Why the blog is of interest:

Although blogs are generally thought of as strictly text-based media, there's no reason on Earth why that always has to be the case, especially when rapid advances in multimedia technology are now unfolding on the Web. With great ingenuity, Joe Cleaver, platform strategy advisor in Microsoft's Financial Services Group, has leveraged this opportunity by starting to audio-enable his financial services blog with a series of illuminating chats with industry leaders.

In contrast to most other industries, financial services is one where IT (information technology) departments often find themselves scrambling to keep up with the needs of business users, Joe Cleaver notes.

In Industry Chat #1, he and colleague Joe Rubino, a Microsoft architectural evangelist, have created a quickly downloadble MP3 file that gives you a far reaching overview of how Microsoft's is helping different types of company decision-makers to implement .SQL Server, Silverlight, and other NET technologies for coping with various sides of the financial services equation.

When played back with Windows Media Player, the audio soundtrack is accompanied by computer-generated fractal design animations, in suitably MP3 style.

Beyond folks who specialize in business strategy, the Microsoft financial services team also includes evangelists and other experts in .NET architecture and the technical "bits and bytes" of development and data center issues, according to the two Joes.

By clicking on another link in this multimedia blog, you can tune in on Industry Chart #2, where Daniel Chait, managing director and co-founder of Lab 49, jumps aboard to deliver intriguing details about how technology is spurring quantum leaps of change throughout the capital markets.

Although some traders are still shouting to each other across the exchange floor, more and more of them enter into their jobs these days with backgrounds -- and even advanced degrees -- in mathematics, engineering, and computer science.

Computers are capable of processing incalculably more information than human beings -- and also unlike people, they can work around the clock, points out Dan, whose company has been building financial applications for customers ever since its inception back in 2002, when the .NET platform was just leaving beta testing. 

Dan tells Web listeners that upshots of the recent changes include algorithmic trading, grid computing, large databases, advanced 3-D visualization applications for traders, and P&L (profit and loss) statements that are now done in real time -- whenever you want -- instead of once a week.

But still, he says, human beings need to be sitting in the cockpit to direct the computers in the desired directions, obtaining results around various combinations of parameters related to trading speed, costs, and impact on financial markets, for example.

Dan likens old style financial trading to a Wright Brothers plane and contemporary trading to a modern commercial jet, where pilots need to handle control mechanisms around diverse and often abstract systems dealing with everything from air navigation to playing a motion picture for passengers on the flight.

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Why the blog is of interest:

Risk management is a multidimensional and increasingly global discipline, and Microsoft’s Sai Sireesh is particularly well suited to shine a light on its manifold aspects.

Fortunately for his readers, that’s exactly what Sai is accomplishing in a blog first launched in April of this year on the PRMIA (Professional Risk Managers' International Association) Web site.

“Sleepless in Seattle, I start this blog to share, discuss and most importantly learn about the New Frontiers in Risk & Compliance,” wrote Sai, who serves as the global lead for Microsoft’s Risk Management & Compliance Solutions.

In keeping with his title, the Microsoft executive addresses these frontiers with a decidedly international flair, whether he’s talking about regulatory climates in the US and Australia or forays into online virtual worlds by banks and insurance providers in northern Europe.

“As more and more financial institutions get creative about reaching out to the youth market by establishing presence in 3D virtual worlds, it is going to be interesting as to how the traditional risk management practices will evolve to keep up with this new online presence and associated risks,” he observed in one blog entry, penned in June.

Sai then proceeded to outline the virtual world activities of organizations ranging from banks in Germany and the Netherlands to the Belgian financial services group Fortis and a UK-based financial concern known as the Yorkshire Building Society.

Subsequently, in a pair of entries in July, Sai turned to the topic of Basel II, juxtaposing the progress of initiatives in the US against those in Australia.

Blogging from Barcelona during October, just before a Risk Management and Excel Bootcamp in that Spanish city, he jotted down his thoughts about European risk management practices related to transparency and risk control.

“These are expected to have wide ranging implications for the markets guidelines and the rest of the world, too,” predicted the Microsoft risk management specialist.

Sai explains that, on the whole, he’s focusing on ten different areas in his “New Frontiers in Risk Management & Compliance” blog: Risk Visualization; Next Generation Risk & Compliance Architectures; Risk Pricing Clusters; Risk & Compliance Taxonomy; Pan Regional Risk Data Grids; Digital Assets Management; Cross Industry Risk Management Practices; Incubating Centers of Risk Management Excellence and Practices; Risk Management Career Options; and Embedding Risk Management and Compliance in Organizational DNA.

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Why the blog is of interest:

Some blogs in the financial IT space are collaborative in nature, voicing views and opinions from folks throughout an organization. Lab49, Inc.'s blog is a great example. This blog stands out, too, on the basis of the vast variety of topics it covers. Actually, there's something here for just about everyone.

The collective work of Lab49's many individual bloggers is delivered in categories -- .Net, Microsoft, IT Management, and "Fun," for instance -- as well as in sections such as "Tales from a Trading Desk" and "Development in a Blink."

In one recent posting, Lab49's Doug Finke shares some nitty gritty tips on how to program with the use of Microsoft's emerging F# language. But in a lighter moment, Doug reflects pithily on the ramifications of the numeral 2,000,000,000 -- a number that represents the total membership of the ".Net Generation" from 1977 through 1996, according to the top selling book Wikinomics.

Elsewhere, Sal Mangano explains that Lab49 wants to be both "transparent" and "easy to work with" -- and that the company's collaborative blog is meant to bring these very same values to life. "Everyone at Lab49 is allowed and encouraged to blog and many do," notes Sal.

The Web site innovates in other ways, too. On the site's Demos page, for example, Daniel Chait presents a video depicting how WinFX can be implemented in advanced trading applications.

You can reply to Lab49's recent blog postings, if you like. You can also follow all the postings and replies via an RSS feed.

And while you're browsing through the diverse content on the site, you can get a sense of where other visitors are located in the world, simply by clicking on a link to a global map expressly designed for this purpose. Very cool.

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Why the blog is of interest:

Quite often, bloggers inside the financial services community link to - and even react to - the jottings of other bloggers. Bloggers also post the responses of their own readers. In a blog called "Powers Unfiltered," John Powers, president and CEO of Digipede Technologies, gives his reaction to computing consultant Marc Adler's entry on the Magmasystems blogspot about the growing demand for grid architectures in financial services. (See "Microsoft's Intensifying Moves into Financial Grids" elsewhere in "Best of the Blogs.")

As John views the grid market, developers in financial services are much more open to the .NET architecture than IT managers. "Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop their applications (.NET, COM, or anything else) find the Digipede Framework SDK provides the most natural approach available for adapting their applications to grids. And it's free, as part of the Digipede Network Developer Edition. Check it out, .NET developers - it might just be your ticket to 1,000 pounds a day!" he maintains.

"(Digipede and Microsoft) are also working together to win over the IT guys. With the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE), Microsoft has made the deployment and administration of many servers as easy as one (and dropped the price for compute-grid deployments, too.)" As you might expect, this posting drew some diverse feedback from readers.

The Digipede executive also writes about a lot of other topics related to partnering with Microsoft. In another blog entry, entitled "Clubbing with Steve," John tells about attending a reception at Club 21 in New York City with Steve Ballmer and some financial services execs. "Indeed, the continued positive attitude at Microsoft toward partners overall is most heartening. There's still plenty of room for improvement - but the commitment to that improvement is evident, even at the highest level," according to the blogger.

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The demand for grid computing keeps climbing faster in financial circles. Yet Windows faces plenty of entrenched competition in this space from other environments. In the Magmasystems blogspot, however, third-party computing consultant Marc Adler points to some arising technologies that could give Microsoft a big boost in financial grids, including Microsoft Accelerator and the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE).

"It will be nice to get first-class support from Microsoft as far as development tools go," according to the consultant.

Marc bases some of his observations on recent trips to Seattle  --where he met with Microsoft Accelerator team members about the future of their technology -- and to London.  

"The Accelerator team claims that (Accelerator) can be used as an abstraction for multicore technologies. The guys from the Accelerator team also predict that the world will eventually be moving to massively multi-core machines (i.e.: Intel's 80 core processor)," Marc writes in one blog entry.

"Got together (in London) with some ex-colleagues, who were marveling at the London consulting market," he relates in another posting. "The hot area are (in) grid computing, with the prevalent stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily (consulting) rates for qualified individuals are about 100 pounds, (which) at the current exchange rates is about $2,000.

"It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Cluster Server and (software tools vendor) Digipede can make any inroads into this market. There seems to be very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007."

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More and more these days, financial traders are software developers, too. As a group, these traders constitute some of the busiest -- and most brilliant -- bloggers around. Karl Schulze, a 22-year-old manager/engineer at a robotics company, has now launched a particularly noteworthy blog encompassing, in his words, "the development of an Automated Trading System," along with robotic technologies, Web site creation, a kite aerial camera system, and a few other types of "ramblings from a young dinosaur."

Despite the eclectic nature of the blog, a lot of the content is specifically related to Microsoft's own C# development language.  Karl, the recent recipient of a master's degree in engineering from Cornell University, gives you the nitty gritty on how to use C# to create a simple trading infrastructure and an intraday historical stock viewer. Beyond strictly professional pursuits, however, he's also exploring how to write an application in C# that's unabashedly socially oriented.

In one of the postings on his "Dinosaur Technology and Trading Blog," Karl tells how he's developing a C# FTP image uploader aimed at letting wedding guests upload their digital images to a central Web site. "In an ideal world, I would set up a Web site which we would hand out to all of our guests. They would go to the site and simply drag and drop their files on to the server much like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly, shown below," he elaborates.

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Why the blog is of interest:

Bloggers from Microsoft are shining behind-the-scenes insights on to a vast range of subjects pertinent to financial services pros (and others.) These bloggers hail from a variety of different walks of life, too. On the Windows Live Spaces Web site, Kurt Shintaku, a Microsoft principal systems engineer in southern California, gives us insider glimpses into Vista pirating, the new Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, and Silverlight Streaming, an emerging technology, now in alpha, for delivering multimedia without worrying about bandwidth scalability or storage capacity.

Kurt also posts content of specific importance to the financial services crowd, including descriptions of Microsoft's current series of Financial Services IndustryCasts.  Upcoming Webcast topics will include Windows ATMs, grid computing for .NET, and more. 

In one of the many other entries in his copious blog, Kurt tells about a letter from a customer asking for suggestions on whether to use an apparently pirated copy of Vista, which the customer has received from China. The Microsoft engineer warns that, without a genuine edition of Vista installed, you can't download either reliability, performance, or functionality fixes or add-ins such as Powershell for Vista and Windows Mobile Device Center components.
 
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