Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

In the next 5 minutes, you could get $5 worth of plumbing services, $30 worth of legal advice or $17 worth of psychotherapy. Or, you could just spend your next five minutes building a real-time stock quote widget. Don’t think it can be done in 5 minutes? Check out a video showing us doing it in less time.

Here’s how you can do the same thing using PHP and Eclipse, although the same basic process can be used for any language and any IDE:
Read more

Every five minutes, a business in the U.S. catches fire, someone in the UK swears, and a clock that took 5 years and £1 million to build before being unveiled by none other than Stephen Hawking, finally tells the time accurately for a second or two.

What will you do with your next 5 minutes?

Here’s a thought: Why not build a real-time forex currency converter? Sound like fun? If so, give it a try using the steps below. Or, if you’d rather leave all the fun to someone else, why not just watch a video of us doing it?

Here’s how it’s done: Read more

Now that the cat’s finally out of the bag on BGCantor’s new on-demand web services, I can finally take the readers of the Xignite blog back stage for a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the biggest initiative in the on-demand financial web services world since the start of Xignite.

BGCantor On-Demand offers fixed income and derivatives data via on-demand web services using Xignite’s core platform.

What happened behind the scenes?  How did this new on-demand business get launched?  And what did it take to launch it?  Well, first and foremost, it took a great team at BGCantor Market Data.  The BGCantor team was absolutely delightful to work with.  Everyone was highly knowledgeable, very responsive, dedicated to accomplishing the mission and very excited about the whole project.  We couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with.

Together, the BGCantor/Xignite team started by designing web services to be truly application-ready, combining Xignite’s web service experience with BGCantor’s in-depth market data knowledge.  Then we coded the web services on top of the XigniteOnDemand market data distribution platform for rapid development on a robust, high-performance, highly scalable architecture.  At the same time, we also built the BGCantor On-Demand website and tightly integrated it with the web services themselves.  To help manage the new on-demand business, we also deployed an administrative portal for on-going management of customer accounts.  At the same time, on the sales and marketing front, we worked together to find just the right usage-based pricing model to drive strong revenue growth for BGCantor while also delivering exceptional value for BGCantor’s customers.  Then we collaborated on developing marketing collateral and sales tools.

As for showing you blooper videos of our behind-the-scenes footage, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite convince Legal to sign off on that. Sorry. Maybe next time.

I really liked how Max Bowie characterized Xignite as “disruptive” in a piece he published in Inside Market Data earlier this week, entitled “Appetite for Disruption.” He was covering our latest release of equity options web services XigniteOptions and XigniteRealTimeOptions, but his “disruptive” moniker couldn’t be more appropriate for all of Xignite as a company.

He dubbed us as “disruptive” because our equity options services changed the economics of getting options data so much that customers like iVerit are now able to create new businesses delivering this high-volume, high-expense market data at rates affordable even to small private investors over small, affordable devices like the iPhone.

But the truth is that virtually every time we launch a new web service, we see this pattern of disruptive technology creating new opportunities to penetrate existing markets much more deeply. That’s because it’s the on-demand delivery model itself, not any particular web service, that creates the order-of-magnitude changes in economics that cause disruption and new opportunities to deepen existing markets.

So thanks to Max for giving us a rep as a high-tech company running amok causing market depth and disruption wherever we go.

I was reminded when we launched XigniteGlobalRealTime this week of how small the world has become. There was a time when traveling from Europe to my house in California would have taken months by sea, then months by covered wagon. Now I can make the trip in a single non-stop 21-hour flight. Granted, I have to brave the kid kicking the back of my seat, screaming babies, the guy with N1H1 to my right, and the guy to my left who spends all 21 hours trying to sell me life insurance while telling me his life story. But at least I don’t have to worry about scurvy… just airline food.

The world of market data has also gotten much smaller. Not too long ago, getting intraday stock quotes from Europe’s biggest exchanges was simply out of reach for any U.S. company that didn’t have a six-figure technology budget. Now even small startup companies on a shoestring budget can get real-time Level 1 stock quotes from even the smallest European exchanges, not to mention countless other exchanges around the world. What’s next? Frequent data miles for global market data usage? (Hmmm… Not a bad idea.)

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.

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.