Cormac Kinney

Cormac Kinney
Born Cormac Kinney
(1971-06-18) June 18, 1971
St. Louis, Missouri
Residence New York City
Nationality American
Education Carnegie Mellon University
Occupation Entrepreneur
Known for Software inventions

Cormac Kinney is an entrepreneur and software designer. Inventor of Heatmaps,[1] institutional trading systems,[2] quantitative news analysis for trading,[3] a publisher social network,[4] and wireless diamond technology.[5] His inventions have been cited in over 1,500 US Patents.[6]

Background

He grew up in University City, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, the oldest of six children. Graduated from Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering, earning Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Industrial Management, and a Master of Science in Industrial Administration and Finance in 5 years, skipping one year of college, but leaving a Software Engineering degree uncompleted.[7]

He has lived in Manhattan, New York City since 1994.

Career and Inventions

As a student at Carnegie Mellon, Kinney founded two small software companies in succession, sold to Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., and H.J. Heinz. Both were related to optimization.[8][9]

While a graduate student at CMU, he became a founding member of the Carnegie Mellon Fast Lab consortium,[10] a real time trading simulation using trading floor data and technology, subsequently expanded to universities in 20 countries. The Smithsonian Institution awarded the Fast Lab consortium the Computerworld Smithsonian Award.[11] In addition to his research there, he contributed the state of the art fibre-optic networking equipment used by the Lab. His research focused on visualization for financial markets, and culminated in the invention of Heatmaps in 1993.[1][12]

Heatmaps, NeoVision

In 1993, with Carnegie Mellon Senior Research Scientist, Marc H. Graham, Kinney founded NeoVision Hypersystems, Inc.[12] to develop and market the Heatmaps technology. NeoVision Heatmaps are a real time middleware and computation platform with a now-familiar colorful visual interface. With the Heatmaps platform, specialized trading, risk management and broker monitoring applications were built, consolidating vast amounts real time and static data.[13]

After licensing the technology to trading desks at Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley,[13] and 9 departments in Deutsche Bank, he raised a total of $8 million from Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, Intel Corporation and venture capital investors.[14][15]

With fresh capital, Kinney hired Brian Barefoot, President of PaineWebber International, and formerly global head of sales and trading at Merrill Lynch as CEO, added Deutsche Bank’s Global COO to NeoVision’s board,[16] and continued to expand the rollout of Heatmaps to many large buy and sell side financial institutions, including Bank of America,[17] PaineWebber,[18] Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney and 13 other brokerages,[19] JPMorgan Chase,[20] Fidelity[21] and the DTC, for monitoring up to $1.7 trillion in daily transactions.[22] Subsequent to NeoVision, Barefoot became President of Babson College for seven years.[23]

Significant distribution licenses were made with Bloomberg L.P., Dow Jones Telerate, Thomson, and Reuters to license Heatmaps to over 300,000 desktops.[9][18][24][25] The Nasdaq was the first to license a web version, webHeatmaps, which has been included on the front page of www.nasdaq.com since 2001 through 2013,[26] with approximately 2.4 million daily page views.[27]

In 2002, he designed a trade cost analysis system for Fidelity Investments - cited by The Wall Street Journal as "a sophisticated tracking system to see which brokers can execute trades most efficiently," which was credited, in part, with reducing the mutual-fund firm's trading costs by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, to half the industry average.[2] This system, Brokermaps, was later installed at Bank of America Investment Management, Invesco, Janus, Merrill Lynch Investment Management and Putnam Investments.

As of July 2013, since 1993, Heatmaps have been cited in over 1,550 patents granted by the US PTO,[6] and in dozens of peer reviewed research papers.[28][29][30][31]

After a planned $30 million IPO fell through due to the dot com crash,[32] NeoVision was acquired in 2003 by financial software conglomerate SS&C Technologies.[33] Today the NeoVision technologies are incorporated into several SS&C products.[34]

Quantitative Hedge Fund

After the sale of NeoVision, Kinney shifted his focus to quantitative trading, developing a computational linguistics based trading system, which he used to manage hedge fund strategies at Amaranth Advisors, and Tudor Investment Corp. Subsequently, he launched Sentiment Strategies, a New York-based hedge fund consulting firm, additionally managing a $400 million portfolio for Millennium Partners,[3][35] and QuantFund LLC, a quantitative hedge fund.[36]

News Corp Social Network

In 2013, Kinney developed a new type of social network, based upon his design for a social graph to track the news consumption of a large number of readers. The system recommends articles to readers based on their profile and interests, but most importantly based on news discovered by peers sharing those interests. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp financed the development of the concept, simply named "Network," and agreed to implement Kinney's technology in The Wall Street Journal,[37] and other News Corp publications. News Corp announced the initiative as a LinkedIn competitor.[4] Kinney brought together a team of 70 staff from various News Corp and Wall Street Journal departments to build the technology. Network's recommendation and social features were a key element of the WSJ.com redesign, launched in 2015.[38][39] Kinney had intended Network to be used by a consortium of leading publishers, aggregating their reader's interests, to enable cross-publication recommendations. Although the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Inc., Forbes and other publishers expressed interest, News Corp decided to keep Network exclusive to its own publications.

Diamond Exchange and Wireless Authentication

In 2014, Kinney unveiled two inventions,[5] which enable diamonds to become a liquid commodity. The first is an electronic diamond exchange, and the second is a physical diamond commodity, akin to gold bars. His patent includes software to create sets of diamonds. Each set has the same aggregate quantity and quality of diamonds, based on a concept licensed from GemShares LLC. Kinney's technology seals the diamonds in transparent resin, with a wireless encryption chip. Counterfeit-proof optical technology detects a unique pattern of diamonds embedded in the resin.[40] The fungible diamond sets trade daily at a market price, and users authenticate the commodity with a smartphone. The system is pending approval by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for an Exchange-traded fund which holds the diamond units.[41] Kinney's technology was initially licensed to Secured Worldwide, LLC. In December 2015, that company's CEO, A. Joseph Lipton, was found to have committed fraud to take Kinney's technology.[42] Kinney represented himself Pro Se in the two year Federal case.[43] After a 5-day trial, Kinney's patent was ordered returned to him, by SDNY Chief Judge Colleen McMahon, and he was awarded damages.[44]

Flont

In 2016, Kinney launched Flont, a platform to introduce designer fine jewelry into the sharing economy. [45]

Awards

  • Carnegie Mellon Entrepreneur of the Year 1994
  • Pennsylvania Small Business Entrepreneur of the Year 1994[7]

References

  1. 1 2 "United States Patent and Trademark Office, registration #75263259". 1993-09-01.
  2. 1 2 "The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2004 - How Fidelity's Trading Chief Pinches Pennies on Wall Street, by Kate Kelly and John Hechinger".
  3. 1 2 "ZeroHedge, March 19, 2009 – Movers and Shakers".
  4. 1 2 "The Times, May 29, 2013 - News Corp Poised to Challenge LinkedIn, by David Robertson".
  5. 1 2 "Google Patents 20150223580".
  6. 1 2 "United States Patent Office Search".
  7. 1 2 "Pittsburgh Business Times, November 14, 1994, by Tascarella, Patty".
  8. ↑ "Fortune Magazine, May 2, 1994 - The New Face of Small Business, by Brian O'Reilly". CNN. May 2, 1994.
  9. 1 2 "Forbes Magazine, May 17, 1999 – Hot Stuff, by Silvia Sansoni". May 17, 1999.
  10. ↑ "Listing of Carnegie Mellon Fast Lab Members".
  11. ↑ "Georgia State University - Bio of Professor Sanjay Srivastava".
  12. 1 2 "Sept 5, 1996 - Heatmaps on Wall Street".
  13. 1 2 "Waters Magazine Nov 27, 1995 - A Picture is Worth A Thousand Numbers, by Dianne See Morrison".
  14. ↑ "Inside Market Data May 28, 2001 - Deutsche Bank Using Neovision's Heatmaps".
  15. ↑ "Success Magazine, Jan 2000 - Six Degrees of Capitalization, by Elaine Pofeldt".
  16. ↑ "Deutsche Bank Announcement, Mar 14, 2001".
  17. ↑ "Thomson Corporation, Oct. 7, 2002 - Bank of America Selects NeoVision Heatmaps; NeoVision Portfoliomaps".
  18. 1 2 "Inside Market Data, July 8, 2002 - Brokermaps at PaineWebber".
  19. ↑ "Inside Market Data, Oct 10, 1998 - Strike Teams Up with NeoVision, by Robert Sales".
  20. ↑ "Trading Technology, Nov 8, 1999 – Firms Install Heatmaps".
  21. ↑ "Waters Magazine, Sep 1, 2003 – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words".
  22. ↑ "National Securities Clearing and Depository Trust & Clearing Corporations Select NeoVision Heatmaps".
  23. ↑ "BusinessWeek Biography of Brian Barefoot".
  24. ↑ "Nov 16, 2003 - NeoVision Announces Licensing Agreement with Bridge Information Systems".
  25. ↑ "Bloomberg Licenses Heatmaps for 95000 Users".
  26. ↑ "Intel Corp announcement of webHeatmaps on Nasdaq.com".
  27. ↑ "WebStats Visitor Approximation for Nasdaq.com".
  28. ↑ "IEEE Computer Society Journal Jul 11, 2008".
  29. ↑ "Universite of Konstanz, Germany – Visual Exploration" (PDF).
  30. ↑ "University of Maryland, NASDAQ Velocity and Forces: An Interactive Visualization of Activity and Change" (PDF).
  31. ↑ "NC State University Institute for Advanced Analytics, SESUG 2012 Paper RI-08, Using SAS graphics to enhance survey research, by Barbara B. Okerson" (PDF).
  32. ↑ "Corporate Financing Week, Oct 19, 1999 – New York Co Plans IPO".
  33. ↑ "SS&C Acquires trade visualization firm NeoVision".
  34. ↑ "SS&C Website page for Heatmaps".
  35. ↑ "Sentiment Strategies Management Bio".
  36. ↑ "QuantFund Website".
  37. ↑ "Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2013 - Wall Street Journal To Launch a Financial Social Network, by Paresh Dave".
  38. ↑ "Journalism.co.uk, April 16, 2015 - Wall Street Journal to launch first site redesign in 7 years, by Abigail Edge".
  39. ↑ "Nieman Lab, April 21, 2015 - After the launch of its long-awaited web redesign, The Wall Street Journal hopes to spur innovation, by Joseph Lichterman".
  40. ↑ "Google Patents EP3105704A2".
  41. ↑ "U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form S-1, GemShares Physical Diamond Trust".
  42. ↑ "WBBH NBC-2, Jan 19, 2017 - Judge: Secured Worldwide Vult CEO Committed Fraud".
  43. ↑ "Law360, LexisNexis, May 20, 2015 - Diamond Middleman Wants Atty DQ'd In Software Patent Beef, by Bryan Koenig".
  44. ↑ "KMOV-TV St. Louis, Jan 19, 2017 - Judge: Secured Worldwide Vult CEO Committed Fraud".
  45. ↑ "Fast Company, Sep 15, 2016 - High-End Shopping In The Sharing Economy: Now We Can All Have Couture".

External References

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