Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

One of the things we struggle with here at Xignite is how to explain what we do in plain English. We get a wide variety of visitors to our website from Wall Street traders who’ve never heard of a Web service to Ruby on Rails developers who think Corporate Actions is a Harrison Ford movie from the early 90’s. Add to this the fact that a Web service is an all but invisible product, then well you can see the problem.

We thought about writing a white paper on how Web services lower TCO over traditional data feeds….snoooze…even put us to sleep! So, instead we decided to go all out on video and take our best shot at making the mysterious benefits of on-demand market data and Web services a little more interesting. And, dare I say it…fun? Here is a sneak peak behind the scenes.

Landon Long (left), our in-house Steven Spielberg, deserves the credit for setting up the studio and coaching our young video stars to peak performance.

Currencies, Metals and More to Come
If you are a currencies or metals data customer, you may have already noticed the difference. Otherwise the upgrade still remains a little bit hidden, because we’re upgrading the website one section at a time. I was the initial guinea pig for the new XigniteCurrencies section just to get our process down. Lighting and color quality could be better, but overall we thought it came out OK. The less than HDTV resolution is intentional to keep the download time fast and the user experience positive.

You may notice a little quirkiness and familiarity, because we decided not to use professional actors. The people you see on the site are the same people who respond to your emails and answer your phone calls. Here is an outtake of Farris Pine who will star in the upcoming stock quotes section.

Mike Iacopi was second up for the new XigniteMetals section. Here he is in a short video tutorial on how to build a widget that fetches real-time gold and precious metal spot prices using the XigniteMetals Web service. And, we fixed the lighting problem!   Stay tuned for the appearance of your own favorite Xignite staffer!

After we roll out the rest of the website we’ll be moving on to more in-depth application case studies, technical tutorials, customer interviews, and maybe some more outtakes. Feedback and ideas are welcome. If you’ve got some Xignite-video of your own that you’d like to share, then please do. For example, here is a video the guys over at the SemanticWeb.com did on Xignite and Wolfram Alpha.

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What does the Albanian Lek, Dominican Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and 140 other global currencies have in common?  They can all be found in the newly updated XigniteCurrencies section.  Redesigned from the ground up, the new currencies section has been expanded to provide the tools and information necessary to get up and running with Global Currency Data.

In addition to covering over 85% of the world’s currencies, there are several improvements that we are very excited about.  First, we have expanded the section to include two new areas, one dedicated to providing detailed product information, and the other dedicated to providing comprehensive developer resources.  We have simplified the sites navigation, while also adding cool new features including several educational videos, expanded product information and an entirely new set of interactive demo applications.  We have even created a step-by-step video on how to get up and running with a simple real-time currency converter.  If you haven’t visited the section recently, you should give it a peek.

Product Resources - Currency Overview - - What Is On-Demand - - Live Forex Demos - - Global Data Coverage -

Developer Resources - How-To Video - - Getting Started - - Forex WSDL File - - Web Service Operations -

What’s most exciting are the countless ways our global currency data can be used. Our customers have proven that it doesn’t matter if you’re an Aviation Catering Company, Armored Transportation Service, National Menswear Retail Chain, Global Automotive Manufacturer or Cool Online Gaming Startup, with XigniteCurrencies, the applications are truly endless.