Assignment San Francisco Quid.com
By Rosalea Barker for Scoop Techlab
Truth be told, I use my Galaxy Note II as a tablette rather than as a phablet. It’s more like a pocket computer to me
than a communication device. And although its camera is excellent, I’ve never been very adept at photography and I tend
to shy away from using it.
So it’s little wonder that I didn’t do well on the assignment our beloved TechLab editor, Alastair Thompson, gave me,
despite having used the phone’s S Note feature to list his instructions. I forgot to Tweet whilst interviewing Kiwi
entrepreneur Sean Gourley at his offices in San Francisco, and didn’t record the interview as a video. Except for this
small intro, filmed where Sean met with me in the library of Quid.com:
Quid exists in the highly lucrative, but not viral (as in Facebook and Twitter), space of enterprise software. It
enables company strategists—whether they be in marketing or mergers and acquisitions—to get a three-dimensional picture
of what matters to them. Instead of viewing the results of, for example, a search for news articles, blogs, government
information, and social media posts about “cybersecurity” as a humungous list, Quid presents the same information as a
map showing what has been getting the most attention, as well as the connections between different sources.
Data Visualisation vs Text - Click for big version - (Photo credit: Sean Gourley)
Speaking of maps, I did use the phone to navigate to Quid’s offices from the Embarcadero BART station. Contrary to the
findings of recent research it didn’t take me longer to walk where I was going by using a phone app than it would have
if I’d had a paper map in my hand. And a paper map wouldn’t have told me the interesting story of this part of town,
which was created by landfill (and old sailing ships) in 1855, east of what was known as the Barbary Coast in the time
of San Francisco’s first boom—the Gold Rush.
The greatest use I made of the smartphone during my tech reporting adventure was as an audio recorder. Despite my
positioning the phone with the mic end towards me instead of my interviewee, the sound quality was good, and the Voice
Recorder app includes a simple snipping tool. Here’s a snippet:
Click a link to play audio (or right-click to download) in either
MP3 format or in OGG format.
There’s lots more audio where that came from, and I’ll be including some of it in an article for Scoop about Sean
Gourley and Quid. In the meantime, just to show that even a Kamera Klutz like me can take a photo on the phone, here is
one of Sean standing in the quidaciously decorated entranceway to the Quid offices:
Sean Gourley - Click for big version
Content Note: This post has been enabled by Telecom NZ , but the thoughts are my own. Scoop TechLab is a project of Scoop Independent
Media http://www.scoop.co.nz . You can find more about the Galaxy Note II on the Telecom website ( where you can also find out about Telecom XT's breakthrough flat rate data roaming plans) and on Scoop TechLab.