ktMINE’s CEO, David Jarczyk, was featured on the Entrepreneur Friday segment of WBBM Newsradio’s Noon Business Hour on September 23, 2016. David talked with Kris Kridel and Cisco Cotto about how ktMINE provides unparalleled access to the innovation activities of companies. Read the transcript below.
Cisco Cotto: It’s Entrepreneur Friday here on the Noon Business Hour and this afternoon we’re featuring a Chicago business that digs through data in an effort to figure out what companies are planning to do. Let’s learn about it from David Jarczyk, President & CEO of ktMINE, again based here in Chicago. David, good afternoon thanks for joining us.
David Jarczyk: Hello, thank you for having me.
Cotto: So, give us a thumbnail sketch of your data mining business.
Jarczyk: Absolutely, I started out a few years ago in consulting and recognized one of the biggest problems any corporates or investors run into is knowing who’s innovating what. Innovation is such a hot topic whether we are talking about Google companies you’ve never heard of. The problem is companies spend significant resources hiding what they are innovating and for good reason, right. Companies don’t want the competitors knowing what they’re doing. The funny thing is this data is actually out there in the public domain, it just needs to be pieced together. ktMINE, our company, finds this data and pieces it together allowing investors, corporates, and even government to figure out who owns what and what they are innovating.
Cotto: So no matter how they (companies) want to keep it a secret, no matter how hard they try, you can figure it out?
Jarczyk: At the end of the day there are certain things, whether it is regulations in certain countries or finding some boring things that are known as patents and trademarks, that are generally known as legal topics, these pieces of data, when combined and used for this analytical purpose, yes. Yes, the information becomes very visible to the common eye.
Kris Kridel: So you can predict trends or actions by businesses, give us a couple of examples.
Jarczyk: Yeah, that’s exactly right. We look at this data as being a leading indicator of where a company is innovating and that’s the beauty of it. Going back in time if we were looking at Amazon over the last few months to a year, you would be able to see that Amazon significantly investing in the grocery business with their “Skip the Trip” offering and the data shows that’s exactly where they were going. If you’re in the grocery delivery business that’s something that you would want to be keeping an eye on. Another great example is Sony. Sony is developing contact lenses towards gaming. Think about that and putting contact lenses in your eye, every commercial you see on tv now is for virtual reality with big goggles on your screen. We are now talking about contact lenses in the future for gaming. These are the types of things we can see ahead of time and we call it that leading indicator of innovation.
Kridel: Do you have a lot of competitors in this area?
Jarczyk:Â The data itself is in the public domain so anyone could find it, it just takes a lot of work connecting it and finding it. There are other companies that deal in portions of the data but we feel our unique offering is piecing it together with the way we do. No one has the same data sets or provides the same analytics the way we do. The one thing we love is we’ve created an Alert feature. So, say you’re interested in a particular company or technology, we’ll send those alerts right to your email when something happens. Then you can determine how important or critical that is for your business.
Cotto: Is this something that just benefits bigger companies, in thinking big corporations or can mom and pop operations also benefit?
Jarczyk: Well it’s interesting, right, one of the biggest risks to big companies is actually the mom and pop or the kids in a garage that are creating disruptive technologies. It’s interesting data that will allow big companies to see what the little guys are doing but also the little guys to also know who’s out there in the space. More often than not companies aren’t worried about the big companies they compete with, they know about them, it’s these new entrants in the market that come out of garages that really can disrupt an industry.
Kridel: Alright, David. We’ve learned a lot in just a few minutes from you. Thanks for joining us today.
