I was recently in the US with the Leading Edge Forum touring a number of technology companies across silicon valley. One of the people I met was Sean Gourley who is the co-founder and CTO of Quid.

Quid is a company that is building software to enable people to see patterns and extract meaning from data. In principle this sounds simple, but in the information age data is endless and constantly growing, making it increasingly difficult for people and companies to harness data and generate valuable insights.

I was very impressed with the technology, but I was equally impressed by Sean’s story, which explained how and why he chose to start Quid. Thankfully in 2009 Sean shared this story during a TED Talk, which I highly recommend you watch.

As Sean is a trained physicist, much of the maths he described during our meeting was beyond me, however his passion, dedication and humanitarian nature were hard to ignore.

The video below highlights how Quid is being used by telecos to solve the “dumb pipe” problem.

As companies continue to struggle with the challenges of “big data”, I can see tools such as Quid being critical for businesses who want to remain ahead of the game. In fact, I would go as far to say that without software like Quid, companies will be unable to adapt to the ever changing business landscape. Our “Minority Report” future is closer than we think!