S&P rolls out new online service
MarketScope Advisor, an online tool that’s meant to serve as a central source of real-time stock analysis, thematic research, strategic asset allocation, and market commentary tailored specifically for financial advisers has been rolled out by Standard & Poor’s.
With the product, financial advisers will be able to navigate among six different modules.
The first two, “MarketView” and “MarketScan” are intended as at-a-glance updates on stocks and includes Standard & Poor’s STARS upgrades/downgrades, activity on the Street, merger talk, stock splits, and S&P’s asset allocation recommendations and global outlook as well as market statistics, commentary and breaking news.
Another, more sophisticated feature, “TrendScope,” provides thematic analysis of recent and emerging trends in various market sectors including healthcare, energy, lifestyle, green investing, sector investing, and emerging markets among others.
The final three features are intended to help advisers keep clients better informed and include “Calendars” for tracking market-moving events such as government data announcements and IPOs, Rankings to keep up to date on S&P STARS stock recommendation changes, and potential ramifications for client portfolios, and finally “Portfolios,” for guiding the creation of individual client portfolios and monitoring the performance of S&P’s own suite of model portfolios.
Specifics on pricing and availability were unavailable at press time.
Skype, Logitech, and Intel team up on video calling
Now advisers can think about cheap video conferencing and holiday shopping all at once. The team of
Skype,
Logitech, and Intel [Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif.] has come together to introduce a new feature on the popular Skype communications platform: High Quality Video on Skype. The consumer won’t need to make a purchase for the service itself — calls, whether audio or video, between Skype users will remain free just as they’ve always been.
Where you’ll have to part with some money will be on a new Webcam and it’s quite possible you’ll even need a new PC to get the new higher quality video.
We reported on several low-cost high-quality video calling applications in our October 22 issue of
Tech Tips.
At that time the best frame rate capable with Skype [Technologies SA headquartered in Luxembourg] was 15 frames per second, a rate that provides, at best, jumpy and disconcerting video.
This latest version the Skype application provides smooth full-motion 30-frame-per-second video, but you’ll need a dual core Intel-based PC as well as one of three new models of webcam available from Logitech (Logitech International with headquarters in Fremont, Calif. and Romanel-Sur-Morge, Switzerland).
These three cameras are available and include the QuickCam Pro 9000 ($99.99), QuickCam Pro for Notebooks ($99.99), and the QuickCam Orbit AF ($129.99).
With 246 million registered users worldwide as of press time, and eight to 10 million of these online at any given moment there’s little question the service will remain a popular one.
