I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I good night tonight with 30-40 people at the Xero offices for Wireless Wednesday demo sessions.
First up was Scott from www.sharesight.co.nz. This has been under development for the past year and is looking very slick.
They have data feeds of NZ and Australian stocks, dividend history, historical share prices for the past 10 years - all working like you would expect it to.
I’ve been looking for a Web 2.0 style portfolio manager and this looks like it will hit the spot.
They are in final testing stages so accounts are currently free. Go and have a play.
Next up was Bruce with his Enterprise Life Cycle product, www.e-lm.com. This is a heavy duty and very functional Enterprise SaaS offering. Needs a bit of work to make it pretty but starting to win customers around the world.
FrondeAnywhere showed off their mobile banking two factor authentication solution. I hope that some NZ banks pick it up soon as it is so much more convenient that carrying around a bag full of key generators.
Clare from BookHabit showed her project. It was very interesting to hear about their business model and how the industry has greeted their worthy effort in reducing the barriers to publishing.
Pricing goes from $2.50 to $5.00 as the book gets more popular. It is free to upload your book for sale.
Max from ZetaPrints showed off a few things. Most interesting was a community blog initiative FlyingPickle.co.nz.
Webstruxure showed off an early version of an information management tool.
Neal from Telecom finished off with a great discussion on the Telecom GSM network rollout. It is a huge project. Few interesting things were.
- The spectrum Telecom is using is becoming more common around the world as challenger Telco’s come into the market and can’t get 900/1800 spectrum.
- The 3G iPhone should work on the spectrum they are going for.
- They already have a CDMA BlackBerry. I thought they were GSM ones.
- The new towers will have fibre to them so upstream data bottlenecks shouldn’t exist. Maybe will see non-frightening mobile data pricing finally.
No doubt the Telecom data guys get the Internet. Great to see these comments on Monday which indicate Telecom sees a more open mobile data view of the world as a differentiator from the global Vodafone model.
Telecom believed in providing mobile customers with an “open portal” so they could roam the Web at will, rather than providing them with access to a limited range of services through a “walled garden”, he says.
blog
“The 3G iPhone should work on the spectrum they are going for. ”
What point is there having a 3G iPhone on Telecom when Telecom’s 3G network will only cover the major cities? Telecom really need 850MHz WCDMA but it’s unlikely that we will see this until they free up their 800MHZ spectrum and dump the CDMA network - something that won’t be happening for a good few years yet. By then LTE will be a reality and Telecom will be able to skip a generation.
I believe the 3G iPhone will probably include 850MHz WCDMA - it’s just a shame Telecom won’t have a network to run it on! Vodafone’s 900MHz 3G is going to offer nationwide coverage, hopefully we’ll also see a 900MHz capable 3G iPhone with the impending changes to EU 900MHz licencing restrictions.
What is it with Telecom also bragging about having a 14.4Mbps cabable HSDPA network? We’re unlike to ever see any 14.4 capable HSDPA devices, something that has been acknowledged by most manufacturers and even by Telstra who have a 14.4 capable Next G network in Australia but no devices to use it. It’s pretty much accepted that devices will skip from 7.2 straight to LTE.
“What point is there having a 3G iPhone on Telecom when Telecom’s 3G network will only cover the major cities?”
Steve, I am assuming what you mean here so may have misunderstood what you mean’t.
Do you think 3G networks in NZ should cover more than the major cities?
If so this would give us much more dense coverage than say London. In many parts of London you cannot get 3G coverage on Vodafone and they have more coverage in the UK than anyone else. Same is true in Europe. The only countries where you are likely to get consistent 3G spread is probably HK, Singapore and some of the other Asian countries.
I cannot see either Vodafone or Telecom wiring all of NZ for 3G; does not make economic sense to them.
“I cannot see either Vodafone or Telecom wiring all of NZ for 3G”
Well Vodafone have already done it (well not quite all of NZ but they’ve made a good effort!). Their 900MHz WCDMA 3G network isn’t a dream it’s a reality and it’s very, very close.
2100MHz is a terrible frequency for a mobile network while is why 3G has been so patchy whereas both 850 and 900 are fantastic. It really is a shame Telecom haven’t rolled out 850MHz WCDMA from day 1 - Telstra’s Next G network is fantastic.
Just set up a Sharesight trial and it looks good.
Obvious concern is the longevity of the system - will it still be around in 6 or 12 months time. Xero understood that credibility is everything when dealing with data and the same will apply here, but great to see more local online offerings and I hope they go well.
I am currently developing the same thing as ShareSight and FinData but my app. is way deep into the mechanics of financial market data-analytics. It is interesting to see other local vendors doing development in this area because there aren’t many.
FinData uses simple financial metrics such as P/E ratio, MACD, RSI, Stochastics Oscillator and most of the technical analysis indicators for its reporting. My application will be connected to NZX & ASX live (other market indices will be included in the future) for realtime analysis , because financial markets are all interlinked, which means that events happens in other markets might give a good indication of what’s gonna happen in local market or vice-versa before those effects taking place. It is important to capture this live, because such information could help investors or analysts to do certain counter measures, such as self-hedging for instance. I have included all the traditional technical analysis indicators plus more advanced stuff and also the fundamental analysis techniques.
I am targeting investors who are newbies (mostly mum & dad), where those users will just use the default algorithm for each models and upto the most advanced analysts from the banks, fund managers, and financial institutions (these advanced users will have different models available to them to select from). Functionalities will include:
Equities & Shares:
—————–
- track correlated stocks live (minute by minute or hour by hour) : important for pair-trading.
- alert the likelihood of a burst in a specific stock or group of stocks. It is important to know this in real-time as investors might want to re-allocate the assets in their portfolio before a drastic effect takes place.
- realtime tracking of which stocks are over-price/under-price, over/under-sold, over/under-bought, aggressive/non-aggressive , etc,…
- Stock clusterings to indicate stocks that have similar co-movement.
Interest-based Financial Derivatives (Futures, Forward Contracts & Forex):
————————————————————————-
Bonds, Bond options (put and call), Fixed rate notes, Floating rate notes, Caps (caption), Floors (floorlet) and Swaps (swaptions).
Equity-based Financial Derivatives:
———————————–
Non-standard & Exotic options as Asian options, Bermuda options, Spread options, Barrier options, Compound options, Lookback options, Vanilla stock options (put and call options)
Fixed Income :
————-
- Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS)
- Debt Instruments :- Treasury Bills Price/Yields, Zero-Coupon Bonds, Step-Coupon Bonds, Term Structure of interest rates.
- Derivative Securities :- Convertible Bond, Treasury Bond Futures, Swap-Pricing and Portfolio self-hedging.
and many more…
Scot, this may be of interest to you in implementing the Markowitz Portfolio Theory (MPT) for ShareSight, which is widely adopted today for portfolio management. MPT uses optimization algorithms to allocate financial assets (in your app. are stocks) that will maximize the returns but simultaneously minimizes the risk. This is very important for investors, if they loss money because of the market movement, then the it would be minimal.
Hey, if you want an informal chat about financial analysis algorithms, just drop me an email may be I can point you out to which resources where to get those infos. My favorite online resources is RePEC (Research Papers in EConomics), where you can find all sorts of algorithms available (unlikely to be found in a finance/economic text-book) from the freely downloadable papers at RePEC (or link from there). There are about half a million publications available.
Cheers.
Thanks for the hospitality Rod, Helen and WBF.
It’s a great idea making the 5 minute demo sessions available to local aspirants. Also pleasing to hear from Scott that WBF are looking at ways to attract decision-makers to the showcase events.
I’d love to see more CIOs and government I.T. heads coming along to Convergence. Hard to grow the local industry when they are out there spending tens of millions of our tax dollars on imported software annually.
The new SSC rules around “recycling” taxpayer funded intellectual property make this even more of an imperative.
http://geniusnet.blogtown.co.nz/2008/03/02/confusion-over-ip-guidelines/
Dermott Renner: you can not be more wrong!! 900mhz UMTS is being deployed now by Vodafone NZ in Rural areas. Watch for the media release from Vodafone in the next few days.
John, I am quite happy to be wrong. Delighted in fact. What I was saying was that I have seen nowhere outside of city states where you can always get 3G Internet connections. You cannot always get it in London and you certaintly cannot always get it in Auckland.
So when a carrier says they are rolling it out all over the place what does this mean in practce? To make it work you need decent signal strength (3 bars or more) an real 3G connection as opposed to some spin from marketing saying it is 3G when it is actually 2G or 2.5G and limited people on the connection so that it works.
I will be delighted if Vodafone does something for Auckland. I would be even more delighted if they would do something for North London where I have a employee.
3g is now in clevedon waiuku glenbrook clarks beach and many other places on 900mhz umts/hsdpa What part of auckland are you from? Also cambridge and that place north of hamilton i cant spell starts with n and is a maori name.
Johnr is correct there is great 3G coverage on 900mhz UMTS in the below areas that has come online in the last few weeks!
Tuakau
Clarks Beach
Glenbrook
Waiuku
Clevedon
Place North of Hamilton that starts with N (maori name can’t spell sorry)
Cambridge
“What I was saying was that I have seen nowhere outside of city states where you can always get 3G Internet connections”
I know it’s getting a wee bit OT but Telstra’s 850Mhz Next G network is the latest 3G network in the world delivering 3G coverage to 98% of the Australian Population. This is far greater coverage than any of the GSM networks in Australia.
2100Mhz 3G networks are never going to deliver great coverage. 3 have spent huge $$ on their networks but the reality is hitting home that lower frequency (850 and 900) 3G networks are the future. I believe we’ll start to see a huge shift in the next few years to 900MHz 3G networks on a global scale and the demise of GSM at 900MHz to free up spectrum.
Hi Dermott
I suggest you read the below thread on geekzone.co.nz
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=40&TopicId=19950
John, that does not help me. I don’t need 3G to send videos of myself on a phone. I need it on a mobile data card. I get 3G already but my point was you also need decent reception as well. 2 bars does not equal 3G performance.
Paul Lattimore – Thanks for signing up for a Sharesight trial, I’m glad you like the look of it. All I can really say re longevity is that our ongoing costs are relatively insignificant in relation to the investment of developing the site in the first place -so it’s certainly not going to disappear any time soon, it wouldn’t make sense! We know that building up a customer base is going to take time and we are in it for the long haul.
Falafulu Fisi – Your product sounds interesting and I would certainly be interested to have a chat to you about it sometime. We have deliberately limited the scope of our product to the ‘post purchase’ side of things at this stage rather than getting too heavily into the analytical side of things relating to buy / sell decisions. We are making the assumption that our customers already have an investment strategy in place and we simply want to show them whether they are getting it right or not, and to help them with the administrative side of things relating to tax and financial reporting. That’s not to say that the analytics isn’t interesting and very relevant stuff of course, and we do have an interest in doing some work in this area in the future. You may also be interested to get in touch with Mark Clare at http://www.valuecruncher.com, who is doing some very interesting work in this area also.
Dermott Renner what device are you using? WCDMA or HSDPA
Vodafone HSDPA
What speeds are you getting to a NZ server??
John, have not measured the speed but from experience all over the world, if the reception is poor (1 or 2 bars) then even connecting at 3G is not fast.
Going on what people have said in this thread, if Clarks Beach is on 900mhz/hsdpa the question is how many bars reception do they get? Clarks Beach is not the end of the world but you sure can see it from there.
I would have thought on 900mhz if it is everything people say it is I should get 5 bars in Milford/Takapuna.
900 umts is not on the north shore if you had read the thread you would of seen the places its been turned on. There are no data cards out there that support umts900 that will change very soon. Umts 900 will not be on all sites.
Scott Ryburn, here is an interesting article (see link below) from the Herald’s finance regular columnist, Diana Clement. She is basically describing the Harry Markowitz Portfolio Theory (Markowitz and two others won the Economics Nobel Prize in 1990 for developing this model), without mentioning the term Markowitz or optimization. Markowitz model is all about efficient allocations of portfolio assets that maximizes returns and simultaneously minimizes risk.
Diana Clement: Don’t lose your shirt - diversify
It is widely adopted in the investment/financial industry by analysts, however there are lots of financial advisers around the country who don’t use it nor even heard of it, but banks and other large financial institutions do use it. I am making this capability available to ordinary investors (ma & pa), which is something that has always been the domain of top notch financial analysts. Users don’t need to know anything about Markowitz or optimization, all they need to know is which button to click that does efficient allocations & optimizations of assets in their portfolios. I am not sure if NZ Superannuation fund is using it or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. I know a few high profile fund managers around the country that don’t use it and basically I’ve followed the companies in their portfolio from media reports and some have lost millions (in the tens). See, if they use Markowitz model, it is likely that their lost would be very minimal if the market movement is unfavourable to the assets (stocks) in their portfolio, instead of say 10 millions loss, it might be a loss of 2 millions for example. One of these local fund managers made around $20 millions in the previous 2 years, from their portfolios, but again if they use Markowitz, instead of gaining $ 20 mils because the market movement favoured their portfolio, they might gain $25 mils, subjected to constraints imposed on the portfolio by the manager, so profit is maximized and risk is minimized.
There are more advanced variants of Markowitz algorithm that are publicly available from the Optimization Online journal, where you can just dig around that web site for papers related to portfolio optimizations, if you’re thinking of implementing it in the future for your software. This particular publication is very interesting:
A Log-Robust Optimization Approach to Portfolio Management
3G now in Helensville