As of today, DiscoverText is part of a larger company: Vision Critical, a market research technology provider that works with more than a third of the world’s top 100 brands. The thrill of joining a successful and growing firm headquartered in Vancouver is amplified by my pride in what DiscoverText can bring to Vision Critical’s customers, and by my excitement about what we’ll be able to offer our existing customers now that we are part of Vision Critical.

I am personally joining Vision Critical as Vice President for Text Analytics, and while I will still be based in western Massachusetts, I’ll have a chance to work with Vision Critical staff and clients at the company’s offices across North America and around the world. My task at Vision Critical is to work with every colleague to add a new analytic dimension to the integrated product suite. We will further develop DiscoverText so that it becomes a seamless, world class text analytics solution for Vision Critical customers and research personnel.

To that end, we have started drawing on the software engineering expertise and market research experience of the Vision Critical team. As we move deeper into 2013, current DiscoverText and Vision Critical customers will benefit from a growing array of powerful tools, scientifically-informed methods, and access to new data types, all backed by a robust IT infrastructure. Whether you are working with panel survey data, emails, customer service data, or one of the many Gnip-enabled premium social media feeds, my job is to shorten the time it takes you to reach valid and reliable, data-driven insights. “Better insights faster” is the operative theme.

I am honored and deeply grateful to have this opportunity to join Vision Critical. On a personal note, as someone who grew up in Vancouver (and has fond memories of tossing Frisbees with my family on Spanish Banks), it’s wonderful to be joining a company that is one of Vancouver’s great success stories. While it’s now truly a global company, with half its employees based in offices as far-flung as New York, London and Hong Kong, I look forward to regular visits to Vancouver HQ.

The top priority now is to bring a rigorous and innovative approach to the analysis of text into an elegant and ever more useful software framework. I am confident that DiscoverText will continue to grow more powerful in many interesting an unexpected ways. On behalf of my colleague and trusted Chief Technology Officer Mark Hoy, I can say unreservedly we are pumped up to be a part of a vibrant organization like Vision Critical.