jump to navigation

EC2 scale May 19, 2009

Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a comment

Amazon released a number of new APIs for the EC2 cloud computing service yesterday, all designed around making it even easier to scale up your cloud in response to an increase in load or incoming traffic and simplifying distributing this load evenly across the cloud; CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing. Between these APIs and Canonical adding support for Eucalyptus (an open-source implementation of the EC2 API for running private clouds that can be scaled to EC2 if required) to Ubuntu, I find it hard to view Windows as a serious server operating system for cloud-style applications. Hopefully Microsoft will get a competitor widely released (and at a low cost of entry) soon; either that or Mono improves the server performance of their CLR implementation!

twitter ticker February 13, 2009

Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , add a comment

My favourite Twitter client TweetDeck has been updated to include built-in support for the day-trading Twitter community StockTwits (via ReadWriteWeb);

You can think of it as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal.

Or more cynically, another place for uninformed traders (aka gamblers) to fall victim to pump and dump scams?

Clearly Twitter is no replacement for professional trading tools. That said, IM plays a significant role on many trading floors these days; the next time I am on ours I’ll keep an eye out for TweetDeck! There are a few other Twitter tools with a financial focus. Fred Wilson recommends mytrade’s Twitter quote bot. It would be interesting to see Twitter integration with a stock screening application as well… “@trader AAPL is trending above VWAP“.

I would sign up to StockTwits but I am less than keen on giving out my Twitter credentials. The sooner Twitter supports an OAuth-style authorisation mechanism for 3rd party websites the better. Despite signing up for Loic Le Meur’s Team Seesmic-Twhirl to try out Twhirl’s Seesmic integration (hmmm… is there a possible StockTwits and Seesmic overlap for a crowd-sourced Internet alternative to CNBC?) I gave it a miss when it required signing up for yet another social network account; between a handful of OpenID’s and Google/Facebook/Twitter account I think I am now waiting for them all to just start letting me cross-authenticate.

Finally, a plug for my own Twitter feed.

Web 2.0 financial tools for all November 12, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , add a comment

I have been regularly using Web 2.0 start-up Wesabe for tracking my personal finances for over a year now. I think they run a great service and believe it is only going to get greater. So I’m happy to see that they have just launched a co-branded version of their website with a media outlet that is all but guaranteed to get more people flocking to their service in these budget-conscious times of recession; the UK’s Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph-branded version of Wesabe can be reached here but there doesn’t appear to be any linkage on the Telegraph website at present.

I’m not a big fan of the Daily Telegraph itself but this is a great move by both parties. Hopefully it keeps Wesabe well-funded and in a position to keep expanding their capabilities; there are some advanced features I’d like them to implement and the service could also perform some useful predictive forecasting (ie. when is my next utility bill likely to arrive?). I also hope it encourages more UK banks to allow customers to export their transaction history in accurate and standard-compliant format such as OFX, something I have banged on about in the past. That said, my own bank has a fairly decent OFX export… please excuse me if I keep which bank it is to myself in the interest of personal security!

Wesabe are also to be applauded for their Data Bill of Rights, a policy and practice describing how they handle your personal financial data that should be adopted by more finance sector enterprises. They also have an API for extracting that data and massaging it further.

I recommend subscribing to the Wesabe blog Wheaties for your Wallet even if you don’t decide to sign up to Wesabe; lots of thought provoking personal finance news is contained within.

Whilst writing this blog post, I recalled that Wesabe’s main competitor mint.com was partnering with an Australian bank, ANZ perhaps?, but haven’t been able to track down a link. Maybe I just imagined this?