Xignite Goes Green!
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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[...] anything but the most interested prospects who are probably registering anyway. So, we’ve decided to place one of our bets on in-house video capabilities. Our competitors Web presence is rather old school, so we are going all out to stand out. Not just [...]
I know you guys are all about financial data ‘on demand’ (i.e. a pull model) but it would be interesting to know if you are considering some streaming, push-based approaches as well; maybe at a lower speed/higher latency than the traditional leased-line based streaming that is provided by many existing data vendors, but using more open protocols (eg. ‘comet’, HTML 5 WebSocket) and at a much lower price than the incumbents.
Of course, this means you will be competing with the providers of your data to some extent, which maybe they won’t be happy about!
James, we have had several internal discussions around implementing COMET as another delivery option. I’d really like to discuss what you are seeing out there!