NASDAQ Answers powered by TickerHound

I'm very excited to announce that we (TickerHound.com) just launched our first major partnership: The NASDAQ OMX Group (NDAQ).

On www.nasdaq.com you can now find TickerHound's Q&A widgets sprinkled all over the site. To go directly to the co-branded application we built for them: http://answers.nasdaq.com.

This is a major milestone for the TickerHound team. We came a long way since we launched TickerHound a little over a year ago: Many lines of code had been written AND rewritten; Architectures had been rearchitected; Team grew 50% in size.

Press release is below:

NEW YORK, Apr. 9, 2009 -- TickerHound.com and the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today introduced NASDAQ Answers on Nasdaq.com. This new, real-time Question & Answers platform provides Nasdaq.com users with unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor.

“We’re very excited that NASDAQ, which has a long history of technological innovation in finance, has chosen TickerHound as one of its first social media offerings,” said Wayne Mulligan, TickerHound’s CEO. “NASDAQ’s implementation of TickerHound is a strong endorsement of our brand. We welcome Nasdaq.com’s support in fulfilling our mission of educating and empowering individual investors.”

"NASDAQ Answers provides an intuitive way for individual investors to ask questions and get answers from other users," said Bruce Hashim, Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Interactive Services. "TickerHound made it easy to integrate their robust software suite and we’re confident these social media features will significantly improve the NASDAQ.com user experience."

Now live on Nasdaq.com, Nasdaq Answers allows users to freely browse questions and answers across a variety of investment-related categories. Free registration with a valid email address is required for users to post or respond to questions. Visit http://answers.nasdaq.com to participate in the discussion.

For more information on NASDAQ Answers, visit http://answers.nasdaq.com.

About TickerHound:

TickerHound is a community-powered education website for individual investors. Launched in 2007 the company has focused on creating a scalable and extensible Q&A platform and partnering with top-tier financial media brands. TickerHound’s goal is to provide unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor. TickerHound provides its partners with a turnkey solution that will allow them to create, customize and quickly deploy their very own Q&A Community. The company plans to announce more white-label community-powered education features on other websites in the near future. For more information, visit www.tickerhound.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

The matters described herein contain forward-looking statements that are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about NASDAQ Market Pathfinders and NASDAQ OMX Group's other products and offerings. We caution that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond NASDAQ OMX Group's control. These factors include, but are not limited to factors detailed in NASDAQ OMX Group's annual report on Form 10-K, and periodic reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to release any revisions to any forward-looking statements.
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Happy Birthday TickerHound!

It's been a year since we officially launched TickerHound!
It's been a year of sleepless nights, antisocial weekends and caffeine induced coding sessions.
It was/still is a hell of a ride and I love (almost) every single moment of it. This is by no means the end - far from it! Like Wayne said: "we're just getting started!"

Here are some memories, lessons, highlights:

• Outsourced Indian firm: getting the project back from them with most of the code - a couple thousand lines or so - in ONE file. We had to take it apart and pretty much redo the whole thing from the ground up.
• The Crash: the site crashed 15 minutes into the launch. We should have cached like I suggested; I should have stepped up and made us cache. We've gone a LONG way since then. We're now on an auto-scaling architecture at RightScale, leveraging Amazon Web Services (EC2/S3/SQS).
  
• Workspace: our apartments to Starbucks to SunShine Suites. Upgrades at SunShine: the small dark cubicle space (4th floor) to the slightly bigger, brighter but noisier and smellier cubicle space (6th floor) and finally to the nice 3 cubicle space by the window.
• Hired Help: I want to thank everyone who's pitched in and contributed. Good or bad, we wouldn't be here without you.
• Lou: Our third official hire. With him on board, we took TickerHound to the next level. The first time Lou was meeting us, he was late. He was late because he missed the bus. He missed the bus because he passed out on top of a sugar silo in Montreal the night before.
• TickerHound Members: we definitely wouldn't be here without you. You ARE TickerHound. Thank You!
• Software: I no longer get laughed at by the tech community for using DreamWeaver. I'm usually using Eclipse and sometimes VI.
• Hardware: I still get laughed at for having my variety of gadgets: curved keyboard, logitech revolution mice, laptop coolers, headphones, monitors. At the center of it all: my MacBook Pro - still trucking!
• Wayne: Thanks for fishing me out of the menial 9-5 job (no disrespect to my last job, nine to five business casual is just not my thing). It's the most fun I've had working. There's no other way to do it. "It's your world squirrel - I'm just trying to get a nut"

m'sk m'sk m'ks

Florida in December

TickerHound (Wayne, Lou and me) are in South Florida for two weeks to do meetings.


We got a pimping condo: big kitchen, hot tub, hd flat screen, high speed internet... the works. The TickerHound mobile (rental car)... not so much. It's a Dodge Magnum (I didn't want to drive the Celine Dion car; Pacifica).


I'm not really complaining considering I took this picture when it was about 20 degrees in New York (yes, I did check the weather, just so I can rub it in my friends' faces)


Dinner impossible night: I had to make food for 5 people but only had enough material for 3. Starter: Almond Crusted Goat Cheese on Salad of Arugula. Main: Rigatoni with Meat Sauce


Used everything on hand. Added an appetizer and used white bread crumbs and cheap wine to stretch the sauce.


Lou and I grabbed our cameras and drove down to South Beach for a day trip.


Seriously, the following conversation occured right before me seeing that...
Me: This beach is frickin empty! Where are the topless chicks?
Lou: I don't know what they're doing over there but we should be part of that action.


One more with boobies


Obligatory shot of palm tree and coconuts


This guy loves the water.


We sat at a cafe type thing along Ocean Ave. and sucked down giant fruity frozen drinks while waiting Chris to drive down for dinner.

We had dinner at Nemo (sorry, didn't bring the camera with me so no pictures). Nemo had one of the best Chilean Sea Bass I've ever had: crisp on the outside, perfectly cooked all over, great sauce. After dinner Chris took us to The Florida Room in the basement of the Delano hotel to check out the live band. The Fox Brothers Band was playing some wicked latin jazz.

we're numero uno!

It's bound to happen. We got our first TickerHound bashing.

Check out the article here:
The Marching of the Web 2.0 Lemmings? by Jim Fisher, IdeaStar Inc.

At least we're number one on the list! FTW1!!

"The educators can be either an expert or a crackpot" - yes, so can authors making lists about "web 2.0 lemmings".

IdeaStar should really spend more time bringing their technology up to par and less time bashing others. A quick look at the code behind IdeaStar shows that they use Dreamweaver (as illustrated by the eck... MM_preloadImages) and gasp! TABLES! There's also a bunch of ugly javascript all over the place that's super bad for SEO (search engine optimization). What kind of self respecting web design / development / consulting firm still use tables?! seriously?

Well, like my friend Chris said... "this guy sounds like a shmuck in the other reviews that it actually makes it sound like worth checking out all these sites."

Hey Mr. Jim Fisher, 1997 called and want their Dreamweaver 3.0 HTML back!

One more thing, at least we made it to Mashable.

Widgets - LIVE!

Our widgets are up on our partner's site: OptionsZone.com!!!

The first one (Question of The Day) pulls questions their experts answered.
The second one (Knowledge Share) displays a question they ask and collects answers from users.

TickerHound Update

We released a bunch of features that we've been working on for the past few weeks early this morning - after a late night coding and bug hunting fixing session.

These features are under the Tools umbrella:
Dictionary - look up 6000+ stock related terms (from investorwords.com)
Stocks - look up stock quotes, add stocks to questions (from quotemedia.com), done with Eric and Burak's help
People Search - look up users
Articles - this isn't new but we re-did some of the backend
New Search - search everything! with AJAX autocomplete!

Also, with the Monique's help (she knows how to make things pretty), we shift a couple of things around to make the site much easier to use and aesthetically pleasing. The process was brutal - Monique and Wayne made me shift pixels for hours! PIXELS!! HOURS!!

It feels like the battle is won but the war is not over... damn you IE6! I should be doing victory laps right now, not worrying about how fixes and hacks. Where do we send Microsoft the invoice for the hours we spent fixing their crappy browser?

All in all, I'm pretty proud of our accomplishments. I hate it and love it every time we release features.

TickerHound Gets Reviewed on Mashable!

Financial Q&A Service TickerHound Launches

http://mashable.com/2008/05/01/tickerhound/

"Here’s what it comes down to. It’s really straightforward, actually. If you enjoy the question/answer concept popularized by Yahoo, among other online forces, TickerHound can act as a more pure, for focused engine for financial conversation."

Google Custom Search Engine - Part 2: What's What is

Part 2: What's What is

Back in part 1, I ended with Wayne mentioning "mad bugs". Since it was only a text message and not a phone call, I still had time to jump on the bus and head down to the office.
I need to get into the nature of our site and our search strategy before I can get into the bugs. You'll understand why after the explanation.
Tickerhound.com is a Question and Answer site based on finance questions. We launched with a couple of thousands of questions AND answers from one of our partners, Investorwords.com (they're the questions asked and answered by StaffQuestion and StaffAnswer. The Answers also give credit to Investorwords.com ).
This way, the site will have a wealth of information and be more useful for the first wave of users at launch.

The bug: when users type in "what's" (apostrophe s) as part of the question, questions that start with "what is" doesn't show up in the results. As you can imagine, a lot of the questions start with "what is" - no good.

Getting there: After more testing and probing, Wayne the MasterBeta.... tester, found than using "what is" in the query will pick up questions with "what's".
We did more testing with "what is" as the baseline for good results.
I tried doing "what's OR what is" then the question as a query but got bad results.
The next one I tried was both the "what's" and "what is" version of the question, like "what's blah blah OR what is blah blah". It generated the same result as just using the "what is".

Solution: convert all questions that starts with "what's" to "what is" before sending the query to google.

Google Custom Search Engine (Business Edition)

Part 1: The Set Up
We decided to use google's custom search engine to do the search for our "similar questions" feature and for our regular search feature a while back. Fulltext search just wasn't cutting it. Who does better search than google right?

I finally got around implementing it last week.
It was a fairly painless process:

1. sign up and pay (Wayne took care of this part)
2. grab the URL from the admin panel page.
   the URL is only available to the admin or the person who paid.
   adding me as a contributor didn't work and you can't add any additional admins.
   
3. read the doc. this took me a while to find for some reason:
   http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/resultsxml.html
   it seems the doc for the google application is similar but NOT the same as there are more functions that can be used (like meta data filtering) in the application.
   
4. stick the URL in my existing search object, in a new function:
1. send queries to google
   
2. get xml back
3. parse and style xml
4. display results
   

It returns pretty good results, comparing to the old fulltext search.
There was a lag time of about 24-48 hours (this still needs more testing, but that's the general consensus on the interweb). New questions do not come up in the results. That's ok though because the older questions usually have more answers. Who wants to look at questions with no answers?

Everything was peachy then I get one text early next morning from Wayne telling me there are "mad bugs". uh oh.

to be continued...