commented  “I couldn’t type on it [the iPhone] and I still can’t type on it, and a lot my friends can’t type on it…It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.”

The good news for the auto industry is that there is still time to act. Carplay is only just launching to the public. We don’t see signals (yet) indicating that Apple is thinking about sales, marketing & distribution. But there isn’t much time. Whether Apple launches a car or not, the tech giants have set their sights on the automotive market, and change is a-coming.

Selected analysis on the Apple Car available for download here.

Further coverage of the analysis on MacWorld here

Looking for Innovation

As a startup focused on speed, we've long admired Fast Company and their influential list of Most Innovative Companies. In fact, we were doing our best to convince them we should be on the list when they threw out a far more interesting suggestion – what if we helped them make the list for 2016? It is truly an ideal use of the Quid software – combing through millions of news articles and company profiles globally to find ideas and companies on the forefront of each industry.

How the Fast Company List was Built

We started by looking for themes and new developments across 40 different sectors – everything from AI, Sports, and Healthcare to specific regions such as Africa, India, and Israel. The result was an actual map of innovation for each sector. Once we discovered the trends, we dug into the companies that are either instigating or capitalizing on those trends and delivered a list of 12-20 nominees for each to Fast Company. From there, the reporters and editors did what they do best – vet the candidates more fully as well as supplement it with their own expertise and reporting.

Visit Fast Company for their full list of Most Innovative Companies for 2016 and a short article from their staff about how they worked with Quid. 

To see how Quid performs on a custom search of your own, please contact us. 

How We Think About Diet and Weight-Loss

Our interest in losing weight stays consistent over time (no surprise there). But we gravitate toward different trends over time (goodbye garcinia cambogia) and view brands like Weight Watchers and Atkins differently. Check out this Slideshare for a preview of what we learned.

Looking for Innovation

As a startup focused on speed, we've long admired Fast Company and their influential list of Most Innovative Companies. In fact, we were doing our best to convince them we should be on the list when they threw out a far more interesting suggestion – what if we helped them make the list for 2016? It is truly an ideal use of the Quid software – combing through millions of news articles and company profiles globally to find ideas and companies on the forefront of each industry.

How the Fast Company List was Built

We started by looking for themes and new developments across 40 different sectors – everything from AI, Sports, and Healthcare to specific regions such as Africa, India, and Israel. The result was an actual map of innovation for each sector. Once we discovered the trends, we dug into the companies that are either instigating or capitalizing on those trends and delivered a list of 12-20 nominees for each to Fast Company. From there, the reporters and editors did what they do best – vet the candidates more fully as well as supplement it with their own expertise and reporting.

Visit Fast Company for their full list of Most Innovative Companies for 2016 and a short article from their staff about how they worked with Quid. 

To see how Quid performs on a custom search of your own, please contact us. 

Healthcare Influencers of 2015

2015: Year of Women Leadership?

Methodology: Analysis used Quid to algorithmically map massive amounts of information from disparate data sources and then determine influencers by measuring primary mentions of pharma, device, diagnostic, provider, and payor CEOs from thousands of global news sources in 2015.

The 100 Year Human Revolution

There is something very special is happening right now. Within the coming decades, the applications of computing are going to drastically modify the way we look at the world and the way we communicate. These changes will fundamentally change not only how we think, but also what it means to be human.

The pivotal piece of these changes is language, which also happens to be fundamental to our interpretation of human intellect. We are in the midst of a revolution where we get to decide, what does it really mean to be human?

For example, think back to the year 1987. If you wanted to know something, you would need to have access to a library, be able to find the right book, and then maybe you could find the information you wanted. If it was possible, it could take you hours to learn one snippet of knowledge.

Today, you can learn almost anything within a 6-second recall. Now that we have constant access to multimedia via the Internet and our smart devices, we have the ability to communicate with hundreds of people in just a few seconds. As minds, we are no longer independent identities; we are now a collective identity.

To learn more about the evolving revolution, please watch Quid founder Bob Goodson’s full talk below. He gave this lecture titled ‘Augmented Humanity’ at the University of Oxford in May of 2015.

Looking for Innovation

As a startup focused on speed, we've long admired Fast Company and their influential list of Most Innovative Companies. In fact, we were doing our best to convince them we should be on the list when they threw out a far more interesting suggestion – what if we helped them make the list for 2016? It is truly an ideal use of the Quid software – combing through millions of news articles and company profiles globally to find ideas and companies on the forefront of each industry.

How the Fast Company List was Built

We started by looking for themes and new developments across 40 different sectors – everything from AI, Sports, and Healthcare to specific regions such as Africa, India, and Israel. The result was an actual map of innovation for each sector. Once we discovered the trends, we dug into the companies that are either instigating or capitalizing on those trends and delivered a list of 12-20 nominees for each to Fast Company. From there, the reporters and editors did what they do best – vet the candidates more fully as well as supplement it with their own expertise and reporting.

Visit Fast Company for their full list of Most Innovative Companies for 2016 and a short article from their staff about how they worked with Quid. 

To see how Quid performs on a custom search of your own, please contact us.