Now businesses that are being built on top of Twitter are starting to consume others that were in fact features of those very businesses to begin with. Case in point: StockTwits has just acquired Chart.ly, which is a tremendously logical deal. Chart.ly is a stock-chart service designed specifically for StockTwits (which is dedicated to talking about stocks on Twitter). Think of it as a Twitpic for stock charts (you can Twitter about a stock with a link to a chart on Chart.ly).
Howard Lindzon, the founder of StockTwits (and before that, WallStrip), confirms to me that StockTwits now owns the code behind Chart.ly and that its creator, Adarsh Pallian, will continue to oversee the development site. Lindzon will help with ad deals. He paid less than $10,000 for the development work and will now split ad-revenues on Chart.ly 50/50 with Pallian.
In a world of open APIs, this is how small M&A deals are done. Pallian came to StockTwits with his idea for Chart.ly and just went out and built it. “He just came to us,” says Lindzon. “He is a young guy who wanted to design something for us, and we didn’t have the time.” Lindzon and his team were more focused on the stream of data coming into StockTwits, which currently has 70,000 followers on Twitter. Since Chart.ly launched a few weeks ago, about 3,000 stock charts have been created and shared. It was an obvious feature for StockTwits. Pallian proved that it was a good idea by building it and gaining traction for the feature quickly. Right now it is connected to StockTwits loosely, but will become more integrated now that StockTwits owns it.
They could both learn a lot from @stocknames
Two one-man startups merging together?
Anand, you obviously don’t know who Howard Lindzon or Adarsh is. Google them and get educated.
Oh ya..Too many gurus out there that I have stopped ‘educating’ myself..
Never said I was a guru. You might find it helpful to gain some knowledge before throwing out stupid assumptions especially on Techcrunch.
Some growing up needed, perhaps.
LOL. I din’t call YOU a guru..I was referring to the other names you wanted me to Google out..
I love getting no credit from TC for something that was my idea, thank you everyone for inspiring me to work harder
When are you going to learn that ideas don’t mean shit. It’s all about implementation.
“When are you going to learn that ideas don’t mean shit. It’s all about implementation.”
So true. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Question: will this be the biggest piece of startup M&A for the quarter?
Maybe.
This is considered M&A??
Someone had an idea very specific to a single company… coded it… got paid for it… and now is maintaining it.
This sounds like a simple contracting relationship with some extra long-term compensation attached. Not an acquisition.
M & A????
seriously – this is an absurd use of the term.
interesting enough. Maybe I should take http://www.worstpizza.com public and track it on this! That is wishful thinking huh!
Wow a twitter story, that’s original.
Who the hell is this Timothy Sykes dude that keeps calling out for attention on TC? Quit crying brother…
When a product you create keeps getting featured and u get no credit despite both Pallian and Lindzon’s blogs giving me credit, TC is simply discredited
I’m confused. Doesn’t this post you wrote say that you’re just an investor?
http://timothys...-in-stocktwits/
i thought stocktwits already owned charly -look at the whois info prior to the “M&A”
Tim,
You need a reality show.
tim you suck! stick to your spammy blog
How rad is this conversation all about who gets credit.
In other M&A news, Juan “El Matador” Mercado fronted Ricky Smith 4 pounds of marijuana and 6 ounces of cocaine. Mercado paid wholesale price in Ciudad Juarez and will give Smith 10% of the retail proceeds.
Cool stuff. I wonder why all the charts on Chart.ly listed as most popular are market indexes, index funds, etc and almost no indvidual stocks?
The challenge to charting is to how to make those visual identifiable technical analysis patterns , be detected automatically where the user doesn’t need to see the chart visually?
Researches in this area is advancing and there have been several papers which had been published by the computational finance community in recent years that showed good results and there is need for more improvements. I believe that once these automated systems are readily available to the public, then relying on charting for visual analysis will become less useful.
Some of these research papers that I have seen are:
- Automatic extraction and identification of chart patterns towards financial forecast
- Stock time series pattern matching: Template-based vs. rule-based approaches
- and many more…
I believe that charting will still be there, but users with charting system which has automated extracted patterns capability, will use charting as something to confirm the correctness of the detected patterns.