Simon Briscoe, statistics editor at the Financial Times, is to join data visualisation start-up Timetric as its vice-president of product.
Briscoe will oversee the deployment of a number of new Timetric products as the company expands on its ambition of "indexing the world's economy". Timetric visualisation tools have quickly grown to be widely adopted by publishers – including the Guardian's Data Blog – and analysts.
He joins from the Financial Times where he has been statistics editor since 2000. A former Treasury civil servant, Briscoe went on to be managing director of research at Nikko Europe and a senior economist at SG Warburg and HSBC. He said:
"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.
"We will aim to replace official data where it is no longer fit for purpose for the many people making business and political decisions."
Andrew Walkingshaw, co-founder and chief executive of Timetric, told the Guardian: "Simon has extensive practical experience, gained both at the FT and from the market side of the fence, of how professional customers in the financial services industry make use of business information.
"That's tremendously valuable domain knowledge for a company like Timetric. We sit right at the intersection of media, technology and business information – Simon's expertise is invaluable, particularly as we move towards launching subscription data services aimed at squarely at that market."
