Dominic Jones

1. The Writer gets an idea.

2. He or she enters it into the authoring tool, saves, it goes to a file, a feed.

3. The authoring software sends an Update ping to the Cloud (which is just a bit of software running on EC2).

4. The Cloud checks to see if anyone is subscribing to the Writer, and finds that indeed the Aggregator is.

5. He updated! says the Cloud to the Aggregator.

6. The aggregator then reads the feed, finds the new stuff and informs the Reader.

All this happened in less than a second!

That’s what they call Real-time.

The illustration and explanation are big news. RSS is no longer just a pull technology. It now has push capabilities.

That means you can distribute market-moving releases via RSS in near real time to all subscribers, be they Joe Investor, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg or Fidelity — and they all get it at the same time.

That’s kinda what the PR wire services claimed to do but never could actually deliver. Now they’ve been made redundant by a bit of software and a rented Amazon.com server. Serves them right, I say, because they should’ve distributed mandatory releases free of charge a long time ago.

RSSCloud isn’t the only technology that’s transforming RSS into a real-time push technology. There’s also the Google-backed Pubsubhubbub and FriendFeed’s SUP (which is now Facebook’s, I suppose).

It doesn’t matter really which technology prevails, the results are the same. Your RSS/Atom feeds are your newswire and it’s time to give them the attention they deserve. (Don’t be the next Dell)

I hope that Thomson Reuters, Shareholder.com, SNL Financial, Investis and all the other IR website hosts will act as quickly adopt real-time push for their clients’ feeds just like Wordpress did at the weekend.

How important are retail investors to the investor mix of your company?

Absolutely essential  9.3%
Very important  21.6%
Somewhat important  29.4%
Not very important  31.4%
Not important at all  8.3%

 

The results are based on a survey of Shareholder.com clients by Rivel Research. It’s not clear how many actually answered the survey (204 *recipients* is mentioned), but the real question is did the respondents tell the truth?

The incentive here is for IROs to overstate the importance of retail investors. It’s never a good thing for an IRO to say *any* investor is not important, and they know that.

So I’m included to read the results at 30% think retail matters and 70% don’t really care.

I tweeted about this last week. This video provides a quick tour of how the new WolframAlpha search engine is using financial data from Xignite.

I joked about Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn in the opening but what I’m about to say is very serious. Every director needs to know about the impact that these networks will have on their business. And this impact can be positive or negative. It may well become a major reason why boards will need to make sure they have a blend of skill sets and are diverse about knowing how our world is evolving and their strategic initiatives need to change along with it.

I think he hits the nail on the head with “our world is evolving.”