'Hello bank!' by Cortal Consors: Innovative Online Workshops

We are really excited to announce that USEEDS°, a German B2B consultancy firm for user-centric design of interactive applications and associated services, and E27, an innovative agency focused on verticals as different as web, graphic, and product design, opted for Lightstreamer to be rolled out as the streaming engine at the heart of an online workshop environment developed for 'Hello bank!’ by CortalConsors, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas focused on private investment and online trading.

USEEDS° has been invited to provide its expertise as part of the Cortal Consors' effort in repositioning itself as a financial institution. Hello bank! represents a new approach to banking, designed to meet the needs of European clients for a faster, easier, always-on mobile and Internet banking service. Launched on May 2013 in Belgium and Germany and soon also in France and Italy, Hello bank! will aim to attract 1.4 million clients within five years.

Meet Our Partners: Nutcracker

A short interview with Dean Casey, Owner and Director at Nutcracker, a specialist in real-time financial data and information solutions.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Nutcracker is a technology specialist for companies in the financial services sector that require real-time access to financial markets and supporting information, functions and processes. Nutcracker’s service oriented architecture connects to an increasing number of markets and instruments for data feeds and trading and facilitates processing and viewing this data in a transparent and effective way".

 Could you let us know any further information?

 "Our product portfolio is made up of a number of different solutions including

Web Portal Solutions - Nutcracker’s Web Portal Solution allows our customers to offer white-labelled, tailor-made trading and portfolio viewing websites for their retail clients. Features include live market data, stock info and watch list, order routing and technical analysis among the many others.

JTrader - A tiny yet complete trading application, developed as a Java Applet and working on a wide variety of platforms, that provide a full watch list and order routing facilities.

Web TraderPro - A high performance web based professional trading application for professional traders on the road and day traders. It is available for the Internet on desktops, tablets and smart phones and is supported by all browsers.

PortfolioPro - Available in two editions (for Portfolio Managers and Administrators), it provides detailed and summary views of client holdings and transaction data all in one easy to navigate screen. Advanced Modelling, Performance, Compliance, Management Fees, Statements and Reporting are some of the many features available in PortfolioPro".

Meet Our Partners: Web Financial Group

A short interview with Simon Walmsley, Director/Global Sales Team at Web Financial Group, a company that offers solutions for the integration of financial market data and news.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Web Financial Group offers web based solutions for the integration, presentation and promotion of financial market data and related products to the financial community. Our offer comprehends managed content, market data, and real-time data streaming solutions based on http/HTML4 and the emerging WebSockets/HTML5 to multiple web based client technologies, backed by a scalable and flexible multi-vendor, multi-asset, data warehouse platform that allows us to provide a cost effective, end-to-end integrated service. We are currently able to collect and distribute from over 70 integrated data and news sources coming from different vendors, index issuers and stock exchanges, including Thomson Reuters, Teletrader, Bloomberg, Moodys, Fitch, and Reuters among the many others (a comprehensive list is available here)".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"Our company has three distinct business segments - WebFG Technology, WebFG Media & WebFG Network. WebFG has successfully deployed several hundred projects for 100+ global banking groups for over a decade, and is now currently supporting in excess of 70 million clients utilising WebFG's solutions through our white labels. Our customers include Yahoo!, London Stock Exchange, Société Generale and a number of additional top-tier companies from different industries".

Meet Our Customers: Yazino

A short interview with Hussein Chahine, Founder & CEO at Yazino, an innovative social casino gaming company.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Yazino is the home for both social (play-for-fun) and real-money (play-for-money) casino games. We bring casino style games to the mass market in a socially acceptable, friendly, appealing format, combining the best of both iGaming and Social Gaming. Yazino players connect, compete and chat with like-minded people all over the world, live and multiplayer from web, smartphones and tablets".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"Yazino is a London-based company founded in January 2009. Our gaming platform was commercially launched in August 2010 with the ambition to make multiplayer social gaming truly social and universal, with a business model focused on sales of virtual currency (chips). The platform is unique in that it is immensely scalable, and was wired from the start for both social gaming and real money gambling".

Meet Our Customers: Southern Cross Austereo

A short interview with Mike Crothers, Head of Digital Technology at Southern Cross Austereo, one of the most important broadcasting organizations in Australia.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Southern Cross Austereo is a group of entertainment-based media companies. It can reach the 95% of Australians each week via regional free-to-air TV networks, national radio networks, online, mobile and unique one off events. The group operates 80 radio stations and 21 commercial television licenses, and provides more hours of live content per day than any other broadcast media in Australia".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"We had approximately 2 million people visit our main websites in May this year. Our audience is mainly based in Australia with over 90% of people viewing the sites from here".

New Client SDK for OS X Available for Download

Version 1.0 of our new Lightstreamer Client SDK for the OS X platform is now available.

The OS X client library is directly derived from the iOS client library, with which is API compatible. It supports automatic reconnection, automatic resubscription, stream sensing and advanced thread pooling just like the iOS one.

HTTP Streaming with Lightstreamer

Oddmar Sandvik, a veteran consultant and software developer, wrote about his experience with HTTP Streaming using Lightstreamer on his own blog Allekonsulentene, and kindly allowed us to republish this article. Oddmar appreciated Lightstreamer in terms of performance, features, and scalability, even keeping a simple programming model in mission-critical projects.

Oddmar designed, developed, and maintained high frequency/low latency web-based financial trading solutions for DNB for about three years. With more than 1.6 million customers, DNB is Norway's largest financial services group, and one of the largest in the Nordic region in terms of market capitalisation. 

Benchmarking Socket.IO vs. Lightstreamer with Node.js

Because of the increasing popularity of server-side JavaScript, some weeks ago we released a Node module which enables you to write a Lightstreamer adapter that runs inside Node.js. If you are not familiar with Lightstreamer, it is a server that implements bi-directional real-time messaging for mobile, browser-based, and desktop apps. And a Lightstreamer adapter is a custom piece of software you develop to implement your server-side logic (publish messages, receive and elaborate messages, etc.).

Before developing the Node adapter for Lightstreamer, we were wondering if it made any sense... I mean, if you need a real-time server and you want to write your server-side logic in JavaScript, why should you use Lightstreamer with its Node adapter when you can directly use Socket.IO? Well, the answer is twofold: features and performance. In this article, I will focus on performance only. I decided to put the two solutions to the test with a benchmark.

Amazon AMIs for Lightstreamer Moderato Now Available

Cloud services like Amazon AWS are a perfect way to reduce the time and costs associated to exploring, testing, and deploying new technologies. You choose an AMI, launch an EC2 instance and you are done. A brand new machine with all the software you need is ready to use!

The good news is that now we provide free public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with pre-installed Lightstreamer Server, Moderato Edition.

Meet Our Partners: Wirex

A short interview with Alessandro Negro, CTO at Wirex, an Italian software house providing platforms for gaming, betting and gambling operations.
 
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Wirex was founded in 2002 and its products cover the whole spectrum of the iGaming industry with a wide offer of internally developed software, including a players management platform, a live casino, a RNG Casino, and a sports betting platform, all of which are easy to integrate among one another to provide maximum flexibility".

Could you let us know any further information? (Number of customers, covered regions, revenues..)

"Our company has two offices in Italy, each of them with specific specializations, and a fully owned business development unit in Malta. The company reached a significant penetration in the Italian and Maltese markets, is approaching new targets including Greece, Austria, and Spain, and has recently started to consider US, India and Southeast Asia as approachable markets".

Meet Our Customers: Rai

A short interview with Espedito Longo, Project Manager (Technological Services) at Rai, one of the most important broadcasting organizations in Europe.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Rai is the owner of the Italian national public service radio and television broadcasting license, and one of the most important communication firms in Europe. The company has the ability to conceive, design, and develop contents (which include news, movies for cinema and TV, TV formats, and others) to distribute through a wide range of media including Sat TV, DTT, and the Internet. The main objective of Rai Net, fully owned by Rai and founded in June 1999, is to develop and improve the web as a channel for effectively promoting and easily distributing the aforementioned contents to all Italians".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"Rai employs more than 10,000 people, serves over 16 million families as paying users, and owns more than 1,500 branded websites (for entertainment, news, or service) that attract an overall average of 8 million unique visitors a month. The several apps for smartphones and tablets published by Rai recorded more than 900,000 download since their launch dates. In 2011, Nielsen Media Research revealed a significant decrease in annual aggregated advertising revenues (-4%), excluding the web specifically, which recorded +12.3% compared to the previous period. The consolidation of this channel in terms of usage volumes and popularity, and the related capacity to raise growing investments from advertisers, increased the position of the web within the group’s strategy and offer".

Meet Our Customers: IG

A short interview with Ivan Gowan, Head of IT Development at IG, the world’s first financial spread betting company.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Company's core businesses are Contracts for Difference (CFDs) and Spread Betting".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"IG Group (LSE:IGG), headquartered in London, began its activity in 1974 as the world’s first financial spread betting company. In the first half of 2012, IG Group recorded GBP 366.8M (+17.3% from the previous area) in trading revenues and GBP 185.7M in profit before tax. With offices in 14 countries across five continents, we execute more than five million transaction a month for over 140,000 global clients".

Meet Our Customers: OptionMonster

A short interview with Danny Maguire, VP Program Management Office at OptionMonster, a Chicago-based financial company that provides private investors with insight, ideas, and education on the US equities and options market.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"optionMONSTER® is a Chicago-based company that provides stock market insight, option trade ideas, and options education to meet the needs of do-it-yourself investors.
tradeMONSTER™, a powerful online trading platform for active stock, option and futures traders who demand professional grade online trading tools, has been launched in 2008, separated from but affiliated with optionMONSTER®.
stockMONSTER®, founded in 2006, is the third member of the family and helps self-directed investors to read news and analysis in order to invest with confidence".

Lightstreamer's customers dominated the Shares Awards 2012

We are very excited to announce that several Lightstreamer's customers in the financial industry, where our product consolidated its success and value, have been awarded for the coveted Shares Awards 2012 on November 15, 2012 at London's Grovenor House Hotel.

This prestigious UK's financial services gala reached its 11th edition this year, and it's certainly recognized as one of the most widely known and desired prizes as a clear benchmark of excellence and innovation across the industry.

Meet Our Customers: Bùssola do Investidor

A short interview with Frederico Skwara, Founder & CEO at Bùssola do Investidor, a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Bússola do Investidor is a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment. We offer real time quotes, interactive charts for technical analysis, a portfolio manager and contents related to investments, such as news and articles".

On iOS URL Connection Parallelism and Thread Pools

The problem

Did you know iOS has a limit on the number of concurrent NSURLConnections to the same end-point? No? Maybe you should, we discovered it the hard way.

Create a new single-view app project on Xcode and copy the following snippet inside the viewDidLoad event of your view controller:

The New WinRT SDK and Demo

With the introduction of Windows 8, a new application architecture, namely Windows Runtime or WinRT, was also introduced.

WinRT, which has to be used for an application to be published on the Windows Store, is not fully compatible with the old .NET framework. But don't worry, we've got you covered again: with the release of Lightstreamer 5.1 we have made available a brand new WinRT client SDK that can be used to develop Lightstreamer-enabled Windows Store apps.

Our Season's Greetings...

It seems that even Lightstreamer has been affected by the holiday season mood :) 

We would like to wish all the Lightstreamer users a happy holiday season and a prosperous 2013 year!

Thanks for supporting us.

Warm regards,
The Lightstreamer Team

Lightstreamer 5.1 Has Been Released

We are very excited to announce that a new version of Lightstreamer is now publicly available for download.

The new package, tagged Lightstreamer 5.1 Colosseo 20121220, contains updated versions of several components (such as Lightstreamer Server 5.1, Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6.0.1, Lightstreamer iOS Client 1.2, etc.) as well as a brand new client SDK for Windows 8 WinRT.

Meet Our Customers: EFG Hermes

A short interview with Waleed Kamel, Software Development Manager at EFG Hermes, a premier investment bank in the Middle East.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"EFG Hermes is a premier investment bank in the Middle East and is recognized as the market leader in securities brokerage, asset management, investment banking, private equity, and research in this area. EFG Hermes has a huge number of customers, ranging from governments and corporations to institutional and individual investors".