NYC Start-up TickerHound Partners with NASDAQ

Having recently celebrated TickerHound's 1-year Anniversary as a public site, I couldn't be happier to announce our first significant technology partnership with a financial media/tech company: The NASDAQ OMX Group (Symbol: NDAQ).

If you go to www.nasdaq.com you can now find TickerHound's Q&A widgets sprinkled across the site. To dive into the co-branded application we built for them just go to http://answers.nasdaq.com.

This is a big moment for the entire team here and we can't wait to roll out some of the other partnerships we have on deck!

Press release is below:


NEW YORK, Apr. 9, 2009 -- TickerHound.com and the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today introduced NASDAQ Answers on Nasdaq.com. This new, real-time Question & Answers platform provides Nasdaq.com users with unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor.

“We’re very excited that NASDAQ, which has a long history of technological innovation in finance, has chosen TickerHound as one of its first social media offerings,” said Wayne Mulligan, TickerHound’s CEO. “NASDAQ’s implementation of TickerHound is a strong endorsement of our brand. We welcome Nasdaq.com’s support in fulfilling our mission of educating and empowering individual investors.”

"NASDAQ Answers provides an intuitive way for individual investors to ask questions and get answers from other users," said Bruce Hashim, Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Interactive Services. "TickerHound made it easy to integrate their robust software suite and we’re confident these social media features will significantly improve the NASDAQ.com user experience."

Now live on Nasdaq.com, Nasdaq Answers allows users to freely browse questions and answers across a variety of investment-related categories. Free registration with a valid email address is required for users to post or respond to questions. Visit http://answers.nasdaq.com to participate in the discussion.

For more information on NASDAQ Answers, visit http://answers.nasdaq.com.

About TickerHound:

TickerHound is a community-powered education website for individual investors. Launched in 2007 the company has focused on creating a scalable and extensible Q&A platform and partnering with top-tier financial media brands. TickerHound’s goal is to provide unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor. TickerHound provides its partners with a turnkey solution that will allow them to create, customize and quickly deploy their very own Q&A Community. The company plans to announce more white-label community-powered education features on other websites in the near future. For more information, visit www.tickerhound.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

The matters described herein contain forward-looking statements that are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about NASDAQ Market Pathfinders and NASDAQ OMX Group's other products and offerings. We caution that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond NASDAQ OMX Group's control. These factors include, but are not limited to factors detailed in NASDAQ OMX Group's annual report on Form 10-K, and periodic reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to release any revisions to any forward-looking statements.

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Serendipity, Discovery and Digital Media

So I saw a tweet from Fred Wilson earlier today with a link to an op-ed piece in the NY Post titled: "The Future of Television".

It was a well written piece and has a great flow-chart depicting the capabilities and limitations of many of the video offerings currently available to consumers (on both traditional television and the web). It really gives a clear picture of Boxee's position in the digital video market.

I have yet to try the service (no spare macs right now) but it looks pretty damn cool. Think iTunes if it had no DRM and allowed you to pull from a dozen other services.

At the same time I was reading the NY Post piece I had my XM-radio in my house pumping some Brian Eno. While I LOVE listening to Eno while working this was completely coincidental, I just had the channel set to "Chill" and Eno came on.

That got me thinking about new content delivery services such as Boxee and iTunes and how they've fundamentally altered our experience in discovering and consuming content.

When you use a service like Time Warner's Video on Demand, Boxee, iTunes, YouTube, whatever, it requires that you:

1. Actively seek or search for a particular piece of content
2. Make a concious to decision to view that piece of content (relative to other options)
   
3. Commit to viewing (or listening) to it for at least a little while

Think about that for a minute - those are A LOT of steps. They all require a level of thought, comparative analysis and some element of stress when determing which show/song to select.

Now think about what usually happens when you come home after a long day at work (or on a lazy sunday) and you flip on the tube (or your radio). You can sit back, flip through a few channels randomly and through a divine act of serendipity, you stumble upon one of the greatest movies you've ever seen -- FYI: this is exactly how I first found The Shawshank Redemption.

There's something so pleasurable about accidentally finding a great song or movie. The process of accidental discovery - serendipitous content discovery, if you will - adds so much to the content consuming process. The level of enjoyment just seems to increase dramatically for me - not only did I get to enjoy a great piece of content but I also got to feel like I just won at the craps table too.

However, many of the newer services being built today are ignoring this concept.

It's what makes services like Digg so fun, it's why I keep Twitter open all day and it's why no matter how big the Video on Demand selection is on Time Warner, I'll ALWAYS default to channel surfing before heading to Channel 1000.

I'd love to see more mechanisms for serenedipitious content discovery baked into some of these new media services.

But don't get me wrong here either, services like Boxee and Video on Demand are amazing for their intended purpose: quickly browsing a catalog of content, finding the video you were looking for and having it delivered quickly and elegantly. But I think that before anything becomes the "future of TV" or radio, the recognition and utilization of serendipity in the content discovery process will be critical.

Chris Anderson's Amazing Ability to State the Obvious

The web has been abuzz all week with Anderson's latest treatise in the WSJ - The Economics of Giving it Away.

Here are some of the comments the article has generated across the web:

"Chris, what a fabulous perspective! I have been wondering how the changing economy might impact many of these web-based companies"

"Chris, great commentary on the current and future state of online business."

"I wanted to make a quick post this morning to point my readers toward a great piece in the Wall Street Journal [...] He talks about making money in this economic climate. "

Want a quick summary of Chris's "Fabulously Great" article?

If companies want to succeed, they'll have to sell something.

Hmmm...ya don't say, Chris?

That's some enlightening commentary right there...sure taught me a thing or two about a thing or two.

Ok, maybe I'm being overly critical here but I just don't get all the hubbub when someone who should be seeing ahead of the curve is pretty much reciting standard industrial-era business acumen. Am I missing something here or did Mr. Anderson pretty much regurgitate most media companies' business models (advertising) and the model for most software companies for the last 15 years (shareware)?

Chris states, "digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as "Freemium," a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers.", as if this were something new.

I was writing shareware when I was 15 years old - we'd give away a "Lite" version of the application and charge for the "Pro" version - it's been a pretty common practice for a long while now but for some reason if you slap a new brand ("freemium") on an old box and tell people it's new, they really think it is.

And when Chris talks about advertising-based models I really want to crack up. Network television has been 'free' for decades and is supported by ads - what's so unique about applying this model to media businesses on the web?

I just feel like it's 2000/2001 all over again and I'm reading some of the same articles for the 1000th time.

Let's get some fresh thoughts going on out there...stating the obvious isn't gonna help anyone out of the current predicament this country is in. It's as good as saying "banks should've done a better job at managing their risk" and hoping that will change things the next time around.

Chris, give us something we can really sink our teeth into next time!

Thumb Blogging...

I haven't tried this before but I've been seeing more and more bloggers posting via their BlackBerry's. I definitely don't enjoy this mini keyboard for drafting long form copy but if it helps me post more frequently/consistently then I can certainly make due.

My new phone, BlackBerry Bold (thanks baby!), is also a lot easier to type on than the older model BlackBerry I had been using. They've done some amazing things with this keyboard: better "bounce" when you press a key, ergonomic keys, etc. I've definitely been enjoying the experience all around.

The phone's camera is also pretty tight, I'm not sure what the specs are off the top of my head (I'm typing this while on the train) but it was good enough to inspire me to (finally) setup a TwitPic account. I see so many random, bizarre or funny things in a typical New York day, I'm pretty psyched about having a way to capture and record them now.

Almost at my stop on this train...let's see if this "test post" actually goes through now.


Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Happy Birthday TickerHound!

I can hardly believe it's been a whole year!  But WOW, what a year it has been.

12 months ago to the day, George Zhao and I pulled back the curtain and brought TickerHound.com to life...

...and within 15 minutes the site crashed.

Needless to say we've come a long way since then.  

Instead of the single cheap-o box we were running on when we launched, the site is now 100% hosted "in the cloud" on Amazon's EC2/S3 platform.

Thousands of investors have asked thousands of questions and submitted thousands of answers to the site.  Our members are the best in the world - and I can say that because I've personally met and had drinks (alcoholic and non) with dozens of them this year.

We've forged partnerships with a handful of financial media companies such as Investor Place Media, Agora Financial Publishing, Business Financial Publishing, Tycoon Publishing and the list goes on.

And the best part is, we're just getting started!

We made our 3rd hire only 2 short months ago  --  welcome aboard Lou!

We have our largest partnership to date launching in a few weeks -- you won't want to miss this one -- which is why we've been absent from most of the NY Tech events for the last 2 months.

So it goes without saying that we're VERY excited about TickerHound's prospects for 2009. 

But this won't be an easy year.  Then again, when is it ever easy running a start-up?  :)

Our country is entering one of the most challenging economic times we've ever faced.  The crisis before us started in the financial markets, so for a financial-tech company like TickerHound the impact of these tumultuous times becomes apparent very quickly.

We're witnessing a fundamental shift in the financial services industry and I'm excited to be a part of it, but at the same token it's certainly added a level of complexity to our business that we hadn't aticipated when we first launched.  However, the important thing to remember is that in times like these we're presented with once in a lifetime opportunities to really make in impact on our market.  Some of today's greatest companies were forged in the fires of the last downturn.

I firmly believe that now, more than ever, individual investors need to become better educated investors.  Relying on stock brokers and money managers (and even $50 billion-dollar-stealing hedge fund managers) has to become a thing of the past.

With tools out there like Covestor, StockTwits and Wikinvest, an individual investor can level the playing field and manage their money as they see fit.  They have unprecedented access to data, stock ideas and educational material that was once trapped behind high-priced pay walls.

Times they are a changin' and I'm proud and honored to be playing a small part in it.

Here's to another 12 months of sleepless nights, tumultuous markets and some of the most exciting times of my life!

Happy Birthday TickerHound!

Steve Forbes & Eric Schmidt Look Like the Head Vampire!

Here's a picture of Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google):


Now here's a picture of Steve Forbes:


And now here's the Head Vampire from the 80's classic, The Lost Boys:


Any questions? I think not.

Feature Sequencing

One of the biggest mistakes I've seen companies make over the years is improper sequencing of feature sets.

For instance, if the users themselves are the hubs of a social network, then why would you launch a social networking application before giving people a reason to come to the site in the first place? That's like saying, "Hey, come to my nightclub tonight...nobody's here, you won't meet any women/men, but it'll be popular one day so just drop by and keep coming back until we get hot!"

FAIL!

I prefer to think through feature roll outs in a very methodical way -- I don't take any credit for this either, it's been done many times by many successful entrepreneurs over the years. I just happen to enjoy copying what successful people have done in the hopes of one day becoming successful as well.

In fact, I once attended a talk given by Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame and he pretty much said the exact same thing I'm about to share with you...building the right features at the right time is critical to the success of a product.

In my mind this can be boiled down to a three step framework and if applied properly, could mean faster roll outs, higher quality products, greater user satisfaction and more opportunities for revenue generation.

Here's the framework in a nutshell:

Utility - First create a product that's useful for a single user. For instance, Del.icio.us was valuable long before you were able to see other user's bookmarks. In its first iteration Del.icio.us simply allowed members to store their Favorites/Bookmarks remotely, thus allowing them to retrieve these pages from any computer they happened to be on. Later on they exposed the social content discovery components that turned the service into the viral success it has become today.

Network - After you've made a product that's useful for a single person, there's a good chance that MANY individual people will find it useful. When you attract a large audience of individual users then all you have to do is pull back the curtains and allow them to start interacting with one another. It's obviously more difficult than that, but you get my drift.

Ideally you'd want it so every piece of data one of these users contributes to your site somehow adds value back to the whole network. For instance, on Del.icio.us, each time a user bookmarks a URL it adds to that URL's popularity across the system which provides all kinds of useful information for new users, visitors and members who already have that URL bookmarked. It also allows like minded people to find one another and use these new connections as a way to discover new content (e.g. if another member has a handful of the same bookmarks as me then there's a good chance I'll want to see what else he has in his favorites).

And then this leads to (hopefully) the final step in the feature sequencing framework: Revenue.

Generating revenue has become an all elusive component of this framework. I think there are a number of reasons for this but first and foremost it's because most people save this step for last while it should probably be right up there with the problem you're trying to solve.

While this may be the final step in this particular framework, it should be one of the first things a businessman thinks about. Granted, you can have a wildly successful product (and ultimately, a wildly successful business) by simply building something people love, locking them in through the network effect and allowing the revenue model to reveal itself as time goes on, but in my experience you'll dramatically increase your chances of monetary success if you think this through from the beginning and iterate on it just like you would the software.

Ultimately you'll want your utility, network and revenue models to dovetail nicely into one another - e.g. Google and contextual advertising - so it'll pay to think through this framework in a holistic manner.

What This is NOT

This is not a bullet proof way of thinking through your product development plans. It doesn't even begin to address the many nuances of conceptualizing, building and launching a product. It doesn't address user needs, market size, etc.

Simply, think of this as a "back of a napkin" way of testing your product roadmap. Conceptualize your utility, then figure out how that contributes value back to a network and then think about how to monetize that.

I know it may sound simple and probably pretty obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in on product development meetings and someone is pounding the table demanding that every feature plus the kitchen sink be included in "Product Version 1.0".

By testing your product roadmap against a time-tested framework like this one, you'll stand a much better shot at getting a successful product out the door in a shorter period of time, period.