Cormac Kinney

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.

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.

While a graduate student at CMU, he became a founding member of the Carnegie Mellon Fast Lab consortium, 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. 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.

Heatmaps, NeoVision

In 1993, with Carnegie Mellon Senior Research Scientist, Marc H. Graham, Kinney founded NeoVision Hypersystems, Inc. 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.

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

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, and continued to expand the rollout of Heatmaps to many large buy and sell side financial institutions, including Bank of America, PaineWebber, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney and 13 other brokerages, JPMorgan Chase, Fidelity and the DTC, for monitoring up to $1.7 trillion in daily transactions. Subsequent to NeoVision, Barefoot became President of Babson College for seven years.

Significant distribution licenses were made with Bloomberg L.P., Dow Jones Telerate, Thomson, and Reuters to license Heatmaps to over 300,000 desktops. 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, with approximately 2.4 million daily page views.

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. 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, and in dozens of peer reviewed research papers.

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

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, and QuantFund LLC, a quantitative hedge fund.

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, and other News Corp publications. News Corp announced the initiative as a LinkedIn competitor. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. Kinney represented himself Pro Se in the two year Federal case. After a 5 day trial, Kinney's patent was ordered returned to him, by SDNY Chief Judge Colleen McMahon, and he was awarded damages.

Flont

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

Awards