My best friend in high school was John Keoni Morris.
He was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac geek since well before the Quadra 900 and is the most innovative coders and programmers around for the Mac today. His meat and potatoes have always been games for the Mac and he’s been very successful as a result. Now, John is CTO and co-founder of Visible Market, makers of StockTouch. They’re also my client.
StockTouch is the coolest thing going on the iPad, even if you’re not a broker of investor, because it eats up 5-minute-delayed stock market data and spits it out as a visually-striking and easy-to-understand shape and color coded visualization of what’s going on, turning simple fingertip touches and gestures on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch into 9,800 dynamic charts, representing the top 900 stocks in the U.S. market, as well as the top 900 global stocks, categorized across nine industry sectors.
In short, 9 sectors, 900 companies, 12,600 tiles of heat, 6300 charts, 10,800 news stories, all updated every 5 minutes, wrapped in an easy-to-read, easy-to-grok, color-coded display that’s all wrapped up in John Morris’ video game engine. Gone are the lame Bloomberg-esque charts and graphs and tables and charts.
Plus, you can customize your view of the market to view price or volume, and rearrange the layout to sort by market cap, winners, activity and alphabetically. Plus, StockTouch as implemented the iCloud so you can have the same experience with the same favorites across all your iOS devices.
According to the gang at Visible Market:
StockTouch’s technology platform is the first of its kind to apply a video game engine to visualize statistical data, which is combined with a proprietary compression technology that transmits information at 20x the speed of comparable apps allowing the application to deliver up-to-the-minute market trends and numbers through a visually-intuitive, game-like, iOS-native interface.
What happens when John, a video game guru, who has made a fortune producing games for mobile gets together with tech entrepreneur and angel investor, Jennifer Johnson, and user experience maestro, Steve de Brun, then you can have your very own mini Minority Report experience with a user interface that gesturally and intuitively allows you to track publicly-traded business and their stocks and indexes near real-time without needing to get a PhD in finance from Princeton University first.
StockTouch was designed for mobile-touch. One fluid zoomable heat map interface displays 75% of all global trading activity, enabling investors to view the equity markets contextually as they unfold. It uses a series of color-coded heat maps that gives you the pulse and direction of the market by price, volume, in the context of the S&P 500, well as by performance within a given sector. Basically, it brings revolutionary data visualization to the masses so that anyone can understand the dynamics of the stock market, not just the financial elite. On StockTouch, shades of green indicate stocks that are gaining in value, while shades of red indicate stocks that are losing in value. Its touch and zoom-based navigation makes rapidly flying through a large data set very natural and intuitive.
StockTouch is currently available in the iTunes store as a universal app for iPad and iPhone.
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