Tempranillo varietal wine bottle and glass. Shot with Nikon D70s (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NY entrepreneurs Aaron Sherman and Gianfranco Verga partnered with Goldman Sachs analyst Neal Parikh to create an online database and resource for wine purchasers in the NY and NJ area. The site allows users to search all wines, beer, and liquor available by region, size, and price.

The Brooklyn-based site, SevenFifty, began when Sherman and Verga were frustrated by the shortcomings of the site Beverage Media, which previously was the only resource for industry news and information about distributors. They found it difficult to find many wines and also found smaller distributors that didn’t appear on it.

The Wall Street Journal

Ori Allon

Even before its launch, investors are lining up to fund Urban Compass. The NY-based company received $8 million in seed money from Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenaul and Cyrus Massoumi, CEO of ZocDoc. According to TechCrunch, not a lot is known about their business. Only Ken Howery, of Founders Fund, would say, “they are trying to disrupt a large industry.”

Urban Compass is co-founded by Ori Allon, the engineer famous for selling his earlier businesses to Google and Twitter, and Robert Reffkin, a former high-profile chief of staff at Goldman Sachs.

TechCrunch

Ori Allon

Urban Compass just announced an $8 million seed round from Founders Fund, Thrive Capital and Goldman Sachs. The focus of Ori Allon’s new SoHo-based startup is still a secret, but The Verge reports that its new technology collects and tracks data in the “offline world” in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. It not only collects information, it also created a platform that makes it searchable. Urban Compass’ first product launch is expected in the summer of 2013.

Allon, 32, has already created key pieces of information technology. He devised the Orion search engine while he was still a PhD student. Acquired by Google, it was quickly incorporated into its search engine. Twitter bought his second company, Julpan, which analyzed information sharing in social media.

The Verge

RuTube Image via CrunchBase

Lots of people are plugged into social media all day, yet access to Facebook, Twitter and most music and video streaming sites are blocked at Wall Street firms.  Regulations require financial institutions to keep records of all employee communication, but there’s no way to monitor Facebook chats or comments on YouTube. According to The New York Times, employees find ways to overcome those obstacles. They catch sporting events on Rutube, the Russian equivalent of YouTube. Since most companies prohibit access to Spotify or Pandora, they listen to music through SoundCloud and Grooveshark. Goldman Sachs is working with Hearsay Social to make some social media accessible. Just last month it made the company’s own Twitter feed available to employees.

The New York Times

English: Wall Street sign on Wall Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Typically tech innovations have been driven by business and then adopted by consumers, however, mobile apps seem to be doing the opposite. The current rise of institutional apps produced by such companies as Goldman Sachs Asset  Management, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley  is being driven by the growing  expectations of internal sales teams, traders and institutional clients that they will be able to use the same mobile devices they use in their personal lives at work.

Since there is an expectation of deeper knowledge into products on the part of these new users, institutional apps and the information they provide often are more complex than their retail counterparts. Though Wall Street firms have offered mobile apps to customers for quite a few years, they have been slower to adopt mobile technology on the institutional side of the business.

This new rise in workplace apps has forced companies to perfect important security tools, such as encryption, keyless exchanges, and a time bomb data wipe feature. Also data size has become a crucial factor in development, determined by the specified device – such as tablets and desktops can hold a lot more information than smartphones.

Wall Street & Technology

English: Logo of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Category:Goldman Sachs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently Goldman Sachs announced its official arrival to Twitter, as one tweet alone won the company 7,000 followers, and some mixed responses. Wall Street & Technology reported that one Occupy Wall Street protestor greeted Goldman with this simple tweet: “Welcome to Twitter.”

The start of Goldman on Twitter follows an ongoing battle of Wall Street to fight a bad image. Former Goldman employee Greg Smith  stirred up controversy and judgment of the company’s culture in March with his New York Times opinion piece. The parodied Twitter of Goldman, @GSElevator, conveys an image of snobbery and greed, which does not help their image either.

This shift in communications strategy is being led by new head of communications, Jake Siewert. Though it’s obvious that Goldman Sachs is making an effort to step into the social media realm, it may still be a rough start for them. Their second tweet displayed a “self-congratulatory” feel, according to Wall Street & Technology. It read, “Annual meeting is a wrap. Prelim votes show all directors elected with overwhelming support. Shareholders support GS on all proposals.” In response to this, @CNBC tweeted: “ALERT: All Goldman Sachs directors elected, all shareholder proposals fail – source.”

The question being asked now is if Goldman Sachs can make an impact in social media by using it correctly.

Wall Street & Technology

Image via CrunchBase

In a move that reveals a shift in hedge fund and buy-side firm trading, Goldman Sachs is planning to create a separate subsidiary for its REDI Technology electronic trading group. Goldman is also inviting rival firms to take stakes in the unit.

REDI designs execution management systems (EMS) used by Goldman’s hedge funds and institutional clients for securities and derivatives trading. Goldman acquired REDI as part of a $7 billion package in 2000. After that, Citibank, J.P. Morgan and Lehman also bought front-end trading platforms.

But, according to Wall Street & Technology, within the past year, firms have sold off their single-dealer EMSes, as banks may lack the funding to support and upgrade the EMS software. Meanwhile hedge funds and investment managers are using multi-broker platforms. Independent providers like FlexTrade, Bloomberg and ConvergEx have become increasingly popular.

Goldman will maintain a “significant” stake in REDI through Principal Strategic Investments Group, its private equity arm.

Wall Street & Technology

As it would turn out, Rushkoff’s idea proved to be true as the Friedersdorf, who is based in the redwood forests in Northern California, would find that a passage from an Internet article he wrote about the movement would end up as a sign at the movement 3,000 miles away. In his article, he talked about how protesters messages would resonate more with the general public if they were more specific, so to illustrate this, he gave an example of specif message, one that alluded to the SEC case against Goldman Sachs and that was 46 words long.

Ultimately he discovered this example was used on placard by a protestor that then went viral on Twitter. Here is the placard that contained Friedersdorf’s message:

The Atlantic.com

Image via CrunchBase

Networked Insights, a NY company that analyzes social data to find consumer engagement opportunities, has raised $20 million in its latest round from Goldman Sachs. The company uses social data to gain specific audiences for brands rather than target audiences. According to Lost Remote, Networked Insights shows “how the company looks at specifically where ad money is being spent to analyze the conversations around the show.”The company also features a product, Social Sense TV, which delivers media efficiencies from consumer conversation.

The company recently presented a case study on AMC’s The Walking Dead on data that included specific audiences and advising them on how to reach Sunday Night Football enthusiasts.

Lost Remote

Image via Wikipedia

A hacker group using the handle, CabinCr3w, have released personal information regarding the age, recent addresses, details of past litigations and registration information for businesses of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

While the reason for targeting the CEO is unknown, on Monday the hackers also released information about NY Police Officer Anthony Bologna. Bologna can be seen via video and photo spraying pepper spray into women protestor’s faces at the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration from this past weekend,  a video that has now taken on viral status .

According to CNET the hacker group tweeted, “To the people asking…we are part of anonymous [SIC] just a group of like minded people taking on the world.”

CNET

Image via CrunchBase

ZocDoc, a NY startup  that allows patients in 12 different cities to book doctor appointments online, has extended their Series C round, raising $25 million from Goldman Sachs. In August, the company raised $50 million in the round from DST Global.

ZocDoc is free for patients, $250 a month for physicians and has raised $95 million all together.

Xconomy

Image via Wikipedia

Voted on by 144 financial professionals, Goldman Sachs has been named the most admired technology department on Wall Street and was praised for its “quality of its people, processes and pragmatic attitude.”

The following filled out the Top Five of the survey conducted by eFinancialCareers:

• JP Morgan
• Bloomberg
• Renaissance Technologies & D.E. Shaw (tied for fourth)

Wall Street & Technology

Ten financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, provided mentors, feedback and market access. Venture capital firms Contour Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Rho Ventures, RRE Ventures, Village Ventures and Warburg Pincus provided coaching and business advice and $25,000 to each startup.

The six startups are:

• Aqumin—uses interactive 3D technology to visualize and interpret vast amounts of public and proprietary market data.
• CB Insights—evaluates the performance of private businesses by finding signals of strength or weakness in publicly available data.
• Hanweck Associates—provides real-time analytics and risk products for hedge funds, banks and other financial institutions.
• Lenddo.com—uses social networks to analyze credit worthiness, particularly of middle class people in emerging markets seeking loans.
• Syphr—provides personalized credit management and optimization applications to allow financial institutions to identify and attract specific customers.
• Zipmark—employes a mobile barcode that accepts payments from any bank, providing customers an alternative way to pay bills.

TechJournal South

> Maria Gotsch to Speak about FinTech at NY Tech Mixer

Image via CrunchBase

Antonio Garcia-Martinez of NY-based AdGrok recently discussed his experience leaving Goldman Sachs to found his own startup.  Garcia-Martinez didn’t speak highly of the Wall Street environment, calling it “inward-looking and all-consuming,” focused solely on money, trading and their annual White Castle burger eating contest.  He defined the company as having a “claustrophobic value system all its own,” where one defined their worth solely on their compensation.

Since leaving Goldman to found AdGrok, Garcia-Martinez said he now has many more worries, mainly money, but his biggest regret is “not having made the switch earlier” from Wall Street to the startup world.

AdGrok

Previous:

>Adgrok Blogger Calls NYC a “Tech Backwater”

The article concludes that if there is a bubble emerging, it is limited to social media companies, and the internet sector in NY is so far financially sensible.

Crain’s New York Business

Over the past year, CEO Daryl Otte has downsized the presence of prominent figure and co-founder Jim Cramer, expanded the editorial team from 53 to 80 staffers and added subscription services that combine social interaction with trading suggestions. According to Crain’s New York Business, this has been coupled with strategic pitching of subscription upgrades leading to an 8% increase in the subscriber tally.

TheStreet has also added dozens of new advertisers, including Goldman Sachs, Chrysler and Cadillac, leading to a total growth from both subscriptions and advertising of 7%.

Crain’s New York Business

The advertising units, several of which are rich media or have tap-to-video functionality, contribute to Bloomberg’s claim that the magazine has seen a 49% increase in advertising pages for the first quarter of this year.

Mobile Commerce Daily

Previous:

>Bloomberg Business Week, Other Magazines Now Try iPad

Forrester research analyst James McQuivey states that Barnes & Noble must do more. While they may have surpassed Sony’s e-readers, he believes that Barnes & Noble would need to shutter at least 30% of its retail locations in the next three to five years and move more into boutique model.

Fortune

The funding shows that Wall Street has a interest in Internet companies. It is unclear as to how the raised funds will be used, whether they will invest directly or like Goldman Sachs Group Inc, buy and sell shares on behalf of clients in specific companies.

The Wall Street Journal

Previous:

> J.P. Morgan Plans Digital Tech Fund in NY

AppSense plans to expand from 300 employees to between 450 and 500 within the next year, but remains three to four years away from an IPO, according to its chief executive officer Darron Antill in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek.  The company has a base in London in addition to New York, and is currently investing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

AppSense increased its revenue 60% to $47 million last year and is on track to do the same for this year.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Previous:

>Goldman Invests Heavily in Facebook, Learns More About It

Aleynikov’s lawyer did not deny that his client had violated the company’s confidentiality agreements, but stated that the affair was a civil matter and Goldman Sachs could have settled it with a lawsuit. Instead, they notified the FBI.

Associated Press

Previous:

> Goldman Sachs Employees Restricted from Using Electronic Profanity

The Wall Street Journal

Previous:

> The Highs and Lows of Ultrafast Stock Trading

> Who Are New York's Prominent Financial Bloggers?

• FashInvest's Karen Giffith Gryga and David J. Freschman
• Former Goldman Sachs vice president Robin Lewis
• Trestle Venture's Jeff White

To RSVP and for more information, please visit the meetup's Web page here.

Fashion 2.0

• Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs, who started blogging in 2006.
• Felix Salmon, who formerly blogged for NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, and is now at Reuters.
• Bess Levin of Dealbreaker, what the magazine calls the "de facto “Page Six” of Wall Street."

New York magazine

Related:
> Gawker Vet Readies New Blogs

In early 2008, founders Nina and Tim Zagat brought in Goldman Sachs to broker a sale of the business, but the economic downturn and offers below their $200 million asking price reportedly led them to put a sale on hold.

The New York Post

Related:
> July NY Tech Meetup Fills FIT's Haft Auditorium

Because the programs take years to develop and are considered proprietary, top programmers that are recruited for ultrafast trading are offered large salaries and perks as a means for firms to stay competitive in the market.  In this world of programming, however, there is great risk to some programmers who try to leave their companies, according to an article in The New York Times.

Investment
banks, particularly those who
believe that  programmers are taking code as they leave to go to other financial firms, could be costing their firms millions, leading to costly civil and in some cases, criminal suits.

The New York Times