There’s so much going on at Money:Tech today that I won’t try to cheapen it my squeezing it all into a blog post. Indeed, we’re planning a full issue of Release 2.0 in April to capture how much has happened in the collision of Wall Street and Web 2.0 since we first identified it last year (PDF link to issue, 2.4M). But, along with our posts on individual talks, I do want to share just a few of the most provocative near-aphorisms we heard today:
James Altucher, Stockpickr, on differentiating between open and proprietary approaches: “Closed source is a myth.”
Michael Simonsen, Altos Research, on the organization of information: “Free data on the Internet is a mess”
David Leinweber, UC Berkeley, on how quickly investors have to respond to a news event to take advantage of it in the market: “You have to get the news before the news people get there.”
Tom Desmond, TradeKing, on how the Internet democratizes investing: “Turning trading from a solitary function to a social one levels the playing field.” This was a notion picked up by Wesabe CEO Jason Knight, who also had the best talk title of the day: “The Death of Quicken.” His key line: “People understand the difference between income and debt. They just don’t know how debt accumulates.” (Disclosure: OATV is an investor in Wesabe.)
Renny Monaghan, Salesforce.com, on the need to balance the need to know everything with the need to get work done: “How do I avoid being a news junkie?”
George Tsiolis, Agoracom, on how the new investor discussion groups are different from the flame-throwing Yahoo groups of yore: “Investors want a community. But they want a civil community.”
Mike Gamson, LinkedIn, on who uses his company’s service: “our demographics are the same as the Wall Street Journal, except they’re slightly younger and slightly wealthier.”
Rick Seaney, FareCompare, on what we think of the airline companies we rely on: “Airlines rate lower than the I.R.S. for consumer satisfaction.”
It was an exhaustive day. And we get another one tomorrow. I’ll be moderating a panel on collective money management — and there will be 16 other sessions.