StockTwits takes it to the next level September 2, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , add a commentThe long decline of Bloomberg continues… StockTwits has launched a desktop application based on Adobe AIR (further reporting from TechCrunch). The list of features is pretty impressive;
- Twitter integration naturally, although it appears StockTwits is also building out their own microblogging backend (presumably API compatible with Twitter)
- Chart sharing with Chart.ly, which StockTwits acquired)
- StockTwits TV; their burgeoning competitor to CNBC/Bloomberg TV/Fox Business News. The accuracy of StockTwits TV reporting can’t be much more fantastical than that of the big boys’ sometimes is, they are often rabidly bullish.
- SkyGrid business news integration
Presumably porfolio management features might be integrated as well. I also wonder if they could take a big step further and build in some rudimentary FIX API integration… especially if they want to attempt to sell into the ‘pro-am’ daytrading market, although brokers that make FIX access available for daytraders at a price they can afford tend to be hard (impossible?) to find. Maybe StockTwits next step will be to set up a brokerage themselves?
EC2 and private clouds August 26, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a commentAmazon have just announced the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud:
Amazon VPC lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection.
I am sure that cohesiveFT’s salespeople would say otherwise, but this looks awfully like their VPN-Cubed solution which itself runs on EC2. A small ecosystem of start-ups has sprouted up around Amazon’s web services; RightScale, cohesiveFT, Eucalyptus, Enomaly, Scalr; many of them providing enhancements to EC2’s initially sparse feature set with regard to management and scaling. However Amazon have demonstrated that they are increasingly interested in providing this value-add themselves and charging for it rather than just providing the base platform; look at the introduction of CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and now the Virtual Private Cloud.
The life of an EC2-based startup is clearly becoming riskier but do Amazon themselves risk alienation from the software development community through this policy of subsuming their ecosystem’s functionality?
Tis the season for consolidation August 25, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, development , add a commentTibco buys Datasynapse, which is pretty big news for the City since most derivatives houses probably have one or the other. Will this sort of consolidation at the big end of the market scare some architects off and make them focus on open-source players such as GridGain? Are there any grid deployments running GridGain for production intraday & overnight risk at a bank?
Open-source is no stranger to the consolidation trend either;
Terracotta acquires Ehcache: from a capital markets perspective, Oracle’s Coherence (which itself arised from acquiring Tangosol) seems to be the 500lb gorilla in the ‘in memory data grid’ space. The combination of Terracotta and a deeply integrated Ehcache might be an appropriate alternative solution for the primary use case of Coherence in bank deployments; a market data/trade/position/risk cache & time series database.
VMware acquires SpringSource which itself acquired Hyperic: VMware is gearing itself up to be a major cloud player by offering a complete virtualised Java development stack, after all isn’t the recently announced CloudFoundry Java’s answer to Microsoft and .Net’s Windows Azure? Is a database acquisition or purchase of Splunk that far away?
Co-operation rather than consolidation; the open source trading platform Marketcetera has established close relationships with Sky Road and NYSE Technologies’ to provide a hosted solution for Marketcetera. Given Marketcetera uses Spring extensively some involvement with CloudFoundry is a possibility as well.