09:48 AM
Charles Schwab Enhances Wireless Functionality with Stockpoint
While few financial-services companies are expanding their wireless offerings lately, Charles Schwab & Co. announced that it is providing stock quotes, news, watch lists and market briefs to both clients and non-clients through a wireless-services agreement with Stockpoint, a ScreamingMedia company.
Quotes from the New York and American Stock Exchanges, as well as financial-analysis tools are designed to help monitor investments and market conditions.
"If you take what's normally available on a financial-analysis Web site and boil it down to the bare essentials that would fit a form factor of Palm devices, that is what we're providing," explains Steven Spencer, chief technology officer at Screaming Media, based in New York. "It is very rich in information in the constraints we have for the device," adds Spencer.
The service will run on a variety of hand-held devices that support the Palm Operating System (OS), including Palm VII/VIIx and i705 PDAs, as well as he Samsung 1300 and Kyocera QCP6035 smart phones available through Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless.
Stockpoint is running the service in its data center which is then accessed via the wireless services on the Palm O/S."Clearly what we did for Schwab is dependent on data transport over existing 1xRTT or 2.5G networks," says Spencer. It will take advantage of the faster data-network speed to use charts, watch lists, and do some portfolio tracking, he says. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio