UPDATED: kaChing for iPhone
UPDATED: 07/13/2009
I had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Galore and Dan Carroll from kaChing and over some Blue Bottle iced coffee and frozen yogurt we talk about their company.
kaChing has uniquely applied an open source and social-networking strategy to build the web’s largest marketplace for investing talent. KaChing’s users benefit from the opportunity to prove they’re great investors or find great investors to follow and will soon be able to mirror the trades of their favorite investors in their own brokerage accounts. The company’s investors include Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, CEO of Open Table and former president of PayPal and retired partners from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. For more information, please visit www.kaChing.com or add the kaChing application on Facebook or MySpace.
They recently launched their iPhone application and it simply put my Stock Quote default appliation to shame. With access to real-time quote on 80,000 stocks, and access to over 400,000 investors, it’s more robust than your standard branded stock trading application from E*Trade.
Quant-jocks and Finance Freaks can have yet another tool to understand the financial markets all from the power of their iPhone. But beyond looking at your portfolio and being able to trade stocks, it’s the power and access to research that really sets this application and company apart. The next logical question you might ask, is how good or thorough is the analysis, research and advice?
While it’s true anyone can submit User Generated Drivel and get people to believe in their thoughts and ideas, but those people also are subject a level of transparency by putting their portfolios for everyone to see. Performance, investment rationale and credibility play into the mix. Think of the User Reputation for eBay model combined with the Professional-Level User Generated Content focused on investments, and the Social Networking aspect of Facebook with profiles, wall comments, and linking and kaChing is the end product. By the way, kaChing also has a Facebook application. I have long believed that after the entertainment and lifestyle application on Facebook, the next wave will be a set of “real” tools that allow you to interface with things you do everyday, like online shopping, travel and finance. The same can be said about mobile access to all of this as well. In fact, in September kaChing will begin allowing users to mirror investors who truly stand out from the pack directly in their brokerage accounts (kaChing now uses its proprietary Investing IQ metric to evaluate investors).
Linking to Facebook is good, get your friends and other like minded people talking about common topics. And with Facebook Connect to the iPhone, build it where the people go. Also this seems to be the way for low cost viral marketing.
Need some Investing Ideas? Get some suggestions backed by some real research. It’s like getting a hot stock tip from a filtered, crowd-sourced set of folks. And if you have time, you can check up on all those people backing the recommendation by reading their profile, thoughts and stock picks.
Got something to say about a stock? Why not write something on the wall about it? Again, another way to encourage social behavior around stocks. I can’t wait until there are more and more features that encourage even more interaction. I guess just like sports, people can smack talk each other around stocks.
BTW: You can get the application for your iPhone here.
Related Posts:
