The World's Largest Source Of Financial Web Services
 
From the CEO's Desk
First of all, here's wishing every one of you the best for this new and promising year. 2007 could be interesting indeed. While 2006 might have been dubbed the "Year of SOA and Web Services", 2007 will probably see businesses focusing again on the solution instead of the technology.

According to the "SOA Evolution: Top Trends for 2007", last year's discussions about SOA revolved on finding services, picking an infrastructure, deploying tools and so on. Such "technology-for-the-sake-of-it" focus is not atypical when a sea change occurs in the IT world.

But in 2007, developers and IT professional will likely refocus their effort on the business problems they face and the applications they deploy as solutions. This bodes well for you because from the beginning, our focus has been on delivering the web services that make your job of building your applications easier.

Many web services out there have been built by slapping a SOAP API on top of an old flat-file data structure or proprietary interface. Needless to say, these don't make the job of building a compelling application easier. I hope that you have found our web services, intuitive, easy to use, and usable with minimum work on your side. If that was not the case, I invite you to tell us how we can help you build better applications faster.

Finally, please be on the lookout for our new web site which we will release early February. The new site will be completely transparent to your applications so you should not worry about the transition. If we require you to do any testing we have probably already contacted you directly. In our next newsletter, I will tell you about the new features and benefit of the site.

Please write to me at sdubois@xignite.com

Stephane Dubois
President and CEO, Xignite
What’s Coming
Xignite is partnering with Zacks Investment Research to bring two new web services to our integrated solution. Whether you need to track your competitors or the stocks in your portfolios, these services will provide the forward-looking perspective you need to build and keep your edge:
  • XigniteEstimates will provide detailed earning estimates per firm including earning consensus, sales estimates, EPS growth rate and more.
  • XigniteAnalysts will provide analyst ratings, recommendations, upgrades, downgrades and more.
Stay tuned for the next newsletter and be the first to know. There are many more upcoming services. If there is anything you need that you don’t find on our website, don't hesitate to let us know by email. What you tell us helps us identify and prioritize new developments.
John Siegel, Jr., Ph.D. started Stormworm over a decade ago to find out what made the market tick. After reviewing popular investment magazines, web sites, books, and financial news programs, John and his team realized that they were really seeking a more impartial way of picking stocks. After immersing themselves in academic accounting journals they wrote a program which crunched out the valuation formulas which they had discovered.

After analyzing more than 8,000 stocks and investing based on their model, they were beating the market. Stockworm worked so well that many friends and associates were begging John to use it. As a result, Stockworm website was first launched in 1999 and experienced significant growth. In mid-2006, John decided to "privatize" Stockworm and make it only accessible by the clients of the new money management firm, Stockworm Capital Management, LLC, which he created for that purpose.

John and his team discovered Xignite's web services in 2004 and have been using them since. "Xignite made it incredibly easy for us to integrate delayed and historical quotes into our platform" says Fyodor Golos, Stockworm's IT Director. "We must manage large sets of proprietary data to feed our model so we do not want to manage the complexity of additional feeds. Xignite takes that complexity away from us so that we can focus on what gives us an edge."

"But most importantly" says John, "We have been very pleased with the excellent service Xignite has provided our growing firm ... And this is truly a rarity in this business."
Top Reads
SOA Evolution: Top Trends for 2007
(http://www.adtmag.com/)

Budgeting for SOA Success
(http://www.infoworld.com/)

What’s the Buzz about SaaS?
(http://www.industryweek.com/)

Communications 2.0: Beta is Better
(http://www.cmswire.com/)

AJAX Company Wikio Secures $5.3 Million in Series A Funding
(http://ajax.sys-con.com/)

Building Your Own SOAP Client and Reporting Tool
(http://www.infoworld.com/)

Guest Blogger Interview: John Fox of GroupSmarts
(http://blogs.zdnet.com/)
News & Events
2007 Web Services/SOA on Wall Street
Feb 14, 2007, Roosevelt Hotel, NYC

Service-Oriented Architecture
Synchronising Business and IT to Drive Performance
February 26 - March 1, 2007
Four Points Sheraton, Darling Harbour, Sydney, NSW

Web 2.0 Expo
Co-produced by O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology
April 15-18, 2007, San Francisco, CA

WWW 2007
16th International World Wide Web Conference
May 8-12, 2007, Banff, Canada

XTech 2007 - The Ubiquitous Web
May 15-18, 2007, Paris, France

Semantic Technology Conference - Everything about the Semantic Web
May 20-24, 2007, San Jose, California
 
Who's Talking
We'd like to hear from you. Click below to take the survey:

What's new
We released our beta version of XigniteAlerts in 2006. XigniteAlerts is our first "push" web service. The concept is simple: rather than polling our web services to check whether some information you care about has changed, you can use XigniteAlerts to tell you when that information is updated. XigniteAlerts currently supports two sets of information updates:
  • New daily interest rates
  • New SEC Filing
You get automatically notified when information is updated:
  • By email
  • Or by calling your own (fully parameterized) web service
Before you can use XigniteAlerts, you must build a watch list of the stocks or interest rates you want to track using Xignite WatchLists. Please contact us if you are interested in XigniteAlerts either in its current form or to track information not currently supported.
In this industry, most of us have some piece of code lying around whose logic depends on whether the market is open or not. For instance, you may want to indicate the difference between a closing price and a regular delayed price on a portal. While it can seem easy to hard-code some logic initially, your app will quickly fall apart on holidays, early closes or like more recently, with the funeral of President Gerald Ford, unscheduled market closures. To solve this problem, you need XigniteExchanges. This service tracks the unique schedules and calendars of dozens of exchanges worldwide. Adding the logic to your app is straightforward. Here is an example in VB.Net:

Dim objService as New RemoteExchanges.XigniteExchanges
If objService.IsExchangeOpen("NYSE").Value Then
' Logic if exchange is open
Else
' Logic if exchange is closed
End If
Yes, it's just that simple to build an application that can work any day of the year!
Developer Corner
The 80/20 rule applies to many things and the problems our customers run into are no exception. 80% of the calls we receive from our clients are on one of the following subjects:

RegistrationError This typically occurs if you use IP authentication and the external IP of the servers calling our web services changes. It's common for these events to occur without the knowledge of the original programmer. Resolving this problem is simple:
  1. Access and read the complete error message you received from our servers. The message will tell you how your request was authenticated and what the IP was:

    XigniteQuotes: Maximum number of unregistered requests exceeded. Consider registering or subscribing to expand usage. Your request was authenticated using your IP Address (64.124.25.100). If you think you received this message in error, please contact us at support@xignite.com.
  2. Using the AddIPAddress operation to register your new IP address with your account.
The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. This occurs when a proxy server is implemented in your network. You may be able to access our web site using your browser, but you may not be able to access our web services using a SOAP program. This is because your system administrator configured your browser to know about the proxy server. You just need to do the same with your SOAP program. Doing so will depend on your development environment. Here is how to set up a proxy server in VB.Net:

Dim objService as New RemoteQuotes.XigniteQuotes
Dim objProxy As New System.Net.WebProxy("proxy.yourcompany.com")
objService.Proxy = objProxy
Career Section
Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to be an integral part of it.

If you are a master 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.