Idea Success Analyzer

    A unique software product is being created in San Francisco. The program creates a map of world progress in the development of various technologies by mankind and displays information on promising areas of activity. This is a kind of analyzer of the success of ideas in various fields of business. For the past 18 months, the

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    young American company Quid has been mapping the "genome" of technological progress throughout the world. As Technology Review explains, Quid has already gathered information to assess the prospects of 35,000 firms and research groups working in the field of new technologies, and, obviously, is not going to stop there.

    It would seem that only an army of experts is able to analyze all these companies. But Quid thinks differently: she created a program that, according to certain algorithms, systematizes knowledge about these companies, their products and experiments.

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    Quid's programs cover patents, news, web pages of firms, laboratories, organizations, their press releases, research publications, employee lists and job openings, government grant documents, twitter posts, and so on. From all this, the software extracts keywords and phrases that can characterize the main ideas of projects (working groups, startups), their belonging to a particular area of ​​knowledge, to one or another technological field.

    These key phrases (hundreds per company) can be considered genes. Accordingly, it turns out that each company has its own unique set of technological genes, but moreover, different companies may have many common genes.

    When juxtaposing such genetic codes, links are sometimes found that previously escaped attention. Visual visualization in this case helps to find patterns. At the same time, the bundles of lines work according to the "principle of gravity" - the more similarity between the strands of companies, the more they are attracted to each other. So similar enterprises and projects form large clusters (engineering, finance, physics, computer science, biochemistry, etc.), which, in turn, are divided into sections.

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    Matching “everything with everything” is a hobby of programs. The Quid database is growing by 120 thousand documents daily. Not a single person can read them all, which means that they are not able to find any patterns, coincidences and intersections - only computers are capable of this. They are the ones who extract something useful from these tangles of relationships. Of course, guided by the rules invented by people.

    Where do promising innovations come about? What are the trends in the development of technology? Who is financing this? Such information would be happy to appreciate venture capitalists who would like to reduce the risk when investing in something new.

    And although not everything from the field of technology or finance is disclosed on the Web, even public information is enough to draw interesting conclusions. Especially if you know what to look at.

    Quid is very interested in companies and organizations that occupy positions at the junctions of regions. Interesting things often happen here that could potentially turn into breakthroughs. There is again an analogy with nature: the most interesting organisms are hybrids that inherit genes from noticeably different parents. What will come out in the end, a viable individual or a dead end branch of evolution? It’s hard to say in advance, but such innovative mixtures, according to Quid, are something that investors and industrial partners should pay attention to.

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    Say, what can the biopharmaceutical industry, social media, advertising targeting, game industry and genomics have in common? But in the “white field” somewhere between these so different nodes there were several companies and projects.

    So, the American company Insilicosdeveloped programs for the recognition of diagnostic biomarkers in samples, protein analysis, and so on. These tasks required powerful graphics processing tools, which automatically pushed Nvidia, a electronics company, a little closer to the biology, medicine, and pharmaceuticals sector. For Nvidia, this is a hint of a new direction.

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    The young project Foldit borrowed the technology of the gaming industry to solve a purely scientific problem. He invites everyone to compete in ... folding proteins.

    For volunteers, this is just a puzzle assembly competition, and the final product is the optimal folding methods for a particular protein that are in demand in the pharmaceutical industry. A single group of researchers would not be able to cope with this task, because here you need to evaluate too many options, and thousands of people on the Web solve this problem literally playfully.

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    Another example of the intersection of themes: platforms for contextual analysis, such as the one that Proximic had, originally invented for advertising targeting, were creatively rethought by Selventa, which, using such an apparatus, performs a statistical analysis of the reaction to new drugs in thousands of patients and identifies patterns. And they turn out to be very important for the partners of Selventa - companies from the fields of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical diagnostics.

    Another young company, Vivo, adapted the ideas of social blogging platforms to create a network for the exchange of knowledge (results of experiments, ideas) among researchers.

    Large white spots between large conglomerates of companies on the technological map are areas where something completely ingenious could potentially be born. You can see this and pay attention only after an automatic analysis of thousands of documents. So in the field of view of the program come the originals involved in technological hybridization.

    Another striking example is superDimension . She came up with bronchoscopy based on GPS satellite navigation. Three electromagnetic devices that play the role of satellites are placed on the patient’s chest, and a probe penetrating the lungs performs the function of a navigator.

    Using the superDimension technique, the doctor can control the position of the probe with high accuracy, and the catheter can be guided much deeper into the bronchi than with other techniques, and without damaging the walls of the lungs.

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    And this is just one point on the “genetic map” of world technologies, and there are already many thousands of them on it. The most interesting thing starts if one dot after another begins to grow in some kind of white spot.

    So, right before our eyes, a new market sector is beginning to take shape, attracting engineering forces and money. Although the location of the company away from the beaten track is not a guarantee of success, such pioneers are in fact the most loyal supporters of progress.

    Interestingly, Quid not only analyzes thousands of projects, but also analyzes its own project. The company continues to improve its program, refining data selection algorithms. According to Gourley, some predictions can now be made based on the cards built by Quid. But in the future they should become even more accurate and deep.

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    For its project, Quid has combined techniques and methods from mathematics, economics, technology and linguistics. We can safely say that Quid itself was also born in one of the white spots on the world map of progress. And this means that we can hope for the success of an unusual enterprise. So far, Quid has only eight customers. But they are already using the first data from the “technical genome of the planet” program to make decisions in the field of financing new projects.

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