Justin Graves is the Founder and CEO of Infegy, the provider of Social Radar 3, the industry’s most intelligent social media monitoring and analytics platform. Social Radar’s patent-pending analytics and algorithms extract valuable, sentiment-based and actionable information that is used to develop successful marketing strategies and bring to market competitive and improved products and services that better meet the needs of consumers and business users.
At heart, Justin Graves is a computer programmer who focuses on text analysis research and development. Before creating Infegy, Justin founded a company which developed a state-of-the-art high-efficiency 3D game platform. He initially began his career in the technology industry as a computer game programmer and has always been a technology enthusiast. Justin is passionate about following the latest tech trends and the consumerization of IT.
[quote style=”boxed”]The biggest mistake I’ve made since founding Infegy was ultimately becoming a workaholic and ignoring everything else like family, friends and an all-around social life. I’ve realized this though, and I’m trying to create a good balance between my work and personal life, although I know that I am still a workaholic at heart. Admitting this to myself is the first step though, so I’m still trying to adapt.[/quote]
Justin Graves is married to a chef and lives in Kansas City, MO.
What are you working on right now?
I’ve really been focusing on the launch of the new version of Social Radar, a cloud-based social media monitoring and analytics platform.We announced it last week, and I really think that this version “ups the ante” for social media analytics platforms – it’s 10x faster, easier to use and can integrate into any enterprise system. I’m also undergoing a major rework of Infegy’s principle offerings. After that’s done, I want to experiment a bit to determine new ways to analyze content and pick out interesting and relevant information.
3 trends that excite you?
Basically, the evolution of technology in all of its forms fascinates me and I like to follow anything related to this topic that interests me. As a techie, I’m captivated by the evolution in computing power that enables new technologies to be created, and allows existing technologies to be cheap and accessible. I also follow the trends in mobile devices and how they’ve evolved relating to functionality, accessibility to information and global communication. Then there’s also the commoditization and simplicity of accessing extreme masses of information (i.e. Wikipedia), which gives anyone in the world the ability to learn about pretty much anything, and allows anyone to share their ideas through countless social and traditional communication channels.
How do you bring ideas to life?
This may be an obvious one, but dedication and focus are essential to achieving goals and bringing ideas to life. Reaching your goals means you’ve got to see it all the way through and attempt to beat your own expectations – so that if it doesn’t work out you know you did all that you could, and you can feel confident about moving on and maybe you’ll eventually try again.
What inspires you?
Solving challenging problems in new, innovative ways really inspires me, but I’m also inspired by others who take on and accomplish incredible challenges, like the IBM Watson Jeopardy Challenge. That was an incredible effort from some very bright and dedicated people.
What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?
The biggest mistake I’ve made since founding Infegy was ultimately becoming a workaholic and ignoring everything else like family, friends and an all-around social life. I’ve realized this though, and I’m trying to create a good balance between my work and personal life, although I know that I am still a workaholic at heart. Admitting this to myself is the first step though, so I’m still trying to adapt.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
I’d like to see someone create an offering that makes it easier for people to manage their own savings through investment. Investing and managing assets doesn’t have to be as complicated for anyone to do as it is now. It’d be nice to have a service that makes it easy for anyone to invest in ideas and companies they really believe in.
What is one book and one tool (i.e., piece of software) that helps you bring ideas to life?
Hands down, my favorite book is The C/C++ Programmer’s Bible. I don’t use it regularly anymore, but when I was a teenager I used to lug it with me everywhere, and it helped me to understand programming, which has ultimately been my biggest passion in life. It’s difficult to choose only one tool that helps me bring ideas to life….but lately I’ve loved Python, an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics, because it allows me to efficiently prototype ideas.
Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?
I would love to see an interview with John Carmack from ID Software. He initially sparked my interest in programming and inspired my entire career. Carmack is incredible at what he does in 3D graphics and rocketry, and is always an inspiration to me.
What is the key to professional happiness?
You must absolutely love what you do. If you aren’t passionate to go to work every day, you need to do something else. It bothers me a lot to hear people say they hate their jobs. If that’s true, why are you doing it? Only you can change your life and find a career that you love…so do it.
What is your passion?
My number one passion is creative engineering. Software, technology, cars, motorcycles, machinery… I love analyzing and studying the clever engineering that goes into making something as small as the engine in a sport bike so powerful, the brilliance in a smartphone’s processor, or the genius that goes into making a computer solve word puns in Jeopardy.
Connect:
My company’s website is www.infegy.com, or you can read our blog at www.infegy.com/buzzstudy. We also have Twitter accounts, http://twitter.com/Infegy, http://twitter.com/JustinGraves and .
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.