Sean D. Francis

The Geek Index

Posted on 06 February 2009

I’ve spent some time looking at the economy and determined that while I know very little about the auto industry, the financial industry, and pretty much all of business world as a whole, but I have a pretty good sense of Geekdom.  I’ve taken this keen insight and started building what I called a Geek Index.  It isn’t fine tuned by any means as there are many more variables I need to bring into the formula.

As it stands now, the Geek Index is a number based off of twenty publicly traded companies which are then weighted and normalized.  The twenty companies aren’t that surprising.

Entertainment/Games
Marvel
Time-Warner
Lionsgate Films
Sony
IMAX
Activision-Blizzard
Hasbro
GE
Vivendi

Technology/Gadgets/Games
Sony
Microsoft
Apple
Research in Motion
IRobot
Optimal Group
Verizon
AT&T
Adobe
Google
Yahoo
Intel

Some of these companies are ‘geekier’ than others so they are weighted differently.  Activision-Blizzard is geekier than GE.  AT&T’s geek credentials come from gadgets other companies make that AT&T utilizes, so it actually gets weighted with a partial value.

These numbers were then normalized to equal 1,000 on 1/30/2009 as a baseline value.  I’ve been bad at running the formula daily but from 2/2/2009 to today, the index value has increased 75 points to 1078.35.  This is better than my 401k!

I want to include a few other elements beyond stocks though.  I tried tapping into the Hollywood Stock Exchange to get movie values but it doesn’t come through conveniently and it doesn’t track all the celebrities and personalities that I believe truly make up Geek Culture.

The only other mechanism to determine level of fame/notoriety is the number of hits Google brings up for each person.  This is acceptable but not an easy thing to automate… I think.  Also, what twenty people are best representatives of Geek Culture.  For movies I can do ticket sales.  Not sure what I can do with TV series – perhaps ratings.

So if you have suggestions of things to measure to determine the health of Geekdom, I’d love to hear about it.