Oh! You make me laugh so much. Sorry old bean.

We all understand that the market can be driven by rumors. None of us are nearly as stupid as you might think. Your reply, in a sense, demonstrates the essense of gimmick thinking at Streambase.

First of all, there is no one, not even Google, not event the National Security Agency (NSA) with the intelligence in the processing, to create trading strategies based on processing unstructured text from untrusted sources on the Internet. You are marketing a gimmick.

In other words, there are many companies (and organizations) with huge bankrolls, infrastucture, IT and engineering that make Streambase look like a nat on the side of Mount Fuji. These companies don’t make gimmicky claims they can process rumors, as you just have posted (thats for the post, btw).

You have replied (for Streambase), and in doing so, demonstrate the nature of gimmick thinking.

Streambase cannot process rumors from Twitter and create trading strategies that are reliable. You don’t have the technology, the expertise or the capital to do it. You are just trying to get people to believe that you do but you don’t. It is a gimmick.

You make me laugh with your closing “get with the beat Bass”…. as if not believing in your nonsense gimmick marketing, understanding the limits of query-based rule processing, knowing the challenge of processing unstructured text, and the fact that companies much smarter and better capitalized than Streambase do not process text based rumors from untrusted sources to create trading strategies. Maybe Bernard Madoff told his clients that is how he makes money for them?

You, get with the beat Menzies, and learn a little bit about the actual technologies and challenges behind what you are trying to sell. Processing rumors via Twitter using a query-based rule processor for electronic trading. It is a gimmick!

You make me laugh. I needed a good laugh, it is good for health, thanks! I hope the private firms that fund Streambase do not trade that way (of course they do not) otherwise, they will not have any money to fund you in the growing years.

How about that gimmicky Streambase amnesty program, heh? What’s next?

“Announcement: Streambase has a new plugin that can read your email and determine when you should stop cheating on your wife!”

Or maybe this one:

“Announcement: Streambase has processing intelligence that no other company in the world has, no matter how great or big. We have the “Holy Grail Stream Processing Engine. You can buy it, plug it in, process Twitter rumors, and never have to work another day in your life!”

Yours, Tim

PS, RE: iPhone, it is great product, Apple has great marketing. They don’t rely on gimmicks. They rely on quality. Everyone I know with an iPhone loves it.

Q. When was the last time you used the iphone as a spirit level whilst building your ie (Japanese for ‘house’)?

Seriously, markets are driven on rumour (buy) & fact (sell) - why on earth would one not consider Twitter as a valuable source of rumour?

Get with the beat Bass…….

My apologies for the contrived last paragraph. I did not know how to bring the story to a concise close.

Yours, Tim

Hope all is well.

Streambase is a bit unique on gimmicks. For example, a number of year ago, without any major software player (Microsoft, Oracle, BEA (now Oracle), TIBCO, IBM, etc) in the low-latency stream processing space (yet), Streambase aggressively marketed and pushed their StreamSQL “standard.”

This, of course, made no sense. How can a small startup drive a “standard” in a market where the major players have not even entered the playing field?

I am not sure if that would be considered “a gimmick” or just plain folly. However, to me, it seemed gimmicky, because people who understand the market know that a small privately funded, single product family (for the most part), niche player cannot set the future standard in a market where the “big boys” make the rules and niche players follow.

Cheers.