Our Blog is Moving

Marian just finished developing our own blogging software and page.

Originally, we decided to blog in order to put a face on iBanknet. Our blogs have featured little tidbits of who we are and what we are doing.

We decided we wanted to repatriate our blog from Blogger to iBanknet.com. This is a first in a series of steps. Ultimately we will integrate our financial publisher, docKinetics AI, in the process. This will allow us to integrate financial statements, market data, and news in our blog. Way Cool!!!

So our new blog is at:

http://www.ibanknet.com/scripts/blog/viewblog.aspx

Enjoy, Chris

Odds and Ends

This post is a collection of odds and ends.

The Housing Finance and Capital Markets was on CSPAN today, the topic was the subprime situation. Mr. Seidman, a former Chairman of the FDIC gave a short speech and provided this nugget of wisdom; something that went like "Bankers should know who they lend money to and what they are lending money for" (a very common sense statement).

Q3 2007 Credit Union reports have been published. I expect the Banks, Thrifts and Bank Holding Company reports will be published within the next 2 weeks.

This quarter we will be adding coverage of New Jersey.

Chairman Reich of the OTS has sent out a letter for comments concerning Thrifts switching from Thrift Financial Reports to Call Report format. From an analysis point of view, this is good news, however there are some things I really like about Thrift Financial Reports that I will be sad to see disappear.

The FFIEC has extended the Web Service Pilot to the end of 2008. We will probably be adjusting our workflow to bring you more current information.

We will soon be moving off Blogger to our own blogging platform. Marian started work on this today and we will probably be using it later this week.

Have a great week, Chris

Widgets, Gadgets and iBanknet

Our new iBanknet widget - a subject so exciting for me, that I decided to write my first contribution to our blog!

I've developed our own iBanknet widget which provides a simple interface for finding financial institutions on iBanknet.com from your Google Personalized Homepage or, using a Syndicated Gadget, most any web page or blog.

Other widget platforms had restrictions and did not allow us to include more extensive functionality, so we decided to build our own.

Our iBanknet widget currently searches through our growing inventory of over 2,000 U.S. financial institutions, where users can click to view the financial details of any searched institution. The exciting part is that we have SO many ideas of new features that can be added to it that I'm looking forward to adding some more cool stuff to the widget!

As a widget is part of the web 2.0 social networking toolset, we've provided links to some of the social networking websites and personal homepages that allow you to add the iBanknet widget.

Hope you find it useful and have a great weekend!

Marian

Launch of Summary of Deposits Section

Halloween is over, the leaves are beginning to drop and the ocean is starting to get "that" color.



What a great way to start November with the launch of our Summary of Deposits section. We had a lot of fun putting it together. Of course, it is completely RSS based with feeds that you can add to your blogs, personalized web pages and feed readers.



Starting with the National Summary, you can sort by state, number of institutions, number of offices, and total deposits. Click on a state and you will get a list of all the institutions in the state, their number of offices, their total deposits in that state, and percentage of deposits in the state. Click on a hyperlinked institution, and you will get detailed financials of that institution.



That took Marian a day and a half from whiteboard to publishing. Shows what a great techie-business owner can do.



We've got our eyes on a couple of XML based products, one is a flash map based product and the other is dashboard software. Once we save our pennies, iBanknet.com will take on a totally different dimension.



We are looking forward to providing you with a positive internet experience and thank-you for visiting iBanknet.com. Remember feedback is always welcome.



Chris

Autumn in New England

Well our boat "OFFLINE" is now truly offline. We had a great sail from Salem Harbor to Marblehead Harbor where the boat is now in storage for the winter.

Boating season is over, now on to hiking. Franconia notch is a short 2.5 hour drive north of Marblehead. Hiking is very relaxing, a real great way to lose a few pounds and gets you totally grounded. We did a short hike to the top of Indian Head, had a relaxing lunch and then I took a few photos.

The FDIC is conducting a web services pilot for data distribution, so Marian has been testing their prototype to see how it will improve our work flow. Pretty awesome stuff from a publishing perspective. I sure hope the SEC does something similar for distribution of their content. This is truly one of those paradigm shifts.

I've been catching up on some of the XBRL specs and requirements. The Dimensions Spec is interesting reading, addresses some issues we have, and seems straightforward to implement.

This week, we refocus on iBanknet. We've been doing "cold calls" and are pleased with the results. I want to apologize for interrupting all you busy people and thank-you for your words of encouragement. It's pretty amazing when you actually talk to people that have visited our site.

Maybe the telephone is the best social networking tool of all.

New York - Nostalgic Publishing

This weekend we increased our coverage to include New York State.

As I was reviewing the banks and credit unions, I reflected on how much New York had touched my life and in such a positive way. As a youth in my "Family Vacation", visiting Frontier Town, Ausable Chasm and Fort Ticonderoga. As a college student hiking between 10 to 15 peaks in the Adirondacks (Mount Marcy, Giant Mountain, etc.). As my career in banking started, living near Buffalo and enjoying the Bills and frequent visits to Niagara Falls. And then, as my career evolved, being re-located to Battery Park City and working at the Chase Plaza. And then spending many fall and winter evenings reading Gotham by Burrows and Wallace.

It was a quite a nostalgic experience clicking on the state map and checking results. New York State is the first in what I consider to be a "jumbo" banking states(over 700 Banks/Holding companies and Credit Unions) on iBanknet.com. We certainly hope you are finding iBanknet a useful resource on the Internet and don't hesitate to drop us a line with suggestions for improvement.

Thanks and have a nice week,
Chris

TD to Acquire Commerce Bancorp Inc.

We covered the TD/Commerce Bancorp merger yesterday and posted a balance sheet and income statement comparison at the following web address(in excel, rtf, pdf and html):

http://www.ibanknet.com/spotlight/institutionspotlight2007100201.shtml

We normally make this content available, since most financial portals(the free ones) try to shoe horn banks into corporate and industrial financial statements. Many times you only end up with a few items in their statements.

It's very interesting to see TD's expansion, now includes census bureau Division 1 and Division 2, thus having a strong presence in Region 1(Northeast). Meanwhile BMO expanded into Region 2(Midwest) and RBC in Region 3(South). I don't think any Canadian Banks have moved into Region 4(West). Yet.

We seem to be following TD ... we have finished publishing Division 1 - New England, and we will soon start publishing content in Division 2 - Middle Atlantic later this month. Our new infrastructure, designed and developed by Marian Albert, is performing exceptionally well.

Have a great day!! Chris

The Top Ten Reasons I Love Google Base ...

We have been working with GoogleBase since it launched. Over time and from my perspective, we have seen it take a step forward, then a few back and then a few more forward. The normal growth of any product. But I have always believed in Google Base.

Here are my top ten reasons why I love Google Base

1. First and foremost, it is web based and I am a firm believer in the power of the Internet.
2. I am a firm believer in simplicity leads to adoption. Google Base is really simple to create and work with. We load it using our RSS feeds and it just can't get any easier than that.
3. Well Google Base fits nicely somewhere between structured and a semi-structured query language. I see Google, itself as an unstructured query engine using plain language. The simplicity of just typing in a few words and getting the results has proven widely popular. With Google Base you can augment the plain language query with drop downs to formulate a semi-structured query ... so you can find all the credit unions in California with assets greater than 10 million. Very Cool. Almost a semantic web.
4. The results of the search are returned in RSS. Perfect for a mash-up.
5. Yahoo Pipes interfaces with Google Base. Again great stuff for a mashup.
6. I love the bulk upload. Our Bulk upload is scheduled on a weekly basis.
7. We use Google Base as our search tool for our website. Go to iBanknet.com and click on our SEARCH and play with it.
8. In addition to RSS, the results can be returned in 3 views, list view, grid view and map view. Map view looks very promising and we may start to use that feature.
9. Google Base used to integrate nicely with Google Docs, however recently Google Docs has made the interface extremely clumsy. I look forward to seeing the two products play nice together in the future.
10. It's free.

I don't know the future of Google Base. But being an RSS centric product, it is a nice fit in the Web 2 world. Oh by the way, go to Google itself and do a search on "recipe". Well there is Google Base looking right back at you.

Have a great evening!
Chris

Busy, Busy, Busy ....

I can't believe I haven't posted an entry since the end of August. All I can say is we have been really busy.

We finally took a necessary breather last Sunday and sailed up the coast. We stumbled across 'Friendship' returning from the Gloucester Schooner Festival. 'Friendship' is a reconstruction of a 1797 171-foot three-masted Salem East Indiaman.

So why have we been so busy? Well, we're getting ready to publish June 2006 content.
iBanknet.com is built on dual XML(extensible markup language) and XBRL(extensible business reporting language) foundation. Each quarter we maintain 7 banking taxonomies. There were not a lot of changes to the taxomonies this quarter:

1. Credit Unions - No changes this quarter.
2. Thrifts - June features Schedule SB Consolidated Small Business Loans.
3. Banks and Holding Companies: A new fixed item 'F465' replaced text/reporting item '5351'. The caption is 'Cumulative - effect adjustment resulting from the initial adoption of FAS 159, Fair Value Option'. There were also some modified parenthetical changes to clarify applicability to tiered bank holding companies.

The biggest changes are our back-office processes. All the back-office processes have been now fully automated. I am now redundant. I feel a certain loss of control as a result. But in business, this is what you strive for. Now I can spend more time on strategic things.

I hope you enjoyed your summer and have a great autumn. I know we're looking forward to increasing our content significantly over the next quarter.

Cheers,

Chris

The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

I can't remember who coined the phrase or wrote the lyric 'The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same', but Al Stewart seems to come to mind.

We're completing a huge change to iBanknet.com, yet you won't see it. Well not initially.

When we started iBanknet.com, we didn't realize how popular it would become. Subsequently, we've had to start focusing on things like infrastructure and scalability. Over the last month we've changed everything, I mean EVERYTHING. We're in a testing mode right now and will probably start phasing in the changes over the next few weeks.

What will you see different. Nothing. What will the impact be. No Impact(fingers crossed).

But these changes will allow us to scale iBanknet.com and to increase our coverage. Right now we cover about 1,000 financial institutions. We will publish Q2 2007 in a few weeks with the same number of institutions. A few weeks after that we are planning to double our content by publishing a large state or complete FRB district. We'll take a breath and continue to rollout more content at a quicker pace.

On the back-office side, my life got a whole lot simpler. Much of the manual work is being automated. I will now be able to focus on how to bring you more interesting content.

Why are there Derivatives on my iPhone?

Well, on the Internet, you never know who or what is going to visit your site.

We've always tried to make our content viewable on as many platforms as possible. So when the folks at Grazr (a great group of guys on to something), made their Widget available for the iPhone, it took us seconds to connect our derivatives feed.

If you don't have an iPhone, but are running IE 7, Firefox 2, or Safari 3 in Windows, here's a link to an iphone simulator. Then enter the following URL http://www.ibanknet.com/iphone in the command line area of the iPhone to access our Derivatives feed.

So why is this relevant? I really think it is important to try to service each request for information. You just never know who, when, why or what are the circumstances behind the request.

It could be you or it could be Steve Jobs. And guess what, you're both important to us (sounds corny, but true).

RSS - Overview

(Sample RSS Icon)

RSS or Really Simple Syndication has been around for a long time. It is a great mechanism for sharing information. Newspapers were probably the first to use RSS on a widespread basis. Blogging has popularized RSS even more.

Prior to Web 2, you generally used a news aggregator (RSS Reader) to view RSS. But recently more and more tools are being developed to view RSS. Most web browsers have a built in RSS reader. Internet Explore 7 has a nice RSS reader, just click on an RSS item and you will be launched into their reader. Most personalized home-page sites such as iGoogle, NetVibes, Page Flakes all come with the capabilities to add RSS to your personalized pages.

Sometimes RSS is referred to as a feed. At iBanknet.com the majority of our content is available in feeds, so individuals can subscribe to a feed and add it to their personalized home pages.

RSS is a very interesting topic and I will post much on this later.

CJS

Spreadsheet Hint

One of the reasons I wanted to Blog, was to share some ideas that may help you use content on iBanknet.com



In our Mergers and Acquisitions section we often do side by side comparisons of the financial statements of the banks involved in the merger. We make this content available in excel, rtf, and pdf formats. As you see, these documents are styled nicely.



As a note, our excel documents do not use macros. Also, I always recommend that you have up-to-date virus protection software running before downloading anything from the Internet.



Here's a hint. Most of our HTML content can be imported into Excel. Simply go to the excel toolbar, select Data, select Import External Data, select New Web Query. Cut and Paste the iBanknet URL in the appropriate spot and press Go. Then click on the desired table you want to import and click on the Import Button. And you're off to the races.



I hope you find this hint useful ...



CJS

Sun Rise

I am certainly not a writer and I never thought I would blog.

Sometimes events occur that are so small, yet so profound, that you want to shout about them from the roof top.

On Monday, July 30th, Sun Microsystems released their fourth quarter and fiscal year 2007 financial results using their website and an rss feed as a primary delivery channel.


This is a historic event because:

1. It is an official recognition of a corporate IR website and RSS as a primary delivery channel.


2. It is an incremental step towards the widespread adoption of "interactive data", as it would not be hard to imagine a link to an XML/XBRL based financial statement.


3. It will engage a different audience. It will engage a younger, facebook/twitter/widget audience that needs to start retirement planning.

Congratulations to Sun and all those involved in this "small step for mankind".

While I was at the Sun website I saw a nice toy ... I'm off to update my Christmas wishlist with a Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation .

CJS