Saw a very cool sounding article in The Daily Telegraph, ‘‘Telegraph 100 Growth Companies Index’ It has lots of meaningful looking graphs and a ranking system.
“Each company moves up or down the index based on its impact on the Internet and importance.” According to the Telegraph.co.uk
Turns out this is one a number of indices that YouNoodle, an interesting valley-based start-up founded by Oxford graduate Bob Goodson, has launched. You can see some of the other indices here What I cannot understand, having spent some time looking at the site and the information presented on any partner sites is what this score actually represents.
YouNoodle’s website states:
“This is the first time there’s been a scoring system for startups that has been calculated based on such an incredibly rich data set,” says Dr. Sean Gourley, Director of Data Tools at YouNoodle, who led the development of the mathematical algorithm behind the YouNoodle Score. “There is a large and complex stream of information about startups which we’ve spent the last 12 months categorizing and structuring – using the latest techniques from the fields of network theory and probabilistic modelling. This is the world’s largest realtime startup index — opening the window to the world’s most innovative companies and making information surrounding them available to all.”
All very impressive sounding but having poked around, and asked a few people who are considerably cleverer than I, (this is not a small set of people), I have a sneaky suspicion that companies get higher in the index if there is more being written about them on news sites, Twitter etc.
Does anyone know what the index actually measures? I think it has some very interesting applications but surely it cannot be that simple?
I’m always suspicious of these kinds of ‘closed’ scoring systems. I don’t understand how the ‘complex stream of information’ impacts on the success of a start-up unless it’s one that really needs the generic buzz in order to take off.
Also, I don’t think we’ll see any objective evidence that it works. If a company does become successful, however you choose to measure that, will we really see a comparison with their old score? Somehow I doubt it (please excuse the cynicism).