Is Foursquare the future of Investing? Twitter co-founder un-pivots Jelly

The Human Powered Search Engine

Christopher “Biz” Stone, co-founder of Twitter and Medium is in his words trying “un-pivot” his ask and answer startup Jelly. Jelly is was started in 2012,  from Stone’s belief that the future of search will not be to be thinking up some keywords, getting lots of results, and then hopefully getting an answer. Instead Jelly will work in ways similar to Quora or Yahoo Answers, where a person ask questions and then just live their life until they get their answers. Biz Stone states Jelly is “Helpful answers for busy people.”

Basically, Jelly learns which people know what things and it learns what your question is about. Then, it pairs your question with people who are most likely able to help you. As a bonus, you can follow up with these real people to get into specifics, and for those who wonder what about trolls who give answers that are irrelevant to the questions, Jelly will have a ranking system where people rate those that give the best questions, and therefore the highest ranking people will be the ones that have their answers shown.

The Future of Investing

Chipotle reported its first quarterly loss on Tuesday, with massive decline in sales, falling nearly 30%. While many investors was expecting a decline, they were still caught off guard by the scale of the drop. However there was one company that was no surprised. Foursquare, the social-media app that allows users to check in and tell their friends what they are up was able to predict a 29% dip in Chipotle visits from its users.

This is the future of investment that many are calling “alternative data”. Alternative data is where obscure data sets can be turned into tradable information. Such firms such as RS Metrics which uses satellite images to examine traffics going into and from stores. RS Metrics was able to predict an increase in traffic into JC Penny from the amount of vehicles in the parking lots of the retail store.

As more and more firms begin to adopt the use of "alternative data" it seems that mining raw and unstructured data for investment insights is going mainstream. Investors are hiring data specialists and putting projects in place to make sure they aren't left behind. At some point this "alternative data" won't be so alternative anymore.