Cake Financial has just launched a Facebook application. You can take your investment knowledge to your Facebook friends, share your investment portfolio and gain from the collective knowledge of all your b-school college friends. The important information, like your net worth, isn’t revealed, so it’s rather understood that this application works quite similarly to the Cake Financial stand-alone network.

This move makes Cake Financial one of the first to take such an expanded approach to its investment and financial networking services, following along the same path as most other collaborative networks out there. With the benefit of having the wisdom of the crowds, Cake Financial is aiming to be present wherever its users are, in a rather integrated manner. It’s somewhat similar (albeit in reverse order) to what LendinClub has done, in its enabling of users to look to their trusted network of friends and acquaintances for financial purposes. While LendingClub doesn’t deal in the sharing of personal portfolios, it’s easy to see the parallels.

Cake Financial is shifting its networking tools from that of anonymity within the larger confines of its stand-alone network to the existing social graph you already have on Facebook. Is that more beneficial than seeing the shared knowledge from those that have proven themselves on Cake Financial? That really depends on who your friends are. Surely the combined information of such data will be more helpful than harmful. Hopefully the newsfeed alerts for updates made to your Cake Financial account won’t get too annoying for your friends!

– Mashable.com

Tags: Cake

TechCrunch writes: Of all the apps on Facebook, here is one that might actually make you money—depending on how smart your friends are. Cake Financial, a social finance site that lets you track and share the performance of your actual brokerage accounts, just launched its Facebook app. The app lets you compare your real stock-picking prowess to that of other Facebook members who install it on their profile pages. These are not fantasy portfolios. They show your actual returns in percentage terms (no dollar amounts are revealed), and let you compare your returns with that of your friends across brokerage accounts. Every time you or a friend makes a trade, it shows up in your feed. Talk about timely information.Cake Financial launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year. Since then, nearly 10,000 members have signed up who track portfolios collectively worth about $1 billion. CEO Steve Carpenter hopes that Facebook will help Cake Financial grow faster.

The potential power behind Cake—as with other social finance sites like Covester, SocialPicks, and Motley Fool CAPS—is the ability to follow the best stock pickers no matter who they are (amateur or pro). Carpenter has plans to create exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that mimic the portfolios of each of the top five percent members on Cake. It would be a personal ETF. He is still working through the details. But imagine if one of your friends on Facebook was in that elite group and you could automatically start trading alongside him. Would you do it?

Tags: Cake

Late last night I returned home from the Groovy/Grails Experience (2GX) in Reston, VA.  I met many wonderful people and learned tons of new things, which I’m sure will spawn blog posts over the next few weeks.

Just to get started, though, I thought I’d mention a few random observations from the conference.

1. Buy Scott Davis’s Groovy Recipes book!
2. All of the major players I met from the Groovy and Grails projects (Dierk Koenig, Graeme Rocher, Jeff Brown, Jason Rudoph, and many others) were uniformly friendly and encouraging.  Everyone is so easy to talk to and so welcoming of others.  I’m more convinced than ever that Groovy and Grails are going to be huge in the marketplace.
3. Glen Smith, on the other hand, is certifiably insane.  And I mean that in the nicest possible way. :)  My biggest disappointment at the conference (other than bizarrely forgetting to bring my copy of DGG to get autographed) was that Glenn’s “UI Extreme Makeover” talk was so full I was unable to find a seat.  I had to settle for yet another talk by Scott Davis instead (the horror, the horror).
4. Apparently I’m not the only person having a long-term love affair with GinA.
5. Oh, and buy Groovy Recipes!  It’s now available!
6. Dierk Koenig gave a talk entitled “7 Groovy Usage Patterns for Java Projects.”  In retrospect, that may have been the most important talk I attended.  He showed all sorts of ways to apply Groovy to your projects, and gave each category a clever name.  My favorite was “house elf” scripts, defined as programs that “delegate the housework,” i.e., do the everyday background work for you.  I’m going to start collecting my own Groovy programs into his categories.  I really hope he finds a place to publish that presentation, or some article based on it.
7. Jason Rudolph’s Refactotum presentation (basically a how-to on ways to participate in open source projects) got off to a slow start, but finished very strong.  I’ve never actually contributed to an open source project, but now that I know how, I’m sure I’ll be doing so in the future.  I can write test cases at least, even when I’m otherwise busy.  I’m equally sure I’ll mention something about that here.
8. Don’t forget to buy Groovy Recipes!  Don’t let the fact that Scott included a quote from me in it dissuade you.

I see that I’ve left out almost everything.  I wish I could have attended twice as many talks.  I guess I’ll just have to go back next year, too.

– Ken Kousen

Tags: Groovy Grails

“The market right now is going through one of these periodic events that happens twice a decade, where something fundamental changes and it changes the whole landscape of the market and its opportunities and risk for years to come,” said Kam.

He says the mortgage meltdown, and its effect on financials in particular, has dragged down other sectors as investors panicked and pulled out of the markets. Since those sectors are now undervalued, he sees them as buying opportunities. Kam’s favorite sectors are healthcare, energy, commodities, and emerging markets.

“I would put pharmaceuticals at the top of the list, particlarly biotech companies that have late-stage drugs,” Kam said.

Keep in mind these are specific managers opinions, both agree though that this is a good time to look for value and buy.

Tags: Marketocracy

Cheaper fares and trip planning tools - these sites have it all

Tired of searching far and wide for the best deals and coming up empty handed? Frustrated with the state of affairs on the biggy booking engines. Have any of them had an original offer in the past 5 years?

Click on over to our new favorite airline sites and fulfill your travel needs - and desires!

OrbitzTLC: A veteran in the travel industry, Orbitz wows us with real-time updates from fellow travelers who text-message security line-ups, cab queues and traffic jams from their cell phones. The color-coded map lets you zero in quickly on arrival and departure details.

ExpertFlyer: Flight is cancelled and already behind the 8-ball with your boss? Get the real-time scoop on more than 100 carriers that may rescue your schedule and your job. (Basic subscription: $4.99/month)

Yapta: Keep track of flare fluctuations before and after booking your flight. If you booked directly with the airline (often the cheapest way to book) you may be eligible for refund of cash and/or credits.

Tripology: An airline matchmaker service that pairs your interests, wants and needs with a travel agent picked from a pool of more than 6,000 global experts. Fill out the questionnaire and get personalized service from a real person who can answer your questions and deliver the kind of travel you’re looking for.

Tripit: Organize everything from flight and dinner reservations at OpenTable to adding in your trip-specific details like SeatGuru suggestions, weather reports and Google Maps. You email your itinerary and the information is then loaded onto a password-protected website for simple, paperless organization.

Mommondo: When price is more important than a direct flight, this Denmark-based aggregator quickly combs through 450 sites (including major booking engines, no-frills airlines and national carriers) to get you the best price.

MileMaven: Max out your airmiles by searching limited-time offers specifically for those bonus miles. Search through thousands of carriers, routes, airlines, cities or frequent flyer programs.

Tags: Yapta

Joshua Lipton, data from Marketocracy 02.20.08, 11:20 AM ETThe market has indicated that the future for bond insurers looks bleak.

Industry players like MBIA, Ambac Financial Group and Financial Guaranty Insurance used to concentrate exclusively on insuring municipal issues. But, beginning a few years ago, these companies jumped into insuring structured products like collateralized debt obligations.

These products, often made up of bundled subprime mortgages, declined sharply in value as the number of mortgages in default jumped in the past year. Bond insurers could be on the hook for far more claims than anticipated, thanks to the continued deterioration in the mortgage market.

In Pictures: 10 Guru Buys And Sells

The urgency to fix bond insurers and to preserve pristine credit ratings is mounting. At the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing last week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said he expected a resolution in the next three to five days, lest regulators would have to step in. (See “Good Back, Bad Book.”)

The stocks of these bond insurers have now been boot-stomped by nervous stock market investors. In the past 12 months, MBIA and Ambac have both dropped more than 80%.

But the sell-off in bond insurers could present opportunities for nimble investors who are willing to tolerate a high degree of risk. The best-performing online investors, Marketocracy’s M100, are now cherry-picking the sector for money-making prospects.

One bond insurer the M100 now like: Bermuda-based Assured Guaranty.

Analysts say that the company, which has a market capitalization of about $1.85 billion, isn’t completely immune to the problems plaguing the mortgage industry. Assured has exposure to Alt-A and home equity loan securities backed by residential mortgages. Analysts note that both segments of the housing market will experience above-average default rates.

But fans of the stock point out that Assured is one of the few bond insurers that refused to insure collateralized debt obligations of asset-backed securities. And the company’s AAA rating is intact, which means the company can write more business at better pricing.

Assured has continued to grow, expanding into international markets. The company recently opened offices in London and continental Europe.

Last week, Assured announced a dividend hike of 13%. The insurer will pay a dividend of 4.5 cents on March 17 to shareholders of record at Feb. 29’s closing bell. The previous quarter’s dividend was 4 cents per share.

Assured is inexpensive in relation to its expected growth, with a price-to-earnings growth ratio of 0.63. In the past year, the stock has dropped more than 17%. The M100 decided it was time to carve out a position.

In Pictures: 10 Guru Buys And Sells

The M100 have also decided to buy Volcano, a medical device maker. The company makes intravascular ultrasound products designed to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of coronary and peripheral vascular diseases.

Last week, Volcano said it swung to a fourth-quarter loss because of a December charge from its buyout of a company called CardioSpectra. Volcano recorded a loss of $23.74 million, or 53 cents per share, versus a profit of $1.43 million, or 4 cents per share, for the year-ago period. Excluding $26.2 million in buyout charges, the company earned 5 cents per share.

Revenue jumped 35% to $40 million, a record quarter for the company.

But more important for the Street is Volcano’s prospects. The company said it expects much higher revenue in 2008–between $158 million and $162 million. That’s a sizable increase of about 21% to 24% over 2007. Volcano said it expects a loss of between 2 and 4 cents per share. Excluding a stock-based compensation expense of about $10.2 million, the company forecasts a net income of 16 cents to 18 cents per share.

Those revenue projections beat the Street’s initial estimates, though analysts have since revised their projections. They’re now expecting the company to post a loss of 1 cent per share on $160.6 million in revenue. At the Feb. 15 close of $13.34, Volcano trades at 60.64 times the earnings per share estimates for 2009. But it’s growing at close to 67%.

On the sell side, the gurus decided to bail on British stocks, selling the iShares MSCI United Kingdom Index (amex: EWU). The M100 might have been spooked out of the exchange-traded fund by the Bank of England’s much-awaited quarterly inflation report, which warned that consumer price inflation could rise above a 3% annual rate in the near term.

If annual inflation rises above 3%, the Bank of England’s governor, Mervyn King, has to write a letter to the head of the Treasury, Alistair Darling, explaining why it is 1% above target. Since the central bank became independent 11 years ago, this has only happened once. The focus on inflation diminishes chances for the Bank of England to take a more aggressive approach to cutting rates. The FTSE 100, an index of blue chip stocks on the London Stock Exchange, is down about 8% year-to-date.

Perhaps because of fears of an oncoming recession, the gurus got out of Illinois Tool Works, which produces plastic and metal components. Last week, the company reiterated its guidance for full-year earnings from continuing operations. ITW anticipates a 2008 profit between $3.47 and $3.60 per share and assumes revenue growth in the 6% to 10% range. The consensus analyst forecast for net income in 2008 calls for $3.56 per share.

Fans of the company point to its disciplined acquisition strategy, consistently high profitability and copious free cash-flow generation.

ITW bears argue that a decline in new housing starts and weakness from automakers are pressuring North American results. Analysts also point out that while a strong European economy has so far countered the firm’s falling sales in North America, some European markets are also now starting to exhibit signs of slowdown.

In Pictures: 10 Guru Buys & Sells

Guru Buys

Assured Guaranty

Volcano

Wonder Auto Technology

Cynosure

Curtiss Wright

Guru Sells

iShares MSCI United Kingdom Index

Illinois Tool Works

Employers Holdings

IAC/InterActiveCorp

Orion Energy Systems

Marketocracy.com tracks more than 70,000 online stock portfolios. Of those, the top 100 performing portfolios, the M100, are used to create a real-life mutual fund, the Masters 100 Fund, which is managed by founder Ken Kam. Each week, Guru Picks analyzes the buys and sells of the M100. Click here for more information about Marketocracy.com and its money-management services.

Tags: Marketocracy

Christopher Judd writes:

Groovy and Grails are really starting to get some well deserved attention especially after the release of Grails 1.0. Grails has a chance of being a game changing technology. For example one of the things Grails does is make Spring and Hibernate web development really easy and for the most part makes those frameworks transparent. As evidence of the transparency, you can read Graeme Rocher, Grails project lead, blog entry about his experience at the Spring Experience conference. Graeme discovered that most people did not realize Grails had anything to do with Spring.

Could Grails cause Spring and Hibernate to become the BASF of the Java community and adopt the tag line of “We don’t make a lot of the products you develop with. We make a lot of the products you develop with better”. It is hard to tell at this point. But it is probably a good idea for the companies offering Spring and/or Hibernate services to take a hard look at Grails and consider providing Grails services as well.

Tags: Groovy Grails, SpringSource

Steven Devijver writes a bold article on DZone, saying that Groovy will replace Java as the dominant language. You would expect Graeme Rocher of G2One, the company created to shepherd Groovy and Grails, to be rah-rah about this, and violently agree. But his response is very tempered and level-headed, as he provides reasons for why that will likely not happen. I summarize here.

Steven’s reasons for why the Java language won’t remain the dominant language:

• The Java language community is sinking into a deep crisis over change. There’s the row over whether or not closures have to be added to the Java language, and which proposal should be selected. This reminds me of Groovy’s history. With each change to the Java language tool vendors have to adapt with it. This is a slow process, and the closure proposals I’ve seen are not nearly as powerful as closures in other languages, including Groovy. Adding this kind of features can happen a couple of times. The pressure to consolidate will however increase. By the time this happens we’re 2011. The Java language will have new features at the expense of several massive investments by many parties who will grow increasingly impatient.
• Java language changes are driven by Sun and marketing. C# gets annotations, Java need to have annotations. C# gets closures, Java needs to have closures. See the pattern? This does not serve the Java user community. Actually, we’re completely shut out.
• The Java language will be forked. As some people will grow more frustrated with the way the Java language is managed there’s a very real possibility that the Java language will be forked, even if it’s only for the sake of creating prototypes or making a point. This may be conceived as dangerous or at least make some people nervous, re-enforcing the point for the design-by-committee culture even more.
• Static typing is a great feature and every object-oriented language needs it. It’s not so great when there is no alternative. For example, it’s unlikely that new methods will be added to the java.util.Collection interface to support closures. For Groovy dealing with new methods on java.util.Collection would be a non-issue. This feeling of being stuck with certain types will increase the sentiment that the Java language may be at a dead end.

Steven’s reasons for why Groovy should become everybody’s favorite, even though Sun officially supports JRuby:

• Sun supports Groovy too. Some of their employees are working hard on the Groovy plugin for the NetBeans IDE.
• Of Groovy, JRuby, Scala it is Groovy that comes closest to the original Java syntax.
• Java should always have been a dynamic language. Groovy gives us a glimpse of what the Java language could have been.
• IDE support for Groovy will be very impressive in one year from now or less, making its integration into projects much more likely.
• Dynamic languages can have very good IDE support like type detection and code completion. If Visual Studio can have excellent integration for F# then the same is possible for JRuby and Groovy as well. In fact, the NetBeans IDE plugin for JRuby is already impressive.
• Groovy offers joint Java compilation, meaning that .java and .groovy files get compiled at the same time. Java classes can thus extend Groovy classes without a glitch.
• As Groovy IDE support improves - which is already decent for IntelliJ - more and more frameworks for Java will be written - at least in part - in Groovy. This is already happening. Don’t expect the same to happen for JRuby. It could happen for Scala.
• Two to three years from now the performance of dynamic languages like JRuby and Groovy will be equivalent to pure Java code.
• Grails 1.0 is a huge step for the Grails and Groovy communities, but it’s a small step compared to what’s ahead of us. Both in terms of Grails and in terms of new ideas.
• As Groovy starts to play an increasing role in software development an increasing number of developers will be touched. Think Grails, think easyb, think of some novel new use of Groovy yourself.
• There’s genuine interest in Groovy and Grails, and it’s growing. Now is our moment to seize these opportunities and make it easier for people to start using Groovy. The trend is with us, let’s make it stronger.

Steven concludes:

It’s going to be a very interesting 2 years for Groovy and Grails. The moment is ours and the demise of the Java language has to be Groovy’s stepping stone.

Graeme’s tempered responses:

Graeme Rocher replied on Wed, 2008/02/13 - 7:37am

Interesting article, but as project lead of Grails and Groovy core committer, I don’t agree with you

I anticipate Groovy will enter the top 10 languages world wide next year and will be closing in on the top 5 at the end of 2010, but replace? no.

Groovy (and Grails) is designed from the ground up to be used in conjunction with Java, it is not a binary choice. You use Groovy where it makes sense and Java when it makes sense.

Each language has their respective strengths. I see a future where Groovy is used more and more for various aspect of software development on the JVM where it makes sense. Sometimes you might find an entire Grails application written in Groovy without a line of Java, but the majority of cases I believe will see them used together.

Tags: Groovy Grails

We’ve seen social editing, social networking, social news, social bookmarking, and even social music take off. Now a social shock to the system is coming to a market usually dominated by insiders and experts: the finance industry.

Online trading brokerages have existed since E*Trade pioneered the market in the early ’90s, but now an onslaught of entrepreneurs, new media experts, and financial analysts are once again rebelling against the traditional investing model on Wall Street. They want to open the valves of information to those of us who aren’t experts.

It’s a potentially lucrative field, and a number of key players were strutting their stuff at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference in New York City last week.

Inspired by that conference, this survey of the space compares the main players and outlines their user bases and business models. And while I won’t answer the question of whether you can and should trust your money to the ‘crowd wisdom’ model, I’ll try to answer questions that are quantifiable: who are these companies, how much money did they raise, and how do they plan to make money?

Covestor is a social investing community that links your online portfolio to a real brokerage account, analyzes the data, and lets users follow investors (who Covestor calls “fund managers”).

Covester caters to two types of users: investors and fund managers. Fund managers — who may be anything from professinal investors (who make up 20 percent of the site) to hobby investors — import data from their actual real-life portfolios (from any of 18 online stock brokerages) onto the site so that other users can watch their investments. Covestor performs analytics on each of the fund managers. Investors can then browse fund managers by type of investments that a manager makes and how risky those investments tend to be.

Covestor’s analytics creates tables comparing 150 different dimensions that investors can search. Investors can also track their performance and activity against other users, fund managers, and indices and can recieve email updates when a fund manager they follow makes a change to his or her portfolio.

CEO Richard Tahta says Covestor plans to bring a level of trust and real-world verification to social investing, like what you find on social network Facebook. He says he plans to extend the site to let users follow fund manager activity in real time and allow buy/sell orders to be sent directly to a user’s brokerage account. In that sense, Tahta’s goal is to compete with portfolio management services from UBS or Goldman Sachs. (Note: Covestor’s operations chief previously ran the data and portfolio analysis systems at Goldman Sachs.)

To take care of users’ research needs, Covestor has partnered with financial news sites Seeking Alpha and Investopedia, as well as a major financial content provider that Tahta declined to name. Although its current audience is mainly U.S.-based, Covestor has users in more than 30 countries. It only analyzes trades in long, short and equity markets, and doesn’t allow trades on options or derivatives.

Right now, Covestor doesn’t have any revenue, but it plans to let fund managers earn revenue by charging minimal fees to the investors who follow them, just as real fund and hedge fund managers do, while the company will keep a portion for itself.

The company has received two rounds of funding from undisclosed investors.

Location: London, UK and New York City
Number of employees: Undisclosed
Funding: Undisclosed funding from Independent News and Media PLC
Business Model: Company takes percentage of fees that fund managers earn from other users
Profitable: No
Money invested through platform: $1 Billion, according to Tahta.

Steve Carpenter, chief executive of Cake Financial (who we covered at launch in September), wants his company to become the largest social network for investing. The idea is to let users who own the same stock talk about their common investments. In fact, the company has a stealth application in development that may hit a major social network soon.

Cake not only lets users import data from multiple brokerage accounts, but also gives users access to historical portfolio data and lets them view historical returns on investment from that data — something most brokerage accounts won’t do, Carpenter says. Cake then ranks users and lets other users follow their future investments. Cake’s top users feature an annual historical return of 28 percent, dating back to 2002.

To make money, Cake plans to sell the habits of its top users to institutional investors, who, Carpenter says, have already approached him. All the information on the specific value of portfolios and the number of shares is confidential because Cake’s metrics are based on percentages of stock portfolios, not the number of shares owned. Cake also shows the impact a certain stock has had on the overall value of the portfolio. Carpenter adamantly maintains that each users’ data is his or her own, not the bank’s or brokerage firm’s.

Carpenter compared Cake to social music site Last.Fm, specifically mirroring its clean user interface, good customer experience, and ranking individual data to provide personal recommendations, something the company will begin in 2008. It also provides activity alerts to alert users of changes in the portfolios of friends, family, and other investors they’re following.

In one week, the company’s going a whole lot more social — we’ll let you in on the development when it happens.

Location: San Francisco
Number of employees: 20
Funding: Undisclosed amount from investors who include Alsop Louie Partners, Ron Conway/Baseline Ventures and others
Business Model: Sell data on top users to institutional investors.
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: Undisclosed

Zecco stands for zero commission costs. In accordance with that name, Zecco lets investors with $2,500 in their account make ten free stock trades per month.

CEO Jeroen Veth, a former Merill Lynch Vice President, says the industry is headed towards a more open flow of information, something we saw discussed often at the Money:Tech conference. The company is focused on customer service after numerous complaints in its first launch, and has nabbed an E*Trade employee, Michael Feser, the guy who helped run E*Trade’s customer service turn-around.

Zecco will be profitable later in 2008, says Veth, and is already generating revenue from multiple sources — interest earned on account balances of its members, charges from special services, advertising, and cross-selling products with other financial-minded institutions. Zecco has talked to some European companies about expanding internationally by franchising its model, but Veth wouldn’t offer any specifics.

Veth cites both Cake Financial and Covestor as companies hovering in the same market space, but he argues that there’s room for different players, just as E*Trade coexisted (and still does) with TD Ameritrade. If anything, Veth says, the competition proves that the shared vision of an open, social-influenced investing community is gaining traction.

Zecco launched late 2006. In November last year, we wrote about the company’s extraordinary growth plans.

Location: Burlingame, Calif. and previously Ontario, Canada
Number of employees: 85
Funding: $35 million, including Skype investor Martin Lund
Business Model: Advertising, Cross-selling products, interest on account balances, franchising Zecco model
Profitable: In 2008
Money invested through platform: N/A

Wikinvest, a site we covered in November, brings the seemingly antiquated wiki collaboration approach to the arena of investing. The San Fransisco company lets investors collaborate by editing pages about stocks and other opportunities. Already the site claims 100,000 contributors to its wiki.

Wikinvest lets you start with concepts, which the company explains can be things like themes, ideas, trends, products, and industries. Not only can investors do a typical search by company name, but they can also start searching from concepts like the rising price of oil, crisis in subprime lending, or the rise of ecommerce, the site explains.

One component unique to Wikiinvest is a social stock chart, or WikiChart, which lets users add annotations to try to explain WHY a stock price is fluctuating.

You can even play a popular game that’s reminscent of time spent on Wikipedia: something the company calls “six degrees of Exxon Mobil.” Here’s what the company says: “Sometimes in the office, we play Six Degrees of Exxon Mobil — a little game we made up in which we try to guess the shortest way to link any company to Exxon Mobil. The other day we were talking about Coca-Cola: From Coca Cola (KO), click through to Corn Prices, which is connected to Ethanol, which is connected to Oil Prices, which is connected to Exxon Mobil (XOM).”

Location: San Francisco
Number of employees: N/A
Funding: $2.5 million from DCM
Business Model: N/A
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: N/A

Marketocracy is yet another social investing site that lets investors import virtual mirrors of their real stock trading portfolio. It gives individual managers a report card and lets users invest money along with the best performers.

A year ago, Marketocracy opened four virtual funds made up of the stock picks by the top four of Marketocracy’s 80,000 participating managers. Marketocracy tracked their records over the past five years, giving them a virtual $1 million to invest and factoring in transaction fees and other costs. Their long-term goal was always a m100 fund that demonstrates the site’s best investors.

Today, the site claims more than 55,000 users managing 65,000 model portfolios, which Marketocracy has been tracking and analyzing for three years, incorporating long and short-term performance. The company supposedly accounts for the market, sector, and style of trade, of its investors to help offset the “right place, right time” factor that many investors criticize social investing sites for.

Marketocracy was cofounded by Chief Executive Ken Kam and President Mark Taguchi, who managed a fund called the Firsthand Technology Value Fund, ranked No. 1 fund by Lipper for five years.

Location: San Mateo, Calif.
Number of employees: N/A
Funding: $16 million from US Venture Partners, Formative Investors, and others
Business Model: N/A
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: N/A

The Motley Fool CAPS is a fantasy stock investing game that lets users forecast a stock’s performance vs. the S&P 500. Based on that performance, a user gets a percentile ranking. CAPS then uses the data to sell stock recommendations.

CAPS has a digg-like super user feature, where users with higher ratings have more sway on a stock recommendation. It also gives users the ability to vote per stock on bull vs. bear predictions, provides discussion boards, and lists general statistics on the stock in question.

Stock ratings are based primarily on three factors: predictions that a pick will outperform or underperform, time frames for those picks, and ratings of users who made those picks. CAPS claims that these ratings are all merit-based, held accountable by the thousands of users.

The site even tracks the famed Jim Cramer, from CNBC’s TheStreet.com, who is currently ranked 8,050 out of 44,685 using the picks he recommends on his TV show.

Location: Alexandria, Virg.
Number of employees: part of Motley Fool, so hard to count
Funding: Division of Motley Fool
Business Model: Sells stock recommendations and advertisements
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: Only fantasy funds

(The logo’s a bit reminiscent of Covestor’s, isn’t it?)

SocialPicks is another fantasy stock-market investment game gone social. In fantasy sports fashion, users pick the companies they’re pulling for — or at least expect to perform well on the market, and get a score based on how well they return money from their “picks.” These picks are ranked against other users, while the web site also features a financial blog submission tool that extracts opinions on stocks from various users’ blogs.

Like some of the other sites, SocialPicks wants to generate revenue based on the value of the financial data of its users.

Location: Mountain View, Calif.
Number of employees: N/A
Funding: $500k from Bay Partners
Business Model: Sell data
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: Fantasy funds only

Stockpickr is an investing site founded by two hedge-fund managers frustrated with the standard investment approach.

James Altucher and Dan Kelly created a site where users could not only follow “super investor” portfolios like those of a George Soros or Warren Buffet, but also pick one or two positions from each of those. Joining with TheStreet.com (which first owned 49.9 percent of the site and then later bought it out completely), Stockpickr was built to function like financial news with the news stripped out, according to Altucher.

Stockpickr, which claims five million unique visitors, also features portfolios from its community of users, which other users may rate. The big draw to the site, however, seems to be its “answers” sections, which functions a bit like Yahoo Answers but for stocks. It also displays most viewed portfolios, top rated portfolios, and a TV section, which shows video from not only TheStreet.com, but also user-generated video.

Location: Wall Street
Number of employees: Part of TheStreet.com, so hard to count
Funding: Undisclosed acquisition by theStreet.com
Business Model: Advertising
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: None

San Francisco-based Vestopia lets users follow professional money managers on its social investing site and receive email or SMS updates when the managers a user is following makes a trade.

VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha covered the company a few days ago and explained: “Vestopia offers information about fewer investors, but says its information is more credible, because it tracks real individuals and can show you exactly how they’ve done over time. You can judge for yourself by reading their profiles here. The three most successful investors, according to Vestopia’s statistics, are Dan Knight of DK Investments, independent trader Larry Gendler and Mike Goodson of JP Morgan.

“Vestopia offers other ways to interact with the ‘investment managers’, such as blogs, videos and live chats. But since there’s no shortage of investment advice on the Web, the portfolio tracking is the heart of Vestopia’s approach.

“In addition to launching its service, Vestopia also recently announced that Steve Markowitz, co-founder of shopping rewards site MyPoints.com, is its new CEO. The company says it raised “millions of dollars” — it won’t disclose exactly how much — in January from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds and Ofer Hi-Tech.”

Location: San Fransisco
Number of employees: N/A
Funding: “Millions of dollars” from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, and Ofer Hi-Tech
Business Model: Plans to begin charging for “premium services”
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: N/A

Investing social network The UpDown was created by a bunch of Harvard Business School alums who wanted to build a site for users to out-trade (and get paid when they do) the major stock indices using $1 million in fantasy money — and use that data to run a multi-billion dollar fund consistently outperforming the market. Users also improve investment skills through collaboration, using the site’s social networking features.

The company, which launched in September 2007, is already claiming more than 17,000 registered users.

VentureBeat’s Leonid Kozhukh explained when he covered the company back in December: “The company’s ultimate goal, says co-founder Michael Reich, is to build up a group of users who consistently out-perform the major indices and then create an investment vehicle that mimics the behavior of those users. The challenge is to pinpoint a subset of users whose investment behavior is both trustworthy and scalable to large investments. (A corporation’s liquidity and market valuation may be problematic at higher investment amounts.) Reich is optimistic that by cultivating the right mix of online members, he’ll have the data he needs to run a multi-billion dollar fund capable of outdoing the markets.”

Location: Cambridge, Mass.
Number of employees: 3
Funding: $1.2 million from Swiss Investor Joachim Schoss
Business Model: Advertising
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: Roughly $18 million in fantasy funds.

BullPoo, another social investment platform with a much more interesting name (and a video-game twist), lets users discuss and debate financial issues as well as trade a virtual portfolio, make forecasts, and post financial blogs. Bullpoo analyzes and posts statistics on user forecasts and portfolio management. BullPoo even has fictional brokerages that users can pick from based on investment style and preference.

The site also has the typical community features: top rankings, feedback and profile creation, but most viewable features are closed to registered users. For the forecasting feature, users set target price, duration, and precision of the forecast, while Bullpoo tracks the success of those forecasts.

Users can invest their $1 million play money into the American stock exchanges, but the site also has a role playing game-like scoring system, that lets users earn experience points for their trades and forecasts to advance to the next level. It may not compare to Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft in terms of a following, but Bullpoo is trying to make investing more fun for its users.

Location: Ontario, Canada
Number of employees: N/A
Funding: N/A
Business Model: Advertising
Profitable: N/A
Money invested through platform: $1 million in fantasy funds

– VentureBeat

Tags: Cake, Marketocracy, SocialPicks

Jeff Brown is long time Groovy and Grails committer. He recently joined G2One, the Groovy and Grails company. Learn more about the Grails 1.0 release, the Grails road map and Jeff’s thoughts on the Groovy and Grails communities. Enjoy.

Q: Hey Jeff, you’re part of the Grails development team and have recently joined G2One. What’s your new role at G2One?

A: I am a member of both the Groovy and the Grails development teams and I am The Director of North American Operations at G2One. I am really happy to be a part of G2One at this point. We have a lot of great things coming up in 2008. The next generation of Java is here and it is really exciting to be right at the center of that. We are fielding the demand for professional services surrounding both Groovy and Grails. As the demand continues to increase we have a lot of work to do to support that. We are doing a great job at this point and I know we are going to be doing more of the same moving forward.

Q: You got involved with Grails early on. What are your thoughts on the recent 1.0 release?

A: First of all, I want to say that Graeme Rocher has done a fantastic job of leading the charge to get the framework to this point. I am not saying that because Graeme is a friend and partner at G2One. I am saying that because I know that the product is as good as it is because of his commitment and vision.

The 1.0 release is a great milestone to have accomplished. For a long time there have been folks in our community asking that the framework be promoted to a 1.0 release. We have heard from developers who prototyped a Grails app and found that the framework met all of their needs and the only thing holding them back was the fact that they worked in a shop that wouldn’t allow a pre-1.0 framework to be pushed in to their production environment. I think the Grails team deserves some respect for not giving in to that and holding off until as a group, we really were comfortable calling this thing 1.0. Quite a while back a road map of “must haves” for 1.0 was put together and the team kept working hard on the framework until all those checkboxes were accounted for. That doesn’t mean that the framework is finished or that there isn’t room to improve the framework of course. That simply means that the framework supports the feature set that a 1.0 web framework should support. We will continue to improve, innovate and respond to what users tell us.

Q: What does the Grails road map look like for 2008?

A: We have a lot of exciting stuff coming up in 2008. I will tell you that one of the big things I see coming is the continued growth of our plugin community. Over the last year or so we have seen a lot of really interesting plugins surfacing and that is going to continue. I think that the plugin story for Grails is such a good one that in some ways Grails will become the platform for deploying web apps on the JVM and those applications will be built up largely with re-usable Grails plugins. We are already seeing a lot of that happening and I think that is where a lot of folks are headed with the framework.

Q: Can you elaborate on your plugin story? Right now there are many technical plugins and only few functional ones (a wiki plugin, search plugin, …). I would think the functional plugins are the really interesting ones.

A: We are going to see more functional plugins surfacing in the coming months and throughout the year. We are going to see a lot of interesting plugins to support things like forums, web of trust management, registration tools and a lot of other areas that teams don’t want to reinvent solutions for. One of the great things about the way the Grails plugin system is put together is the fact that a plugin is structured pretty much like a Grails application. A nice side effect of that is it is really simple to pull bits of an application out of the application and treat them as plugins. If a team has built up a monolithic application and decides to modularize components as plugins, that is pretty easy to do. As organizations further commit to the Grails framework and are building more applications they are doing this to leverage the value that plugins offer them.

Q: Some excellent books have been published on Groovy in 2007. Can we expect any new books on Grails in 2008?

A: We are going to see new books on Grails in 2008 now that 1.0 is out there. I know that Apress has announced a new upcoming Grails book. There are others on the horizon as well. The Pragmatic Bookshelf guys have 2 separate Groovy books coming out very soon. Those are Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes: Greasing The Wheels Of Java” and Venkat Subramanium’s “Programming Groovy”. I have reviewed pre-release copies of each of those and I can tell you that they are both well written and folks are really going to like having those around. The Groovy Recipes book has more Grails coverage than Programming Groovy.

Q: In the meanwhile the Grails community keeps growing. The mailing list has been very active for many months. Is Grails a hit?

A: Grails absolutely is a hit. Look at the amount of time dedicated to Groovy and Grails on The No Fluff Just Stuff tour in 2007 and how much is being dedicated to Groovy and Grails on that tour in 2008. Look at the excitement and enthusiasm around the upcoming Groovy Grails Experience later this month. All of that is representative of how excited the community is about the technology. I said before that the next generation of Java is here and I really feel that way. I have felt that way for some time and more and more I am hearing from other folks who feel the same way.

Q: This month the second Groovy & Grails conference will take place, this time in the US. How did you like the Grails eXchange last october and what do you expect from the next conference?

A: The Grails eXchange in London was great fun. It was fantastic to see so many people from the Groovy and Grails communities all gathered together to learn and talk about all of the exciting new things going on around Groovy and Grails. The upcoming Groovy Grails Experience in Virginia is going to be more of the same, even bigger and better. I am looking forward to this show more than I look forward to any other.

Thanks for the interview Jeff!

– Groovy Zone

Tags: Groovy Grails