This is my favorite time of year.  Snow, Christmas lights, family, friends, parties . . . Ahh, the holiday season is officially upon us.  One of my absolute favorite aspects of the holidays is sharing warm wishes and good times with friends, family, co-workers and strangers alike.

Last week, we shared some of that holiday cheer at the Xignite Meetup in NYC.  It was a perfect event, with over 40 customers, supporters and friends braving the cold to come out and enjoy drinks, darts and good times with some of the crew from Xignite.  We would like to thank everyone that came out to celebrate the season with us.  I have posted a small photo gallery of the meetup for your viewing pleasure (iPhone quality).  Also, a special thanks to the crew at Stout NYC, a great place to host a Social Meetup.

For those that were not able to attend, I would like to offer Xignite’s warmest wishes for an awesome Christmas, bright Hanukkah, and very special New Year. With 2009 coming to a close, we all hope that 2010 will bring fresh beginnings and new opportunities for us all!  Cheers and Happy Holidays from all the folks at Xignite!

With 2010 quickly approaching, we wanted to celebrate the holidays with our friends & partners in the NYC Area. Join the Xignite crew for some good food, great drinks and special holiday gifts.

Hang-out with Xignite CEO Stephane Dubois and a handful of other Xignite’rs at Stout NYC, Thursday December 17th from 5:30p to 7:30p. We will be located in the Dart Alley Area of Stout’s Cellar.

While everyone that attends will be hooked up with the latest Xignite gear (shirts, USB’s, shot glasses, etc.), the first ten people to arrive will receive a very special gift pack, worth $50 each. We look forward to enjoying great food, cold beers and a quick dart shootout with our friends & partners in NYC.

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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Everyone has been talking about how much smaller this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference was when compared with previous years, fewer exhibitors and fewer attendees.  But for Xignite, this year’s show was the biggest ever. If you missed us at this year’s SIFMA TMC, we hope to see you next year. Feel free to take a look at the 2009 Xignite SIFMA TMC Photo Gallery by Clicking Here.

Despite the fact that this year’s SIFMA Show was scaled down quite a bit, we were positively overwhelmed with demand at the Xignite booth.  Our staff of seven was slammed every minute they were on the floor, answering questions, giving product demos and handing out free Xignite goodies.  Even after show hours were over, our booth stayed filled with people wanting to talk about on-demand web services.  Even when walking the halls, I overheard many others talking about Xignite, our cool new products and exciting activities that we were sharing at the show.  In retrospect, I wish we had brought a staff of twelve to handle all the demand.

Maybe it was just the Xignite shot machine and free booze we passed out. For me, it was fun demonstrating how it’s a lot easier & cheaper to get data “by the glass” (aka on-demand) rather than getting data “by the fire hose” (aka bulk files and data feeds).  If it was alcohol that brought the hordes a-knocking at our booth, that would give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “generating buzz.”

Or maybe we saw so much demand because people just couldn’t resist the power of our free t-shirts, pens, mouse pads and other freebies.  Maybe it was the awesome VIP Event that we hosted at the Forbes Galleries. Or perhaps everyone heard about us from the recent publicity surrounding Xignite, like the amazing coverage in Inside Market Data or product announcements surrounding XigniteOnDemand and XigniteCorporateActions.

In truth, I don’t think any amount of publicity, bribery or booze could have generated the amount of buzz we saw.  Having talked to many at the show, I got a strong sense that people are more serious than ever about finding game-changing technology, like on-demand web services.  Over and over again I heard people looking for way to simplify data projects, dramatically cut costs and reduce the time it takes to delivery new data initiatives to market.  In these categories, Xignite is the only show in town.

It seems that the financial crisis and recession combined are motivating companies to upgrade applications and websites with better market data, while simultaneously lowering costs.  Which just happens to be exactly the problem that on-demand financial web services are designed to address. So, we’re hiring!

We have multiple openings for the following positions:

• Senior Solution Sales Representative
• Product Marketing Manager / Director
• Online Marketing Manager / Director

If you think you are qualified and have the same passion that we do for making it easier to build financial applications in the cloud, then please contact us at jobs [at] xignite.com.