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