CNBC released a brand new iPad app late Monday, delivering the first truly useful, real-time market updates dashboard for the device.

The free app is cleverly organized for quick access to the latest information on the markets, including real-time stock quotes and charts from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ, as well as articles and videos from CNBC.com. Users can customize the dashboard to keep track of their individual portfolios and save articles (although not videos) for later offline viewing. A news ticker (which can be customized to track certain industries or personal portfolios) runs along the bottom of the app, making it easy to catch relevant breaking news as users navigate through the different sections.

Users can also watch highlights from CNBC’s more popular shows, including Mad Money and Fast Money.

It makes Fox Business’s [iTunes link] and Bloomberg’s [iTunes link] iPad apps, which have a 15-minute reporting delay on stock quotes, look primitive by comparison.

Only two things are lacking: streaming access to CNBC’s live TV content and better social integration. Admittedly, finance is not a popular topic of discussion on social networks currently; however, the growth of online social communities like Stocktwits may very well reverse this trend. We’d love to see sharing options for Facebook and Twitter, live commenting functionality on videos and articles, as well as live, stock-related tweets from Stocktwits’s API.

Check out CNBC’s app for yourself in the screenshot gallery below, as well as in the App Store [iTunes link].

CNBC Real-Time for iPad

style="display:none" class="gallery_id">481 style="display:none" class="post_id">463361 style="display:none" class="gallery_type">photo class="ytm-view-type">View As One Page »

startups, Software, crm

Nutshell Building New CRM Software From Scratch, With A Big Focus On Mobile

Erin Kutz 12/20/10

For Guy Suter, starting from scratch is a good thing. At least when it comes to user interfaces, he says. His Ann Arbor-based startup Nutshell is building a customer relationship management software system from the ground up that he says offers a better user experience than what’s long been out on the market.

Suter first saw the problems with existing CRM software options while CEO of BitLeap, an offsite data backup and disaster recovery company that was acquired by Barracuda Networks in 2008. He found products like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM to be “cumbersome” and not particularly user friendly, he says.

Many of the biggest names in CRM got their start before the big modern features of the Web existed, says Suter, Nutshell’s CEO. Pretty important features, like Ajax, the Web development system used to create more interactive application on sites. Some of these long-time CRM brands have added layers to and tweaked their software to keep up with new Internet standards, but Suter says piling new features onto an existing, outdated platform still makes for a clunky user experience.

“That kind of leaves things lacking, it doesn’t feel as seamless as something you could start with a blank slate,” says Suter, who also works as a director at Barracuda Networks.

His 12-person team at Nutshell is putting a big focus on making the software systems for salespeople easier to navigate. Some features include: automatically refreshing the page when users update information, breaking up information so that it doesn’t read as one giant log that takes minutes to scroll through, and allowing users to grab data and move it to the appropriate place. The software also enables users to customize different steps and milestones of their sales process, offering different data entry variables and options for each step, Suter says.

Nutshell, was launched in 2009 by Suter and is internally funded—with no immediate plans to raise outside money. The company also has two staffers completely dedicated to developing the product for the mobile phone. “We want to build the best mobile CRMs in world; that’s where the world is going,” Suter says.

Right now, the iPhone version of Nutshell enables users to sift through their customer data and research leads, but in the future the company is adding geo-location features. One of the big problems for salespeople who travel is entering a lead’s or client’s information into the software system from a computer, and finding the Internet access to do it. With upcoming versions of the mobile edition of Nutshell, users will be able to enter information into the system “between the door of the client they just met with and the door of their car,” Suter says. The GPS features in the phone will enable the system to readily pick up a client location and enter it into the system.

The Nutshell software first hit the market a month ago, offering customers a free 30-day trial of the product, which normally costs $25 per individual user per month. Those first trials were just ending last week when I chatted with Suter, so now “it’s getting to decision time” for those first several hundred customers on whether they’ll stick with the product. The company attracted a mix of customers, but those in the Web development and design space were big, Suter says.

The first crop of customers will also determine the features and focus of Nutshell in the future, which could include mass marketing and enterprise resource planning, Suter says. “Ultimately Nutshell will be an entire business suite of software,” he says.

Erin Kutz is an Assistant Editor for Xconomy. You can reach her by e-mail at ekutz@xconomy.com or by phone at (617) 252-0700.

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Making Money With Options

CNBC Real-Time for iPad

startups, Software, crm

Nutshell Building New CRM Software From Scratch, With A Big Focus On Mobile

Erin Kutz 12/20/10

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