| Wednesday, September 19, 2007 |  |
| Fractal brains |
 This is a series of splendid pictures that supposedly were generated from people's EEG brain patterns. I think the idea is that one looks at one's own patterns in real-time, and there's some kind of bio-feedback thing going on. [ Thoughts | 2007-09-19 00:36 | 4 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Indiceco |
 The last few months I've been rather busy with a little start-up company I'm a partner in.
It might not be terribly interesting to you unless you're in France and in certain types of profession. But, in brief, it is a service that delivers business statistics online. Right now mainly various kinds of analysis of business sectors. For example, any company would have a need for knowing how their sector is doing in general. If you're manufacturing plastic tubing, you'd of course want to know how that market segment is doing, and how all your competitors are doing. Is their business expanding, are they investing, are they turning a profit. There's a whole bunch of indicators and ratios of various kinds, hundreds of them, that are meant to show you that. But it is not entirely straightforward to produce such an analysis. Larger companies would probably have somebody who's job it is to produce that kind of reports, but a smaller company doesn't. So, the idea is to make it very easy. In a few seconds you can get a whole series of well thought-out reports on what is happening in any segment you choose. If all you want is one snapshot, you buy the report and you're done. If you regularly need to do such things, you get a subscription, and you can analyze any segment any time you want. That would particuarly make sense for a consultant or accountant or banker who often needs to advise people in different businesses. The company is called Indiceco, as in Indices (indicators) Economiques. The website is here. It is in French, obviously. But you can probably get a sense of it. You pick a business sector, and you see some different numbers, and there's a variety of different presentations to choose from. More will follow as more databases and more presentation formats are added. Accounting figures isn't normally something that excites me, but the idea of taking huge amounts of data and simplifying it into something you can access in simple ways, and model in real time, is something I like. The world is too complicated and we need ways of making it more simple. The system there is developed in Ruby on Rails, and I'm basically the developer. My two partners, Anthony and David fill in complementary roles by being experts in stuff I'm not well versed in, like the actual accounting details, legal matters, and sales. [ Diary | 2007-09-19 22:25 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |