Comments on: TechCrunch 40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

By: Bay Partners Seed Investments » Blog Archive » Cake Financial Now Lets You Track Your Friends’ Stock Portfolios on Facebook (TechCrunch)

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:29:38 +0000

[...] a trade, it shows up in your feed. Talk about timely information.Cake Financial launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year. Since then, nearly 10,000 members have signed up who track portfolios collectively worth [...]

By: Jobs

Jobs — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:49:11 +0000

Jobs…

Thanks for the compliment no one has ever told me that before!!…

By: Docstoc Opens For Business (Documents)

Docstoc Opens For Business (Documents) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:31:48 +0000

[...] of Docstoc’s public launch below in a DocStoc player). Docstoc competes with Scribd and is a TechCrunch40 [...]

By: Ponoko - A co-creation manufacturing company at dub studios

Ponoko - A co-creation manufacturing company at dub studios — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:10:55 +0000

[...] the open-source browser has proved that it’s possible in the digital sector. sourced via techcrunch, the gong [...]

By: mark vernon

mark vernon — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:11:58 +0000

Thought I would add that we have already launched our site (www.tutorom.com) as a competitor to teachthepeople.com earlier this year. What they will find, as we have, is that it’s really difficult to get quality content created that people will pay for…we’ve decided to create a lot of the content in house, but that takes a looong time to do..:) -

By: Scriptyx.com » TechCrunch 40, quelques annonces intéressantes

Scriptyx.com » TechCrunch 40, quelques annonces intéressantes — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:26:37 +0000

[...] TechCrunch 40 Session 4: Crowd SourcingTeach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set to share it with the Teach The People communities. Users can create individual profiles and contribute content to topics (computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music” are a few examples). The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, content views or content downloads. They can also share in site advertising revenues. (plus d’informations sur la société) [...]

By: cweeb

cweeb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:06:54 +0000

There it is, screen scraping as an expertise ! lol … from linked in

FYI, no mention of having “built paypal” in the linked profile, probably not worth mentioning, but screen scraping, that’s critical.

Doug Reed’s Specialties:

Credit card processing
Online Bill Presentment/Payment/ACH/IFX/OFX
Financial account aggregation/Screen scraping
Open source and web based software development
Distributed computing/Middleware/Web Services/EAI

By: cweeb

cweeb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:44:13 +0000

Security 101

When people enter username correctly and the password wrong, DO NOT tell them “hey, good job with the username, but try again on the password”.

Enter
- email: cweeb@nowhere.com
- password: insecure

Cake happily tells me the email is not found

Enter
- email: dreed@cakefinancial.com
- password: insecure

Cake happily tells me the email/password combo is no good

Great, now I know a valid email, and can just script a dictionary attach against that email. Also, you all don’t seem to bail out to higher auth models after a bunch of failed attempts.

Even paypal give you the much better “invalid credentials” message on a failed attempt, not giving out the valuable clue of which credential was invalid.

By: Notsure

Notsure — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:14:50 +0000

Duncan, while I agree that there were a number of companies. Its seems from the “panel of experts” non of these are worthy enough.

I think some of the “experts” forget that not every company presenting has multi-million dollar backing.

Maybe they need some reminding ?

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:46:49 +0000

NotSure,
this isn’t the case, there were a number of companies launching to coincide with TC40. There was a mix, but I do hear you in terms of providing a forum for early stage startups, a worthy idea.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:57:28 +0000

Cake Financial is a superb concept & looked like it could well be a solid join finance site to run alongside Networthiq.com & Wesabe.com.
Docstoc was a big thumbs down for me & i’ll be sticking with Scribd.com without a doubt…as long as scribd can clean up the site a lil..
TeachthePeople is a good idea but i think one of the most poorly executed of the day & frankly the “ebay of education” makes me feel a bit sick…I’m still looking forward to tteach.com launching which seems to be their main competitor.
Crowdspirit i have always been excited about & has generated a fair amount of buzz in its time but yeah, not much hope of it becoming a long term success. To be fair on the guys -they do seem to have a fair bit of activity on their site at this moment in time.
Ponoko…well, Fantastic idea and there must be millions of budding inventors out there who just need a way to get their ideas out of their mind & into product form. It may mean that they have to pay a freelancer to design it in eps format - but i don’t think thats a bad thing as it could create a submarket of sorts. Probably one of the most ‘web2.0′ concepts of the day i reckon.

By: Notsure

Notsure — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:58:44 +0000

While Tcrunch40 is cool - it disappoints me that you guys only really selected companies which are already heavily funded or are started by people that have large personal funding.

I was hoping that Tcrunch40 was aimed at startups with little or no funding - small teams and a cool, innovative product - not at large companies with >10 employees already and substantial backing.

Disappointing to me to say the least…..:(

By: Doug Reed

Doug Reed — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:19:31 +0000

This is Doug Reed the CTO from Cake. I wanted to respond to the questions about multi factor authorization and security.

I spent most of 2005 leading Intuit’s efforts around multi factor authorization and am familiar with the various multi factor approaches. Cake can aggregate data from sites using multi factor authorization.

As for security. If you use PayPal, it runs on a system that I built.

Cake is doing absolutely everything possible to earn our customer’s trust.

By: cweeb

cweeb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:27:35 +0000

fyi, all my gripes are equally valid for mint that is coming up tomorrow…

- great security page
- give me all your credentials
- and challenge questions
- trust us, we have a great security page
- oh, did I say that nothing is more important than security
- we have a security czar
- we’re built like a bank, only better

while at the end of the day they are a small company looking for a payday and want nothing to stand in the way of launching and adoption….

By: cweeb

cweeb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:24:07 +0000

Yep, we are talking about handing over login credentials to a small company that has a nice sounding page on security. Everyone and their brother talks a great security. You all said “we’re built like a bank”, assuming we believe you, plenty of banks have had breaches. and if your’s is breached, now my login credentials from all these accounts is at risk. Oh sure, you encrypt blah blah blah, but at some point you decrypt and make an https request so the data and key are lying around somewhere. And you are probably scraping your way thru the crappy MFA that most sites have deployed with cookies and challenge questions, again what happens when the US finally wakes up and starts using hw tokens and out of band sms delivered passwords etc.

By: geewiz

geewiz — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:00:25 +0000

To Steven C #10:

What would happen if investment banks decide that it is too much of a security exposure to share financial information they host with aggregators like you, and they start blocking your IP addresses?

How would you be able to explain to your users that it is not possible to add their main brokerage account at Merrill Lynch?

And how can I trust my personal bank login information to a small company like Cake Financials? You don’t have the deep pockets to guarantee or stand behind the security required to guard such sensitive information.

I think I agree with others that this idea is treading on some very shallow waters…

By: cweeb

cweeb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:42:25 +0000

To Steve #10

“Cake is very different”, “we have 10 years of data and they have 3 months”

Is that so different, is that a HUGE barrier that the other company will never be able to do ? seems like a pretty small and easily solved problem to be touted as VERY different…

I am more curious about things like MFA and hardware tokens and what that is going to do to all the screen scraping scripts you all must rely on.

By: =Jason

=Jason — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:25:21 +0000

I wasn’t as excited about this round of ideas. Nothing too exciting nor anything I would use.

By: Darryl D

Darryl D — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:06:10 +0000

^ Steve C., loved your presentation, though I’m short on social investing as the “hundreds and thousands of people” are dead wrong most of the time, and 1000 hedge fund managers go and play golf with those people’s loses. I’d rather pay my bucks to sit next to Warren B., then to follow the masses. in an up market that will work, as the tide lifts everybody’s boats, but when things go down then you want to hang out next to the fund managers.

By: Steven A. Carpenter

Steven A. Carpenter — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:55:09 +0000

This is Steve from Cake. I would like to respond to Bill Cara’s comment. Cake is very different from both Covestor and Vestopia. Here are the biggest differences that I see between us and the other companies:

1) Both companies rely on the traditional notion that following the advice of a single individual is the better way to invest rather than following the proven insights of hundreds and thousands of people, which is the approach we’re taking at Cake.

2) Cake allows you to link an unlimited number of brokerage accounts and we aggregate up to 10 years of an individual’s investing history. To my knowledge, on the other sites you can have only one account and you can see only 3 months of history. It’s difficult to get proven investment performance data over such a short time frame.

3) Last, our business models are different. They want to charge for individuals to follow specific people. Cake members can follow an unlimited number of other investors for free.

By: vudu84

vudu84 — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:39:52 +0000

“All investing social networking starts and ends at CapWiz!”
ya right….

By: Dave G

Dave G — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:28:52 +0000

^ New conference revenue stream: charge nominal fee for a live feed, make it available (free) 72 hours later for everyone else.

By: Dave G

Dave G — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:25:15 +0000

Duncan,

Video is very slow to show. I would think “Tech” Crunch would have been on top of this kind of stuff.

It is funny that we have been broadcasting live TV for 50+ years (with no wires!)…and all the big brains in the room cannot figure out how to upload a video of the conference within 4 hours of the session closing.

Im dissapointed…I was hoping to virtually attend this thing…this year.

On a non-complaining note - I am looking forward to watching.

By: stupid_Dk

stupid_Dk — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:16:21 +0000

Well, i’d say Cake must be appealing to those who actually invest in stocks.. but i dont think that it would appeal to masses..

By: Kanute

Kanute — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:55:39 +0000

Whats the dude talking about????