Technofile: If you are trying to get information about breaking news from the financial world when you are out and about, the most obvious solution is the mobile phone. Now, a new service promises to deliver the boiler room of the trading floor straight into the palm of your hand.
Back in the old days, the best way to get this kind of fast-breaking news and information was the humble pager.
It was in this market that TeleCommunication Systems (TCS), a wireless financial market data provider, built its business. Now it's come up with a new way to check stocks as they turn from red to grey to blue.
TCS has created a product called marketStream. Loaded on to the BlackBerry wireless PDA, the software can display a screen which looks uncannily like a trading screen direct from Wall Street.
Listings of stocks and shares wink and blink as they update themselves without you having to do anything so laborious as dial a number, or wait after clicking on a WAP page.
MarketStream's magic has been made possible mostly because of faster mobile networks which use GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), which makes the wireless streaming of data possible.
The marketStream application allows access to - take a deep breath - streaming equity security prices and volume, foreign exchange rates, futures, commodities and fixed income prices, as well as news and charts in over 30 financial markets around the world.
It's hard to beat when it is coupled with the Research In Motion-built BlackBerry. Dubbed the Crackberry in the United States for their addictive properties, Blackberry's have fast become a hardcore business tool for mobile managers who live on email.
Its secret is very simple, the Blackberry not only allows you to download and reply to your email easily, but it also synchronises those replies with your desktop machine.
The result is that you do not have to re-work through your email when you get back to the office.
MarketStream's launch has been timed to coincide with the announcement of the shutdown of the O2 pager network scheduled for December 2004. Yes folks, the pager is practically a dodo.
But at least in its place are new services that will exceed anything a pager was capable of.
And because marketStream is a Java-based application, it can also run on the Symbian operating system installed on Nokia mobile phones.
Want to check the price of oil on the golf course? Just fire-up marketStream on your phone as you tee off.
However, if you want a cheap and cheerful way of getting financial news and don't want to grapple with your WAP phone, you could try Hand/RSS.
This is a cheap application for palm-based PDAs.
Just download it from Standalone.com.
Hook it up to your mobile or run it on the Palm-based Treo 600 phone and Hand/RSS will automatically pull in headlines from CBSMarketwatch.com, or indeed any website that makes its RSS/XML syndicated feed available to the public.
www.marketStreamlive.com
www.Standalone.com
Mike Butcher edits mbites.com
