Most businesses seem to have adopted a policy of not consistently acting maliciously and with hurtful intent towards (all) their customers. Some exceptions exist of course, like fast food chains serving unhealthy food and tobacco companies. It is true that several of these exceptionally malicious companies have historically done quite well.  It is also true that some companies take extra good care of their customers and do exceedingly well at that.  We have a grand plan of actually ensuring that our customers will be happy and excited about our upcoming product.  This is partly because as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company we need to be qualitatively better than our competitors, but also that that dealing with excited customers makes us happy.

Again, most companies would claim something along the lines above – so the best way to verify that we’re not lying through our teeth will of course be to see when we release our product: are we making customers happy and excited?  Unfortunately we are not quite ready with our released product yet, but I can tell you a bit of what we do to prepare for the release of our product.

The last couple of months I have focused entirely on designing our user interfaces, the user experience and the interactions needed for a trader to take a trading idea through algorithm design, backtesting, simulation on a live market (paper trading) and to live trading with real money.  This will be the interface and the tools our customers and users will make real money with. The plan is to make the process trustworthy, powerful, user-friendly and with a slight tint of fun added.  This is hard work that takes time to mature, and takes both experience as well as empathy for the user’s needs. The same kind of hard work is also happening to our trading backend.  To ensure the robustness and user experience that our users deserve, the design of the whole system have been designed from inside-out and outside-in with the user as the sole focus.  What is the best system we can make for a trader that wants to trade algorithmically? How can we ensure that our user is in control of his algorithms?  How can we ensure that the system responds robustly and with precision during design and execution? How can KolibriFX be the system of choice for traders, and the system our users enjoy using?

Of course, the designs that our team came up with is no guarantee for success.  So in May we asked our friends in Fludo to work with us in June to go through the interactions and design.  Fludo is a company in Bergen that specializes in User Experience (UX), interaction and visual design, and we had the fortune of working with Kenneth Gangstø who is their UX designer and Americo Ferrieira who does visual design.  Luckily they got really excited by our concept and we have had a very productive June.  There are few things better when building software than when you have excited and very talented people working together.  We were that lucky, and there were significant innovations in how we can work with financial data.

The result of the work is what I’d call crazy good, so I am really optimistic for the implementation during the summer. Of course, as a small company of three people, investing months and hiring other people just to ensure that our customers are getting the absolute best software is a significant investment,  but we believe in happy and excited customers, so we put our hard work and money to accomplish just that.  To further underline that our focus is on the user, the Kolibri team is joined by Kenneth and Americo again in August to help us ensure that every esthetic and interactive detail is right.  Details are everything.

I promise to bring more updates during summer, including some more details of the cool design that you will get a chance to see and enjoy later this year

Cheers,

Stig

PS: A quick teaser of one of the sketches we have from our price blotter. Clear, concise and pleasing to the eye. Never mind the nonsensical graphs and numbers — this is definitely a mockup.

Sketch/Mockup Dashboard

We’re back on the release train! Today’s stop is Milestone 6, dubbed Idefix. As you can see, we have started using cute code names for our monthly releases. (Or, you could say, we have reverted to old sins acquired in pre-Kolibri projects).

For all intents and purposes, M6 is an interim release that lays the groundwork for the massive strides we need to take both on the user interface and the trading system side, this summer. It has long been clear to us that our prototype user interface needed a rethink. We are finally in a position to devote the time and resources to realize that goal.

To this end, we are gathering a bigger team of developers for the front-end team in Bergen, in parallel with preparing our code base for the upcoming user interface overhaul. Kenneth Gangstø and Magnus Hoff will be helping us realize a total revamp of the user interface this summer, making it both efficient and pleasurable to use.

While the trading logic side hasn’t received nearly as much attention for this release, we have some great news to share on that side, too. We have brought in Ali Sabil and Johann Prieur of Tillit Technologies. Their expertise in building high-performance and robust distributed systems will be put to good use to ensure that our entire trading pipeline is rock solid and fast. They are currently working on improving the scalability and performance of our historical data storage system.

The task force we have amassed to help tackle our front- and backend challenges, have in large part been made possible by the startup grant we received from Innovation Norway a few months ago. Cheers!