Tags: mobile apps | Offbeat | technology

So what if texting has created a driving hazard. Mercedes-Benz is now offering a finance app from Morningstar in its vehicles.

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Available in more than 20 languages, the Morningstar finance app provides Mercedes-Benz drivers and passengers with global financial information for more than nine million equities, derivatives, bonds, indexes, commodities, and currencies.

"As car systems become even more sophisticated, we're going to see significant expansion of capabilities beyond digital radio and navigation tools," says Jeremy Diamond, head of equity and market data for Morningstar. "Morningstar is at the forefront of apps that allow drivers and passengers to stay connected in their vehicles and enhance the driving experience."

Tags: advisor technology | Portfolio Management Software

Advent Software, which makes portfolio management software (PMS) for RIAs, says it has decided to remain independent, sending its stock tumbling today. It's unusual for a company to issues a press release saying it plans to stay independent when no one has announced intentions to buy it. So what’s really going on here?

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Advent had hired an investment banker recently to explore a sale of the company, Reuters reported six days ago. That sent the stock soaring on March 12 by abnout 10%. 

Advent decided it had to issue a statement before the openning of trading today saying its board of directors decided to remain independent, which knocked the stock for a 12% nosedive before it began to rebound.

"We engaged in a thorough process and carefully considered various alternatives," said Pete Hess, Advent's Chief Executive Officer said in today's press release. "The Board believes we can best maximize shareholder value through pursuing our current strategic plan and our strong balance sheet and competitive position will allow us to continue to pursue strategies we believe will enhance shareholder value."

You can't expect a company with no announced buyer to say anything but that it is planning to remain independent. So today's surprise should not have been a shocker that it should send Advent shares plunging. Yet it's 

By most financial metrics, Advent has done a great job of competing over the past five years. But the company's best days may be behind it. “Many of its customers, including mutual funds, hedge funds and investment advisers, have been reluctant to spend,” Reuters reports today. “The company has embarked on a cost-cutting campaign to improve margins as revenue growth slows.”

Advent is seeing a more difficult environment than ever before in its history because financial technology changes so rapidly. With a $1.4 billion market cap, Advent is a big company in the portfolio accounting software business, and big companies in this space are finding it difficult to compete. Unburdened by legacy databases, an entirely new crop of competitors with better features surfaces every three years.

Meanwhile, investment advisors can do more on their own without Advent. Why do they need Advent to create custom performance reports or handle of a slew of tech tasks that their own staff should be able to handle? In these days of tight budgets, companies demand PMS apps with lower costs that they can manage on their own.

Advent’s most profitable business comes from hedge funds and institutions. A4A readers—RIAs serving the private wealth —only become good clients for Advent if they’re managing at least $200 million, and advisors managing less than that amount. RIAs still using Advent’s old Axys performance reporting system—and there are hundreds of firms like that—might consider Advent’s Black Diamond platform, which Advent purchased several years ago. However, many Axys users are looking for less expensive alternatives than Black Diamond. For these RIAs, today’s report is bad news.

In a cost-cutting environment, Advent is unlikely to compete for the business of small RIAs who require more support to make performance reporting work right and who are not willing to pay much for consulting. Advent’s competitors, small portfolio management software companies that are hungry, are simply too difficult for Advent to compete against at the low end of the RIA market. Small portfolio management software vendors can carve out a niche of working with small RIAs and have a very successful small private business, which will keep Advent from innovating and aggressively pricing a product to gain market share with small RIAs.
 

Google announced earlier this week that it was killing Reader, its RSS feed reader, triggering an avalanche of hateful posts across the Web. You have until July 1, 2013 to find a replacement.

For advisors relying on Google Reader, its death sentence is triggering great anxiety about what to replace it with. But you really don’t need to worry. Plenty of replacements are available and they will be better than Google Reader.

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For the uninitiated, Google Reader aggregates news you are care about. It’s a personalized news feed. If you want to track all the news about “investment fiduciaries,” for instance, you would create an Alert in Google and every time a news item is published using the term “investment fiduciaries,” you can receive it via email, RSS feed, or in Google Reader. Google didn’t invent RSS, but Reader popularized its use by making it easy to aggregate your RSS feeds when it introduced Reader in 2006.

In a blog post announcing the death of Reader, Google says its two simple reasons explain its motivation: “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products,” Google says. “We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”

Some speculate that the real motive is to push more users toward Google Plus, which has some capabilities similar to Reader. My guess is that Google knows that that feed readers will need to continue to evolve and that small competitors will do a better job. I spent the past couple of days looking for a replacement, which taught me a few things.

First, not all feed readers are the same. I tried out one feed reader that annoyingly deleted feeds of stories if I did not read them after browsing through them, for instance. So you really have to watch out for bells and whistles. In fact, some feed readers are still desktop-based and you should rule those out right away, since any feed reader must be useable on a tablet or phone.

More importantly, I discovered that some feed readers are far better than Google Reader. A new generation of readers scans your tweets, Facebook content, and Google Reader feeds and then aggregates your news. That’s a huge improvement and could save you the trouble of having to configure or import your Google Reader feeds into other apps.

But the other thing I learned was feed readers suffer from the same problem as the rest of the Web. They most all point you to the same news sites. For instance, in aggregating news about Google Reader’s demise, all of the news aggregators pointed me to the same group of replacements for Google Reader, like Feedly or NetVibes.

It’s really difficult to find quality information, where a human being goes to six or 10 feed readers and assesses their capabilities and writes a brief but detailed analysis of each one and makes a suggestion about one or two that are best for different types of users. Point is, news aggregation does not replace reporting and analysis.

We are all being bombarded by ideas from apps that automate information gathering but lack the judgment of experts. It took me hour to read through dozens of posts about Google Reader alternatives to make a suggestion for a replacement to Google Reader.

Moreover, the app that wound up on top is not mentioned in any of the posts that are being aggregated. I had to follow a series of links that I cannot even retrace at this point to come to the conclusion that the coolest app to replace Google Reader is Prismatic.

Keep in mind that Google Reader’s demise is going to trigger a flood of innovation from replacement wannabes, and that my loyalty to Prismatic may not be long lasting. But this seems like a great alternative.

Prismatic could not be simpler. You select Facebook, Google, or Twitter as the social medium on which it will base your personalized news feeds.

Prismatic then asks you go give it permission to access your news stream on your social network.

Finally, it analyzes your likes and interests and aggregates your personal news stream. It’s brilliant.

 Correction: An earliker version of this article incorrectly said you have until Julky 31, 2013 to replace Google Reader. You have until July 1.

Tags: cyber attack | cyber warefare

The future battlefield for war between countries could be cyberspace.  Cyber security threats against the United States are growing and concerns are rising about hacking attacks originating from China.

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Recently several big companies in United States have had their systems hacked by cyber intruders from out of the country.  In February a report was released by a private security firm stating that a unit in the Chinese military was responsible for hacking more than 140 businesses, most of which were in the United States.  China has denied these allegations saying there is no evidence.    

White House national security adviser Tom Donilon is requesting Beijing recognize the severity of cyber-attack problem, take serious steps to address it and establish guidelines of acceptable norms in the digital world.

Whether China is behind the recent cyber-attacks or not, one thing is clear, there is a steady incline in cyber security threats and the United States needs to be ready.  Our president has highlighted how vulnerable our financial institutions, power grid and air traffic control systems are to an attack.  Any cyber-attack on the United States can cost billions of dollars and lead to stolen industry secrets, which are vital to innovation and economic growth.

If even the United States isn’t fully prepared for cyber warfare are you sure you are?

To read more:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/net-us-usa-obama-cyber-idUSBRE92C0JN20130313

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/11/17273068-cybersecurity-threatens-us-china-relationship-white-house-official-says?lite>1=43001

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030603/white-house-warns-china-to-crack-down-on-cyberattacks.html