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Four short links: 12 November 2009
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 12, 2009
Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets) Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I...
Four short links: 12 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 12, 2009
Snowball -- a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious) Insider Trades -- a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on...
Four Tips for Avoiding VM Sprawl in the Public Cloud
By George ReeseOctober 3, 2009
You moved into the cloud to save some money. Now it's the first of the month and you're looking at your latest cloud provider bill. It's not at all what you planned. Welcome to the world of VM sprawl, the dark side of cloud computing.
Four short links: 19 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 19, 2009
Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can...
Four short links: 31 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 30, 2009
On this day in history, Mt Fuji exploded (781), Daniel Defoe was put in the stocks for seditious libel but was pelted with flowers (1703), the first U.S. patent was issued (1790), and the radio show The Shadow aired for the first time (1930). Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store -- description of Tokyo Cabinet and code examples in Ruby....
Four short links: 15 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 14, 2009
Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor (PNAS) -- We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas...
Four short links: 7 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 6, 2009
How To Use An iPhone To Fly RC Airplanes and Helicopters -- So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and...
Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank
April 20, 2009
“Progress is not the mere correction of evils. Progress is the constant replacing of the best there is with something still better.” -Edward Filene Two years ago, when we were organizing the first BarCampBank in the US, many people found it hard to believe that banks & credit unions could a place for meaningful grassroots innovation. Even crazier was...
Seeing New Possibilities in Existing Technologies: An Interview with April Allderdice of MicroEnergy Credits
By Joshua-Michele RossJanuary 10, 2009
This interview is with April Allderdice, CEO and cofounder of MicroEnergy Credits. MicroEnergy Credits has developed a mechanism using microfinance institutions and GPS cell phones to allow carbon credits to reach small households in the developing world. Until now the relatively high transaction costs involved in set up and verification of a carbon trade has made the market available...
Stuck Together
By Simon St. LaurentDecember 15, 2008
Bailouts are an awful thing, an admission of drastic failure. They're also a safety valve that can lessen the impact of disaster in a given area on the rest of the system. In the immediate and short term, we need to recognize that it's not just a given group whose boat is being bailed - we're bailing a very large boat that we're all riding.
The Economics of Cloud Computing
By George ReeseOctober 24, 2008
Cloud computing has been "the next cool thing" for at least the past 18 months. The current economic climate, however, may be the thing that accelerates the maturity of the technology and drives mainstream adoption in 2009.
Regulatory Transparency and XBRL
By Kurt CagleOctober 15, 2008
A tectonic shift is taking place in the economy right now, one that is punishing those that have been most abusive of the trust of customers, investors, governments and the taxpayers in those governments. XBRL (the XML Business Reporting Language) has the potential to help renew that trust.
System Crash on Wall Street
By Kurt CagleOctober 6, 2008
The credit markets are seizing up, Congress-critters are trying to make the case for spending billions in a "rescue" package, the stock market gyrations are giving people whiplash, banks are popping like sulfur-filled bubbles and companies are suddenly having to make some hard decision about payroll at a time even when they have more than enough work. The end of the world as we know it seems to have come about all at once, and even as people are scrambling to protect themselves, not a few people are wondering just how everything went bad so quickly.
Black Monday, 2008
By Kurt CagleSeptember 29, 2008
At one point, the stock market fall was so rapid that several financial sites web service update servers were overwhelmed and crashed as people refreshed their browsers second by second to watch the carnage. At the end of the day, the damage was significant - the Dow down 672 points (6.2%), the S&P down 94 points (7.8%) and the NASDAQ down a staggering 200 points (more than 9.1%). In Canada, the TSX closed down 750 points, and it's likely that the selloff in Asia and Europe will be just as brutal.
Would better data analysis reduce the financial bail-out?
By Andy OramSeptember 26, 2008
As I understand it, the proposed bail-out is shooting seven hundred billion dollar-sized bullets into the dark. But banks know where their money is. We could figure out exactly how risky each asset is, exactly how much exposure each institution has to bad loans or collapsing stocks and bonds, and what the overall health of each institution is.
Paulson Plan Will Prove Devastating to IT
By Kurt CagleSeptember 24, 2008
On the 20th of September, Henry Paulson submitted an architectural plan to Congress to provide a foundation for keeping Wall Street functional and prevent the credit markets from seizing up, a task which he has been engaged in pretty much non-stop for at least the last year (since the markets started to crack in August 2007). This architectural plan, one that would involve potentially trillions of dollars and affect the lives of tens of millions of people, was not 1000 pages of detailed analysis, not even a hundred pages of recommendations and "to be filled in with details later". It was 2 1/2 pages long.
Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer's Guide
By Kurt CagleSeptember 16, 2008
O'Reilly's focus has long been on programming issues (or programmer issues) and that focus remains very much in place. However, it is worth understanding how the grief playing out on Wall Street will have a very significant impact upon the IT industry within the next four to six months, even despite the fact that up until now the contagion seems largely to have remained contained in the financial sector.
IT Workers and the Gathering Economic Storm
By Kurt CagleAugust 14, 2008
IT workers are in general perhaps better prepared for the upheavals in that emerging world than most - a world where knowledge, flexibility, indepence of action and thought, and an ability to network will prove to be the most desirable characteristics, but that nimbleness comes at the cost of not tying yourself down to the older society's expectations. Even if the economy does manage to avoid the worst of the doldrums, these are traits to encourage in the days ahead.
Tools for the Equity Research Toolbox
By Robert PassarellaJune 24, 2008
When I was a kid, I would always remember commercials for a school called Apex Tech. One of their taglines was "look over the professional tools you get to keep when you finish your training". It's a lot like that today. Google News, along with Yahoo! Pipes are two tools that analysts, traders, and salespeople are discovering and using. Today...
Data on the Web: VGChartz vs. NPD
By Robert PassarellaJune 17, 2008
After writing my first post, Equity Research in the Age of Web 2.0, I received a lot of comments asking really good questions. Most of the questions from readers asked about real world examples. So here's a taste. In the world of securities research, in general, we talk about consensus sources. These are sources that everyone looks to as an...
BarCampBank is spreading
By Jesse RobbinsJune 12, 2008
When Ben Black and I organized the first BarCampBank in North America last year, we hoped that it would spread. According to William Azaroff's post on NetBanker, the movement is there and growing: What's all this about BarCampBanks? From a North American premiere in Seattle almost a year ago, we've witnessed two more in the last few months, and eight...
Equity Research in the Age of Web 2.0
By Robert PassarellaJune 9, 2008
After spending many years on Wall Street watching the buy side (investing institutions) and working with the sell side (investment banks); all I can say is that I am excited with what the future holds. The Internet is quickly becoming 'the' vast store house of data, research and commentary that I hoped it would. If you think the Internet is for message board jockeys, blogs for late nights in pajamas, and social media for dating; you are missing point. If you want to add to your company and industry analysis, as well as, your investment process, you need to be an interactive user of the Internet.
The Corporation's Two Bodies
By Mike LoukidesMay 5, 2008
The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost...
New Release 2.0 on Money 2.0
By Jimmy GutermanApril 30, 2008
One year ago, we published an issue of Release 2.0 entitled "When Markets Collide" (download a PDF), in which we considered what Wall Street and Web 2.0 might have to teach one another. Quite a bit, it turned out: the key parallels we uncovered include latency (both have to do their jobs more or less instantly), connectivity (it's the liquidity...
To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson's "Free!")
By Andy OramMarch 24, 2008
WIRED Magazine's editor in chief Chris Anderson, following up on the popularity of his Long Tail meme, theorizes in the March 2008 issue of WIRED about the modern tendency to put information online at no cost. I think this is highly volatile and that the phenomenon will be driven in very different ways from his six models. "Free as in freedom" may ultimately triumph. Furthermore, professional quality doesn't come for free, so projects and industries have to find ways to fund it.
Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis
By Jesse RobbinsMarch 20, 2008
The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis. "First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+...
Understanding the undersea cable cuts... (updated: "fifth cable cut")
By Jesse RobbinsFebruary 6, 2008
The Fiber Cuts in the Middle East are getting a lot of attention. The economic damage is real and the geopolitical issues are extremely complex (which is why I edited my earlier post). From an operations perspective these kinds of...
Web2Summit: Complexity + Tight Coupling = Catastrophe
By Jesse RobbinsOctober 20, 2007
Paul Kedrosky and Tim O'Reilly just talked about the "Quant Fund Meltdown" and how complex interactions between computer systems and people resulted in unprecedented hedge fund losses. I spend a lot of time thinking about risk and failure in...
Financial Hacking -- Giving Creative Accounting a Good Name
By Andrew SavikasApril 20, 2007
The subject of the next edition of Release 2.0, available next week, is the collision between Wall Street markets and Web 2.0 markets. The intersection between technology and finance is a busy one, and there might just be some hacker spirit hiding behind those suits.
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