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July 19, 2006

SaneBull offers cool ajax financial desktop

Marshall Kirkpatrick

31 comments »

Brooklyn based Ideajax has released an ajax financial desktop demonstration site that’s already useful and has lots of potential for the future. Called SaneBull.com, it currently uses Yahoo! Financial news to display automatically updating information on stocks in near real time (15 min delay via Yahoo!). Updates are displayed every 5 seconds.

When the company rolls out personalized features and premium accounts in the future they will use a source of information that allows them to charge for use of their interface. Future versions will also include charts and other, richer data. If you want to see the site operate after US markets close, there is a test site available as well.

Ideajax is the same company that put together the previously profiled ajax battleship game SinkMyShip. It’s a four person team of developers with day jobs as developers for large companies.

It’s a great example of an entire site based on ajax, targeting a niche of users and in the end providing a useful service and enjoyable user experience. Serious investors will of course continue to use other more heavy-duty paid services, but for casual investors and people with light research needs - SaneBull could prove a compelling option. It’s already fun to use.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » SaneBull、ajaxベースのクールな金融情報用デスクトップを提供

    July 19th, 2006 at 3:24 pm

  2. X blog » SaneBull Market Monitor

    July 19th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

  3. Urielo » Blog Archive » Monitor financiero

    July 19th, 2006 at 7:25 pm

  4. ideajax.com » Blog Archive » WHILE I WAS IN ISRAEL…

    July 20th, 2006 at 8:19 am

  5. Webizen » Startoldalak

    July 20th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

  6. ideAjax » Blog Archive » Why I like SaneBull

    November 15th, 2006 at 9:30 am

Comments

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  1. Otis Gospodnetic

    July 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Go Brooklyn! :)

    Broken link: http://www.techcrunch.com/www.ideajax.com

  2. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 19th, 2006 at 2:25 pm

    Thanks Otis.

  3. Boxed Fresh

    July 19th, 2006 at 2:56 pm

    I like it, very smooth..

  4. Aidan Henry

    July 19th, 2006 at 3:19 pm

    I think it’s a great idea and the interface looks very good.

    I doubt they’ll be able to monetize something like this through premium accounts. There are many free widgets and plug-ins like this available on the net.

    Their monetization efforts should be focused around licensing and third-party builds using their technology and back-end. That way, a financial website or brokerage could provide a branded, downloadable app that displays stock quotes and real-time market data for their clients and customers - free of charge. This may be a selling feature for them.

    Just an idea…

  5. Shirish

    July 19th, 2006 at 3:30 pm

    Cool application but I don’t get the purpose. There are thousands of sites providing financial news. Also, navigation is tricky. People may find it more confusing than useful.

  6. Farhad

    July 19th, 2006 at 3:35 pm

    It’s a really cool interface, but good luck making money out of this, especially since I get all of this data through My Yahoo.

  7. fixanoid

    July 19th, 2006 at 3:46 pm

    Marshall, thanx a million!

  8. Nick Gavronsky

    July 19th, 2006 at 4:11 pm

    I think thats a great idea, hopefully something like this could get used by the masses but I just dont see it happening. I love the use of Ajax on their design though. However, a lot of people may get confused. Do many people even understand or interact with Ajax that much?

  9. Gautam

    July 19th, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    Sanebull looks really cool!

  10. Franck Mahon

    July 19th, 2006 at 4:25 pm

    Great interface but unfortunately Yahoo! Finance policy is “By accessing the Yahoo! site, you agree not to redistribute the information found therein.” so I’m not so sure the site will be up for a long time especially if Yahoo! is not allowed by its providers or by the stock exchanges to redistribute the quotes to other sites.

    Disclaimer: I’m working for one of Yahoo! Finance data provider but don’t know what kind of contracts they have. So I’m only expressing my own guesses.

  11. Joe

    July 19th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    this is a tech proof of concept to prove they’re capable of handling a project of this caliber in the future for other clients.

  12. Don Wilson

    July 19th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

    Am I missing something here? How is this useful. If I close out of a window, how am I supposed to get it back?

  13. Justin

    July 19th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    Is Brooklyn in the house! This is really a great use of Ajax. Very simple and clean. At some point I would like to be able to choose which financial site I would want to use to get the quotes and charts from. I would also like to add my own feed - maybe this is available and I am missing it?

  14. sam

    July 19th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

    Justin,
    The functionality you are looking for is not available yet. We are looking to add user customization to the site this weekend. So you will be able to add custom feeds and select which feeds you would like to see.

  15. howard lindzon

    July 19th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    People - YAWN

    No offense

  16. howard lindzon

    July 19th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    People - YAWN

    No offense

    The bubble ended in 2000

  17. Andrew

    July 19th, 2006 at 11:44 pm

    At first glance, I think it’s cool and sleek. Although the prospects of it making any money is blurry. It may be just an experiment of some sort that could lead to something more spectacular in the future. Well, hopefully at least.

  18. Gijs

    July 20th, 2006 at 5:59 am

    http://prototype-window.xilinus.com/themes.html

  19. b

    July 20th, 2006 at 6:11 am

    utterly pointless.

  20. Artem

    July 20th, 2006 at 6:50 am

    In response to “b”. If this site has made its way to techcrunch means it is not “utterly pointless” to some individuals. Can you please refrain from flaming products based on your individual opinions.

    Thanks.

  21. c

    July 20th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    In response to “Artem”. How is ‘I like it’ not an individual opinion, but ‘utterly pointless’ is? All these comments are individual opinions - you either take something out of them or just ignore them!

  22. Rob Abbott

    July 20th, 2006 at 7:41 am

    The use of web services to build a site or application like Sane Bull is a great example of a mashup. Now, there is a bit of confusion from some of the readers in regards to why it was “worthy” of a TechCrunch post.

    I would assume it falls in the category of AJAX personalized home pages. This one happens to have a Financial theme and could be great for the general public but as mentioned in the article it is not for professional traders.

    My concern is there isn’t a business model and most importantly it could be replicated over the weekend by a single developer, but why replicate?

    I actually built the same type of site in 2004 when using a mix of Fidelity.com’s and Yahoo’s web services, but again there wasn’t anything to terribly special about it.

    I would throw this in the “cool” bucket…uses AJAX (oooohh) and targets a niche (aaaahh).

    Besides promoting Ideajax it’s hard for me to find serious meaning to this TC post….just my opinion.

  23. Artem

    July 20th, 2006 at 8:17 am

    “C”, “I like it” is not a constructive criticism either. This site is a representation of what Ajax can do and those pointless comments just distract other potentially interested parties.

  24. Jeof

    July 20th, 2006 at 9:06 am

    It seems what they’ve done is take basic XML feeds and redisplayed them using Ajax. Okay … so? That’s kind of the baseline for a good javascript developer. Where’s the mashup? Where’s the analysis? Where are fresh insights that Web2/Ajax methodology can bring? What’s the value? Making the same old financial data look shiny is one thing, but those who are heavy into this stuff don’t necessary care about such things. They just want the information … or they want new and better ways to filter and process the same old information.

    The Google Finance chart is a good example of this - it takes your two basic, normal, normally boring types of data (news and chart) and mashes them together to create new insights on the old data (plotting news points on the chart to see possible influences). Sanebull is … kinda boring.

  25. dave

    July 20th, 2006 at 9:21 am

    I think it is a good demo of ajax or javascript, but really no business model in my opinion.

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