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financial technology

Finovate Spring 2012 Preview

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This week I will be back in San Francisco attending the Finovate Spring 2012 financial innovation conference.

Finovate is a two-day showcase of the newest financial and banking technology innovations from both established companies and startups. Short company demos of just seven minutes each are presented in back-to-back blasts, and no slides are allowed, so presenters have to focus on the key benefits and what makes their product stand out.

I am looking forward to networking with some old friends and meeting some new ones as I once again take my exploration of leadership, advice and technology on the road.

I will be back here with my notes and observations.


FinovateSpring 2012 Presenting Companies

Access Development CoverHound Kabbage SaveUp
Actiance CSI globalVCard Keynote DeviceAnywhere Serverside Group
Affinity Solutions DCisions Klarna Silver Tail Systems
Applause Learning DeviceFidelity Kuspit Social Money
Balance Street Dwolla Linkable Networks SoMoLend
BancBox Dynamics Mitek Systems Swipely
BankersLab eDeposit MoneyDesktop TASCET
Bazaarvoice edo Interactive mSHIFT Taulia
BehavioSec Expensify NICE Systems Thomson Reuters
Bill.com Experian Nomis Solutions TIO Networks
BillGuard Flint Mobile On Deck Capital Transparency Labs
Blaze Mobile FutureAdvisor PaySimple Virtual Piggy
Cachet Financial Solutions Giftly Personal Capital Wall Street Survivor
Cardlytics inStream Solutions Pindrop Security WattzOn
Clover Network IP Commerce Portfolio Football Wipit
Concur iQuantifi ProfitStars ZipZap

Top Ten Geek Week Sneak Peeks – Part 1

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This week I really got the chance to embrace that inner geek that’s just dying to break out of my pinstripe suit. On Tuesday I had the chance to visit the Microsoft Research TechFest 2012, and celebrate twenty years of Microsoft Research (Shout out to my host Juliane Carlson). Then on Wednesday I attended the GeekWire Summit and got to hear and meet all kinds of interesting people doing all kinds of interesting things. Here are some highlights and potential implications on the intersection of leadership, advice and technology in financial services:

Today: Microsoft Research TechFest2012

“The unanticipated results are often as important as the anticipated ones.”  

– Peter Lee, Microsoft Research

  1. Multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. The demo was oriented around an American using GPS to navigate around Beijing, but imagine being able to serve non-English speaking clients in situations where multilingual employees might not be available or practical.
  2. Lots of projects involving Big Data, including FetchClimate, a massive mash-up of global historical climatic data made instantly accessible. Easily useful as-is to assist in assessing branch locations, client real estate projects, etc.
  3. Another Big Data project is ChronoZoom, which is a “…dynamic cloud based data visualization tool where educators, researchers and students can easily consume, compare and understand the history of the cosmos, earth, life and humanity. Where they can easily consume rich media sets like: audio, video, text, pdfs, charts, graphs and articles in one place and discover new possibilities.” Imagine a financial markets version of this product with every price and correlation of every financial instrument for the past 80+ years.
  4. IllumiShare is desk lamp with camera that allows people to share physical or digital objects across the internet. Imagine a client who has questions on their trust document (or paper statement from your luddite competitor, because of course your institution has a secure digital document exchange with e-statments…). They could flip this on from the kitchen table of their beach house and you can see it all on your screen, even mark it up or highlight key areas.
  5. Multitouch is still evolving, and the Wearable Multitouch Projector can turn virtually any surface into a touchscreen, including the palm of your own hand. The current prototype looks a little bit like  first generation home camcorders with a shoulder bag processor and a shoulder mounted projector, but it will undoubtedly evolve. No touch is evolving too, building on the Kinect interface, including potential touchless interaction in surgery.

Tomorrow: The GeekWire Summit