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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