IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Telecom launches new standalone business... Qrious
Mon, 10th Mar 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Telecom Digital Ventures has this morning announced the launch of a new standalone business, Qrious.

According to the telco giant, Qrious will provide a "better way for New Zealand organisations to tap into the world of insights and create value from data, analytics and applications."

“We are living in a new digital age, where the smart use of data is an exploding global phenomena," says Simon Moutter, CEO, Telecom.

"It’s rapidly changing the way people live and do business around the world. Qrious is a bold move to help lead the development of greater economic and social value for New Zealand.”

Qrious is built on the powerful combination of information, insight and action.

“Qrious wants to help New Zealand address big challenging issues such as how to deliver better public transport, housing, and health outcomes," adds the General Manager for Qrious, Cyrus Facciano.

"We want to help businesses and organisations improve the way their products and services meet their customer wants and needs.

“For example we are curious about ways to help prevent the increase of chronic illness and improve the healthcare services available to the public. By connecting available data sets across the sector and correlating this with population demographics, we can help direct investment to the most in-demand types of care.

“Greater value and benefits can be derived from the combination of information, the insights that can be gleaned from that information, and the application of those insights into valuable action.

“The challenge is, many organisations and businesses don’t have the people expertise or technical resource to analyse information and gain these insights, or if they do, there are significant obstacles to generating value. Drawing on a powerful and unique local cloud platform and a team of data experts, Qrious aims to help them overcome this challenge.”

“We believe there is a massive opportunity for NZ Inc. to generate significant economic and social benefit from smarter use of data. Global insights suggest this could generate value in the billions of dollars for New Zealand.

“We have established a platform where businesses, the public sector and other organisations can privately and securely host their own data and combine this with other publicly available information to gain even greater insights. Our experts will help them to work with this data to derive valuable information and understanding.”

Along with this emerging Big Data phenomena is the global emergence of a new kind of professional, the “Data Scientist”. Data Science is the unique but essential combination of statistics, coding skills and business acumen to solve business and public good problems. The challenge, is that this type of professional is extremely rare.

In order to help build up the data science skill base within New Zealand that is necessary to deliver these benefits, Qrious is also establishing a Data Science Academy where students will be trained, tutored and tested on their knowledge of these new techniques. The best people will be offered internships and positions in this emerging and exciting industry.

“We think people will be amazed at the innovation, efficiencies and insights that can be created from the better understanding of available information, Facciano adds.

"Qrious will be the market leader in extracting these insights and helping our organisation and business customers comprehend and influence the forces that shape modern society.”

 More details of Qrious can be found at www.qrious.co.nz