Progress Update

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Hi everyone!

We are still on track for a an Early-Bird release near the end of Q2. With a strong development focus and short deadlines we have not prioritised blogging and tweeting. Sadly, before we know it, months have passed without any updates! Rest assured – we are alive and well and running on full steam ahead towards our beta release.

The team is working day and night and are very excited as we move ever closer to our goal of making algorithmic trading possible for real traders, through revolutionary online technology!

We are happy to see that our list of registered Early Birds keeps growing every month, and we encourage you to sign up ensure that you are among the first to receive news and information about the launch.

As the next 6 weeks will be even busier as we approach the release date, you probably shouldn’t expect many updates – but we will do our best!

KolibriFX is two years old! Happy birthday!

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Yesterday marked the second anniversary here at KolibriFX. We’re officially two years old now! The Day of Genesis seems so far away already.

The past year has been the most eventful year so far in our short history. Some highlights:

  • In February we signed our first major deal, with a well-known Scandinavian financial institution
  • On April 1, the intrepid Stig Erik Sandø joined the team to help us take the big step from a working prototype to full product. This also meant a slight geographical expansion, as we branched out to Stig’s attic in Bergen
  • Less than two weeks later, we received a startup grant from Innovation Norway. This enabled us to bring in some very talented external consultants who have contributed with their great expertise
  • About a month after that, in May, we were officially ramen profitable!
  • In July, we were very happy to welcome Knut Arild Erstad as the latest addition to our team.
  • At the beginning of the summer, Stig and Knut had the honour of moving into our first proper office, in the Nyskapingsparken incubator in Bergen.
  • We received an R&D award from The Research Council of Norway and Innovation Norway in August. Naturally, we put the money to good use by starting to look for more hires immediately.
  • We launched our new web site in October, complete with its own Early Bird Access programme.
  • At the very start of 2012, yet another talented developer couldn’t resist our cool offices in Bergen: Michael Mortensen joined our band.

… and these are just the highlights we have blogged about. There has also been a lot of activity behind the facade.

All of us have been really busy producing code in between all the business developments reported above. We are super-excited about showing you the fruits of these labours in the months to come. A lot of people have already signed up to our Early Bird programme starting in Q2! We encourage you to sign up if you want to be among the first to receive news, screenshots and early access as we roll out.

We are currently putting together a timetable for when and where we will showing public demos of our technology for this year. We will keep you posted as this plan solidifies!

New Kolibri: Michael Mortensen

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More good news, everyone! Another talented Mr. Developer has decided to join our team. This time it’s our first foreign hire, sort of: Michael Mortensen. “Sort of”, because while Michael’s a Canadian, he’s been living in Norway for most of his life.

If you read our previous new hires posts, you should know the next part of the story by now:  Michael’s last place of employment was Vizrt, where he focused on developing low-latency/realtime systems for video and graphics playout. He has extensive experience from both front- and backend work.

After Knut let him in this morning (Michael was so eager to start that he showed up at the incubator before everyone else), he’s now properly configured and installed into our Bergen offices in Nyskapingsparken, alongside Knut and Stig.

In the coming months, Michael will help us making sure all your future trades are processed securely, by putting together a solid message passing and system integration solution for our upcoming trading platform.

New Website Launched!

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Check out www.kolibrifx.com !

So today we finally launched our new website, and we are very happy with how it turned out! Hopefully it will give you readers a good idea of what our business is about: integrating great ideas in a productive workflow, and enabling traders and non-programmers to build fast, secure and safe automated trading models.

Thanks to our friends at Fludo for doing a great job with the webdesign, and to our fellows in the trading community for great feedback along the way!

We really hope you guys like what you see, and that you sign up to invites for our early adopters programme!

Feel free to share your views on our new site by commenting on this post!

New KolibriFX Website Coming Soon!

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Hi Friends!

We said in an earlier post that a new KolibriFX website was in the works – and it was – but inevitably more pressing priorities made us put it on hold for a while.

But you will be pleased to know that it’s finally back on the agenda, and should be live by mid-September! We will do our best to make the site communicate our dream, and also reveal some of the cool features we are working on.

Don’t expect too much in terms of interaction in the initial version, but keen visitors will be able to put their name down for early invites.

We will continue – and increase – our blogging efforts, with named authors from the team. We will try to share as much as we can about how we do stuff, and shed light on many of the intricate details we encounter as traders, hackers and UX experts alike. Promise!

KolibriFX receives R&D award!

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We recently received another piece of really good news that we want to share with you: The Research Council of Norway has found us eligible for a programme called  SkatteFUNN.

SkatteFUNN is a tax-deduction scheme managed jointly by the Research Council, Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Tax Administration. It targets innovative companies that invest heavily in research and development.

The award will cover 20% of our research-related  expenses over the next 3 years. We’re of course investing all the money we receive directly into developing our innovative trading platform.

We are only too happy to get another external validation that we are not just truly innovative, but also have the right team in place to make this happen!

New Kolibri: Knut Arild Erstad

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Good news, everyone! (And this is good news.) We have a new addition to our team; Knut Arild Erstad joins us today (July 1st) as employee number four.

Knut’s last place of employment was VizRT, where he worked on both backend and frontend aspects of critical broadcasting systems used by a myriad of TV stations, such as Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN and BBC. He has extensive experience with computer graphics, in particular software to control graphics, virtual studios and video servers.

Our ploy of selling a next to impossible task combined with low wages worked yet again. Given his background and interest in computer graphics, Knut was hard pressed to resist the opportunity of working on domain-specific languages and visual modeling for currency trading. His primary focus over the next few months will be re-building our visual modeling editor with nimbler technology, to make it snappier and to give it a first-class user experience.

Knut is already fully configured and installed in Nyskapingsparken, and is working alongside Stig and our other hired guns in Bergen.

Designing for real people

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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.

Vertical Detail Dashboard

Sketch/Mockup Dashboard

Our first office!

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We have our first, real office. A place where we can work through the nights, swashbuckle with rubber swords, yell loudly to disturb the neighboring companies, and start hanging all kinds of geeky posters on the walls.

The office is part of  Nyskapingsparken (an incubator) at the VilVite centre, and from June 1, it is home to our Bergen frontend team. As luck would have it, Kenneth, our usability expert for the summer, has his office immediately next to ours, as his company also inhabits the incubator.

Milestone 6: Idefix

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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!