We’re all really looking forward to working together on indexing the world’s economy. It’s a big task, but we reckon we’re up to it, and we’re very pleased that Simon’s going to be on our side (how can you argue with someone who literally wrote the book on British statistics?).
Here’s our press release:
Simon Briscoe joins Timetric as Vice President of Product
LONDON, United Kingdom, Sept. 22 — Timetric today announced the appointment of Simon Briscoe as Vice President of Product. Timetric index the world’s economic data; Simon brings his extensive experience in economic policy, the financial industry and journalism to the task of shaping Timetric’s highly-detailed and exceptionally broad-ranging economic data services.
Simon joins Timetric from the Financial Times, where he spent a decade as Statistics Editor. Before that he was Managing Director of Research at Nikko Europe and a senior economist at SG Warburg and HSBC. He started his career as a Treasury civil servant, including a spell at the European Commission in Brussels. He is an advisor to the OECD’s “Measuring the progress of societies” global project and is a director of Straight Statistics (straightstatistics.org), a pressure group that aims to detect and expose the distortion and misuse of statistical information. He has published several books, most recently “Panicology” (Penguin). He has been on the councils of the Royal Statistical Society and Society of Business Economists.
“We’re delighted that Simon has chosen to join us at Timetric,”, said Andrew Walkingshaw, co-founder/CEO of Timetric. “Simon has developed an immense understanding of the challenges faced by both users and distributors of public and proprietary statistical data. We are about to bring several new data products to market: as we do so, Simon will help us deliver the most useful and relevant services to both financial-industry and media audiences.”
“I am hugely enthusiastic about quantifying the previously unquantifiable. We will be both riding the wave of free government data and mining the insights locked up in businesses’ proprietary systems. Through that, we’ll be finding new trends – and breaking news stories! – using data, a resource which is still mostly untapped”, said Simon Briscoe. “We will aim to replace official data where it is no longer fit for purpose for the many people making business and political decisions.”
About Timetric
Timetric is indexing the world’s economy. Building on the Timetric Platform, a proprietary, highly-scalable, and Web-native time series store and statistical publication service, they are building the next generation of business information services. Their flagship public website, timetric.com, is used by publishers globally (including the Guardian) to communicate the latest statistical insight to their audiences.
Timetric is headquartered in Clerkenwell in London, England. It is backed by a team of leading angels based in the UK, the US, Europe and the Middle East led by Stefan Glänzer and Alex Zubillaga.
Target 2.0 is a competition, challenging students to set the optimum policy to control inflation in the UK economy. It’s open to schools across the country, and is run by The Times and the Bank of England. The name comes from the target in question: keeping headline inflation to 2.0%.
It’s run in three stages – the regional heats, area finals and the national final. In each round, teams go head to head with teams from other schools: they present their view of the economy and what they think the base rate should be to hit the Government-set target. However, since this challenge is about monetary policy in general, and in view of the recent quantitative easing, the students can also tinker with the money supply. The teams are then judged on the quality of their presentation and their reasons behind their choices. Last year, the competition attracted 285 teams. The finalists were invited to visit the Bank of England and meet the Governor, and also got a chance to win some of the £26,000 worth of prize money for their school.
One challenge schools face with the Target 2.0 competition is access to the data on which the decisions are to be based. The Bank of England website provides a list of the relevant economic data but in a flat form – usually a long column of dates with corresponding figures. Therefore it can be difficult for students, already pushed for time with A-level preparation, to wade through all the data, let alone begin to understand the relationships between series. That’s where we can help; we’ve uploaded the data recommended by the Bank to the Timetric site, where you can immediately share, compare, and graph it. Nearly 200 series are here:
What’s more, to make things even easier, we’ve grouped the data into subgroups around specific topics: money/markets, demand/output, labour market, costs and prices and international economy:
Firstly, hello to everyone at the data-driven journalism conference in the Netherlands today! We’ve been working on a few new things for Timetric, and one of them’s ready to go: we hope a lot of people, including journalists — and you! — find it useful.
Get up-to-date graphs and data on your website in five minutes. Or your money back. *
2. Pick the data you’re interested and add it to the graph.
Filtering through the dataset is really easy: just search, then tick any data you want to see in the graph. Want to take it out again? Untick it.
3. Tweak the graph and grab the embed code.
Right now, you can change the size of the graph or the line thickness. (We’re adding more options here soon). Once you’ve finished tweaking, grab the embed code and paste it into your site or blog, just like you would with a Youtube movie.
“Okay, so this is the data blog today. So obviously we’ve got Afghanistan at the top. Afghanistan is often at the top at the moment. This is a full list of everybody who’s died, every British casualty who’s died and been wounded over time. So you’ve got this data here. We use, I tend to use a lot of third party services. This is a company called Timetric, who are very good at visualizing time series data. It takes about five minutes to create that, and you can roll over and get more information.”
…but it’s definitely worth your time to watch this if you're interested in where journalism's going. (You might be interested in this SxSW panel too.)
Real-time charts, from Tom Taylor, of your odds of getting a bike from London's new bike hire scheme. Our local station's the 13th busiest.
Young Rewired State was last week, and as ever, the kids put us all to shame. We're really proud to have been sponsors, and we wish we'd thought of GovSpark, a real-time monitor of the electricity usage of government departments, first!
The Economist's daily charts are really well done. They've been tracking the price of breakfast, which is shooting up thanks to a global wheat shortage. Our suggestion's to treat yourself to a fried breakfast:
On a very different area of economics, Asymco — a new blog, largely writing about the mobile phone market. It's using data really, really smartly; this post on Nokia's woes, for instance.
