Money:Tech Day 2: Best Lines of the Day [MoneyTech]

Like yesterday, the second day of Money:Tech was stuffed with early signals on everything from using website visits to predict the unemployment rate to the emerging market for catastrophe bonds.

Here are just a few of the choice lines today:

Michael Stonebraker, Streambase, on why fast-moving financial firms must keep their data in memory, not on a hard disc: "The minute you store the data, you lose."

Devin Wenig, Reuters, on how the speed problem may be solved: "Latency is not the burning issue in our industry anymore." To which Tim O'Reilly responded, "there is a lot of room to collect the data earlier," before that latency period even starts.

Martin Wattenberg, IBM, on what he's learned painting the future of data visualization: "There's more to life than AI and fancy machine learning."

Brian O'Keefe, Panopticon, on the limits of software: "You can't ask questions in Outlook."

Henry Blodgett, Silicon Alley Insider, on an eternal truth in equity research: "The only research that's valuable is the stuff nobody else has."

Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, describing his business model: "We filter what's available for free on the Web and people pay us for that."

Cathleen Rittereiser, Alternative Asset Management, on how hedge funds persevere: "It's better to be wrong together than to be wrong alone."

And I didn't even quote my own panel, on collective money management. I'll return to that in a future post.

I'll let Money:Tech conference chair Paul Kedrosky weigh in definitively about the event on his own blog when he catches up on sleep, but from this vantage point it feels like we're still quite early on in the interactions between financial markets and Web 2.0 markets. We'll continue to chronicle them here, in Release 2.0, and at future Money:Tech events. This was a very exciting beginning.

Money:Tech Day 1: Best Lines [MoneyTech]

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.

The Industry Standard is back. Why?

The Industry Standard ably chronicled -- and, eventually, mirrored -- the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and -- with one brief exception a few years back -- not doing much about it, IDG, which was the Standard's lead investor and picked up the carcass in bankruptcy court, has relaunched the site this week.

The new site is, to these eyes, an unintentional parody of Web 2.0 features. Rather than mere advertising, it has a more high-end sponsorship model (i.e., one pay-for-it-all advertiser), it seeks to create a community (you have to sign in to enjoy the more interesting features), it combines aggregation and a sliver of original material with a "wisdom of crowds" prediction market, and it appears to have a bare-bone staff. And, of course, to keep costs really low, this time the brand is online-only.

I'm not sure what's being accomplished here, aside from the modest monetization of a dormant but still semipopular URL. It's an attempt to revive a once-very-popular name, synonymous with original content, with as little original content as IDG can get away with. Maybe that will change.

Recently someone I hadn’t been in touch with for more than 20 years found me on Facebook and suggested we "reconnect." But if we really wanted to "reconnect," whatever that means, we might have done so at least once during the previous two decades. That’s how I feel about The Standard coming back: it’s too late, its time has passed. The new site should rise or fall on the basis of its own achievement, not on those of an entirely different team a boom and a bust ago.