This morning at 6:19:51am, the SEC accepted for publication Google's IPO prospectus. Sometime later they actually published it and PubSub.com notified me of it at 6:25:29am -- just over five minutes later. At 6:42:55am, almost 23 minutes after the SEC released the prospectus and 17 minutes after PubSub had alerted me about it, I finally got a notification from Google that the prospectus had been released. Note: Google used a Morgan Stanley mail server (picfbh6.ms.com) to send the announcement.
I had thought that as a registered bidder on Google shares (I didn't actually buy any), that I would be receiving notifications about the IPO from Google much faster than if I had relied on other channels. However, throughout the process of the auction, as Google made new filings and modified older ones, I consistently received notifications from PubSub.com about 20 to 30 minutes before I got similar notifications "straight from the horse's mouth" -- i.e. from Google itself.
Clearly, not everyone needs to be the first to read SEC Edgar filings... But, for some people speed *is* important. An advantage of only a few minutes in getting news can be, for some folk, the source of significant revenue or opportunity...
Back when Google first filed their IPO, we at PubSub.com were among the first to notice. For instance, we were able to get credit for being the first to post about the S1 at Slashdot.org. We've seen throughout the Google IPO process that we get the news out first with PubSub.com. I'm very, very pleased to see that we're delivering on the promise we've made to deliver news in near realtime. The system works. I hope you find it useful.
bob wyman
Bob,
admirable, but this raises the quandary of "what is the Value Proposition" for PubSub?
Is it the ability to find out about something faster than anyone else? Going back to the previous discussion around "enterprise vs Consumer", and the inferred need to focus on the "consumer view", one must look at the potential markets for timely information. Is finding out about a google filing, before one's peers, going to give one an advantage? Given that the mechanism is purely one for information disemmination (and not, say, bidding for something) then the "ROI" is debatable. And, of course, what is ROI on a "free service". Turning this around to becoming say a "bidding engine" might be a direction to head...
If, for arguments sake, Ebay got their act together and XMLified. Then, I could ask PubSub to tell me when someone posts a "widget" on ebay. Further, because of the "other data" that can be matched by PubSub in an XML structure, I could ask for widgets, for sale to my home Country, within a price range of... And get a range of "bid for it", notify me, lookup the auction price in comparision to a "shopping service", only bid if it's x% below RRP, etc etc etc.
No doubt the guys down the road in Wall street can tell you war stories of automated bidders, so there is
a need for more thought and safeguards in this approach..
Inherently, to offer a "faster" deal, there needs to be a level of guarantee, and predictability. Pubsub, is inherently dependent on intervening technology, generically the diversity of the intervening network, but more specifically, the operation (under load) of aggregators. That needs to be understood, and compensated for, to take it to enterprise grade...
I recall the DEC "RTR" - Reliable Transaction Router product, which guaranteed, not only the delivery of a message, but also within a specified time frame. Is this the potential target for the "Enterprise pubsub"?
Posted by: Peter Quodling | August 23, 2004 at 19:42