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Lab49 To Provide iPhone Users With Financial Applications
August 5, 2008
Lab49, a technology consultancy that counts data visualization among its specialty practice areas, announced yesterday that it has begun developing financial applications for Apple’s iPhone.
The first product to launch is Lab49 Capital, which allows buy-side portfolio managers to track their assets’ performance in real time on the iPhone 2.0 platform that became widely available last month. New York- and London-based Lab49 says its new software will take advantage of the Apple handheld’s advanced hardware capabilities, which can, for example, change the way information is presented when the phone is switched from portrait to landscape position.
“The new iPhone is a great platform which offers all the interactivity and data services to develop applications to tie into the trading and market data systems we are already building for our customers,” said Lab49 managing director Daniel Chait. “The idea is to get information into people’s hands wherever they are.”
A demonstration on the Lab49 Web site shows how a hedge fund manager can use the software to chart a day’s trading, with the ability to display the results in dollars or by percentage. Users can also drill down into results by strategy, industry, manager and country. Alerts can be triggered by an early close, for instance, or a trader approaching his limits.
Lab49 aims to pack considerable information into its graphics without creating confusion or visual clutter. A blue shadow image appears along the right edge of a result, indicating its contribution to the total. And rotating the iPhone to landscape mode produces a bubble chart that reveals the changes and contribution of individual strategies.
According to Chait, Apple’s decision to link the device to Microsoft Exchange means it can readily fit into large enterprise systems, such as investment banks, without requiring new infrastructure.
Chait foresees the handheld being used for data delivery, alerts, visualization of positions and risk, and mobile workflow, such as approving the extension of a counterparty limit even when a manager is away from the trading floor. “This allows users to readily see for themselves what is going on even when they are not at their desks, without requiring a desk clerk to find them and tell them something has happened,” noted Chait.
The iPhone won’t necessarily replace Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, he added. “The absence of a keyboard presents tradeoffs and influences the kind of applications that make sense on an iPhone.” For many users, the graphical capabilities of the Apple device should compensate. Buttons on the iPhone change dynamically to support the task on the screen, users can drag and drop or scroll with a finger, and images can be expanded and compressed with hand movements.
Although Apple has a history of keeping its platforms fairly closed--especially compared to the original IBM and Microsoft models of interaction with software developers--it is providing a software developer’s kit (SDK) for the iPhone that has some powerful and easy-to-use tools, according to Chait.
“The SDK allows you to display lots of different types of data in a very small form factor,” he said. The first version of the SDK didn’t allow developers to do as much as the new release. “It’s not quite as ‘open arms’ as you would like,” acknowledged Chait, “but you can go on the Web site for free and, as long as you sign the terms and conditions, you can download the SDK and create applications that look great.”
