VISUALIZATION SOFTWARE
If you think the stock market looks a bit funny these days, you should see it through Clem Chambers' eyes. In his world, publicly traded companies look like multicolored fish swimming in an aquarium, or nails of various lengths extruding from a landscape, or a system of planets spiraling around a sun. It all pours out of a visualization program called 2C that Chambers developed two years ago while running On-line, a London-based game company he cofounded. Chambers aimed to create a visual that would help him understand how On-line was faring in its market segment. "I wanted information the way a gamer wants it - all of it at once, using high-end 3-D graphics."
Most of the ideas and code that went into making 2C were left over from On-line game projects like The Interactive Rocky Horror Show and Lawnmower Man. It was an easy port, says Chambers: "The stock market is the best multiplayer game on Earth."
Last fall, Chambers created ADVFN.com (Advanced Financial Network), a spinoff company built around 2C, and in March he took ADVFN public on London's AIM exchange. The company's stock market Web site (www.advfn.com) is aimed at the individual investor, and it features live quotes, news feeds, and an active bulletin board scene. "I think of the site as a kind of multiuser dungeon," says Chambers. "The people who tend to do well in those are the ones who cooperate, make alliances, and share information."
The heart of ADVFN, however, is the 2C stock visualization that brings financial information alive. One mode, Toplist, transforms dozens of rankings into a forest of bars that rise, fall, or change color as a stock moves up or down a list. Drag a cursor over any of the bars, and more detailed information appears in another window. (More of Chambers' work accompanies the Wired Index - see page 243 - and frequently appears in New Money.)
Other 2C designs are pure whimsy, such as Fish, a variation on the stock-market-as-solar-system view in which the planets have fins. Says Chambers, "Someone thought it might appeal to Japanese investors." Or your typical daytrading sharks.
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