Xignite Newsletter - September 2006 edition

2006 October edition
The World's Largest Source Of Financial Web Services
From the CEO's Desk Did you ever wish you could pull and manipulate web service data straight into Excel? Well, now you can and it’s easier than you probably ever imagined. Xignite entered into an agreement with long-time partner StrikeIron to provide their OnDemand Web Services for Excel Add-in to our clients. The StrikeIron’s Add-in is a very nifty and incredibly easy-to-use tool that lets you pull data from web services in just a few clicks: You simply point our web service WSDL, drag-and-drop the field you want to see on your spreadsheet and call the web service. Voila! Now you have completely "live" spreadsheets which you can customize in any way you want. You can combine the power of Excel with the accuracy and immediacy of our data. To make things easier and to give you some ideas, we have also created free sample Excel workbooks already configured to access every operation of each of our web services. So go ahead, download the Add-in and give it a try. You can look at the following resources for more details: Overview and Download Step-by-Step Demo Free Sample Workbooks Press Release Finally, thank you for your response to our recent edition of the Xignite newsletter. Your feedback has been extremely encouraging and we will continue to incorporate all your suggestions in our future newsletters. Several of you have also volunteered to contribute articles of interest to make this newsletter more valuable and pertinent to our growing community of users. We appreciate this gesture and will strive to ensure greater value to all our readers through a collaborative and participative approach in developing this community. Please write to me at sdubois@xignite.com Stephane Dubois President and CEO, Xignite What’s Coming There are several services currently under development and some of these will go live in the coming weeks: XigniteGlobalHistorical Xignite is going global... with the addition of historical and end-of-day prices for dozens of international exchanges, Europe, Asia, South America, etc... you will be able to access delayed and historical quote information in any and all of the markets you track. XigniteCompensation Would you close more deals if you knew more about the top executives at your prospective client? Now XigniteCompensation can give you that edge. The service will soon deliver biographical and compensation information on more than 100,000 officers of public companies. There are many more upcoming services - stay tuned for the next newsletter and be the first to know. Also, if there is anything you need that we don’t currently have, don’t hesitate to let us know by email. Remember, what you tell us helps us identify and prioritize new developments. Who’s Hot BUYINS.NET has been a loyal customer for 2 years and has found innovative ways to use a number of our web services. BUYINS.NET is a research company that focuses on Regulation SHO, new short selling requirements enacted by the SEC. Their website is a database driven automated research tool that allows users to download research reports on U.S. stocks and exposes all short sale time and sales information from January 2005 to present. This allows users to determine the exact price that a short squeeze can start in any U.S. stock. BUYINS.NET CEO, Tom Ronk, contacted Xignite looking for delayed stock quotes, news releases and VWAP data. We were able to meet his needs and we have been providing quotes, news and VWAP information on 15,000 stocks daily. "We send over 100,000 requests each day to Xignite and have been very impressed with the stability and near zero latency of their platform," said Mr. Ronk. "Xignite provides institutional quality services at very competitive prices," he added. The BUYINS.NET web site hosts a 9 billion cell database of every short sale transaction on every US stock. Each hour the Xignite web services feed price data to an application that compares the current price of the stock to the VWAP of all short sale transactions in the BUYINS.NET database. An alerts list is posted for all stocks that are crossing above their SqueezeTrigger ™ price. Users can also go to a "Performance" page which shows how stocks that have been "naked shorted" and "shorted but not properly borrowed", are performing based on their change in price from the previous day’s close. New services are in development and will integrate additional Xignite Web services. News & Events Unleashing the potential of service-oriented architecture Sponsored Podcast by Accenture (Source www.cio.com) SOA Symposium A joint series of presentations offered by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Oracle, Network Appliance (Source www.soa-symposium.com) The CIO Agenda 2007 and beyond November 8, 2006, Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont (O'Hare) Illinois, USA Service-Oriented Architectures for E-government Conference Oct. 30, 2006 - Oct. 31, 2006, MITRE 1 Auditorium, McLean VA Top Reads The Notion of "SOA 2.0" is Just Plain Silly (Source http://webservices.sys-con.com) An Open Source Approach to Software Integration (Source http://opensource.sys-con.com) Web Services, SOA, Open Source Converge (Source http://eweek.com) Apache Axis2/C Version 0.93 Released with XML Schema Implementation (Source http://xml.sys-con.com)> SOA and persistent data requirements (Source www.itarchitect.co.uk) The Truth about SOA (Source www.cio.com)	What's new We have been working hard since our last newsletter and we have a long list of new offerings that may apply to your business. Some highlights: XigniteFundamentals brings over 350 fundamental data points on more than 10,000 US and Canadian companies to your fingertips. The service covers profile information, latest financial summary, technical analysis, ratios and more. This is the place to go if you need Betas, Trailing PEs, EBITDAs and other key fundamentals. The data is updated on a daily basis and is provided by Hemscott, a leading independent provider of financial data in the U.S. and Canada. XigniteFinancials makes annual and quarterly financial statement information for some 10,000+ US and Canadian companies a breeze to integrate with your analytics applications. You can access income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows as well as dozens of other key ratios and data points for the last 10 years. You can choose to pull complete statements or only the data elements you are looking for. The data is updated daily and provided by Hemscott. XigniteReleases gives you the information you need about the companies you care about. The service delivers corporate press releases information from leading wire services. You can request press releases by symbol or across markets and also search them by title. This is essential for tracking key portfolio holdings or competitors. We have added many more services to our integrated platform. We will continue to highlight them in our following newsletters. What’s Hot Have you ever wished you could pull just the data points you need for an application instead of struggling with a complex, bulky feed? XigniteFinancials and XigniteFundamentals let you do just that in a couple of simple web service calls. For instance, how do you get to the most recent Beta for Yahoo!? In this case you would use the GetFundamental operation of XigniteFundamentals. The operation takes 3 parameters: Type: Pass *Beta60Month* out of the list of about 300 options Identifier: YHOO IdentifierType: Symbol The operation will not only return the value you are looking for, but also the date it was last updated, its unit, its source, as well as a description you can use in your application. How about if you want to know Google’s operating revenue for the last quarter? Just use the GetStandardItem operation of XigniteFinancials. This operation takes 5 parameters: Type: Pass *OperatingRevenue* out of the list of about 250 accounting line items you would typically see on a financial statement. Identifier: GOOG IdentifierType: Symbol ReportType: You could pass *Latest* to get the latest number. Note that you could also choose a specific Quarter, Year or even Trailing Twelve Month (TTM) number. AsOfDate: Pass today’s date. If you wanted to see a historical quarter, you would pass the date representing the last day of the quarter you are looking for. You now have Google’s operating revenue for the quarter ended 6/30/2006 - the latest quarter reported. And, you also get a useful description of the data returned. Developer Corner Return classes for all Xignite web services share a set of standard elements that can help you work more effectively. All return classes inherit from a class called *Common* which is defined in the WSDL of all services. This class includes the following elements: Outcome. indicates the outcome of the request. It is always present so you can test it safely. It can take four values: Success: The Request executed properly. SystemError: An abnormal error occurred on our side. Please contact our Support team if you run into such an error. We track them on an ongoing basis and attempt to remove them as they occur. RequestError: Something was wrong with your request parameters and the system could not execute it, e.g. a bad symbol. RegistrationError: You exceeded the number of requests allowed by your registration or subscription. Typical remedies include registering for the service if you have not already done so or subscribing to the service. Message contains an information message helping you to further diagnose a problem indicated by Outcome. Message is empty when Outcome is Success. Message will always contain some informational message if Outcome is not Success. Identity is a string that indicates how we authenticated your request. This is helpful to diagnose registration problems. Possible ways to authenticate your requests are: The requesting computer's IP address An HTTP Cookie A SOAP Header A URL Request Parameter Delay indicates how long (in seconds), it took our servers to process your request. Tip: It is a good programming habit to always assess the value of the Outcome field returned by one of our web services. Career Section Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to be a part of it. If you are a mastermind of your own trade, looking for an early startup to sweat into an apparent overnight success, Xignite is for you! We are a small but thriving company growing full of smart and motivated people. We work hard and are passionate about changing the life of our clients and making the delivery of web services the business model of the future. For more information on Careers at Xignite click here.