As we mentioned in our last post, Wikinvest now features lots of new data features and interesting visualizations on our Data Central and Financial Statement (Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Cash Flow Statement) pages.  With all of this new information on Wikinvest, though, we realized we’d need a better way to navigate through it all.

Meet Bling — our new financial metric search engine. Have you ever tried searching the web for GE’s 2004 market cap? Or Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income trend for the past 5 years?  Maybe you have a presentation and you need to find Sony’s revenue for the past 14 years?  Now, you can use Bling to search for and satisfy any and all of these data needs.

For example, search for “GE 2004 market cap” or “BAC Pre-Tax Income” or “Sony Revenue” and you’ll get the following, respectively:

• General Electric’s 2004 Market Cap
  
• Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income
  
• Sony’s Revenue
  

Note: Bling searches will also work in the standard Wikinvest search bar.

These new data pages show how a particular metric has changed over the past several years and quarters as well as an assessment of whether this is a High, Low, or Average value compared to the rest of the industry.  Using the sidebar, you can jump to another year using the Time Machine or jump to a similar metric page for one of the company’s competitors.  If you want to read more about what a metric means, just use the Dictionary in the right sidebar to find out how it’s used, how it’s calculated, and a few examples of how this information is used.

As usual, all of our charts on these data pages are available for you to embed on your blogs.  Happy searching and feel free to let us know what you think of the new stuff!

Great news. Thanks to you and the rest of the Wikinvest community’s contributions, we’ve just been nominated for a Webby Award for the best Financial Services site on the web. In addition, our nomination makes us eligible for the People’s Choice Award, an award decided by none other than you! (Yes you.)

To vote for Wikinvest, register with Webby Awards and then pull up your ballot to vote for your favorite financial services wiki website! Fans can vote until April 30th to help improve our chances of winning the People’s Choice Award. Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and awarded at the Webby awards ceremony in New York City on June 8th.

Thanks again to all for all of your contributions — Wikinvest is nothing without all of you. If you haven’t been back to the site in a while, now’s the time to help prove the strength of our community. Drop in and write a definition, analyze a company, or help explain some of the markets recent ups and downs.

We admit it; it’s been a while since we updated the Wikinvest blog.  We’ve been too busy writing simplified investment content and developing useful tools for finance bloggers.  In our place, though, we are happy to announce that the New York Times just wrote a feature about Wikinvest.

Check out the article for the Times’ review, comments from a few of our contributors, and to catch a glimpse of Wikinvest headquarters.  Special thanks to all of our contributors who volunteered to speak to the Times about their experiences with Wikinvest!

Over the last month or two, we’ve been working hard to connect some of the web’s best financial bloggers. The result — the Wikinvest Wire — is here. The Wire syndicates related investing content and adds a mini news feed to the bottom of our blog partner’s posts, something like this:

In addition, we include links to related blog posts directly on Wikinvest articles.

The Wire is designed to give you, the reader, even more information about stocks and investing ideas. Readers of Wikinvest Wire partner blogs will be able to find more blog posts about their favorite topics. If they decide they need a bit more of a neutral voice, they can hop over to the one of our related, neutral Wikinvest articles. (The same goes for readers of neutral Wikinvest topics looking for some good ol’ fashioned blogger spin.)

For all of you bloggers out there, the Wire will syndicate your content and make it available on Wikinvest and over 100 Wire partner sites, including Kudlow’s Money Politic$, Random Roger’s Big Picture, Financial Armageddon, and Pharma’s Cutting Edge. Keep an eye out for the Wikinvest Wire on your favorite financial blogs, and if you don’t see it, tell the blogger to get with it and sign up for the Wikinvest Wire!

Coming soon, you’ll even find the Wikinvest Wire on several mainstream media sites…

We’ve been working with the team at Netvibes to build a widget that lets you track your stocks directly from Netvibes.  Enter in a list of stocks you track, and you can get stock quotes, WikiCharts, and some Wikinvest analysis right from your Netvibes homepage.   It’s still in beta, so let us know what features we should add to the widget!

You can add the widget to your Netvibes by clicking here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/294187/wikinvest-stock-widget

Today, Wikinvest launches the web’s first-ever interactive, embeddable stock chart. The charts are as easy to embed as a YouTube video, and your users can click, drag, pan, zoom, and play with no page refresh. And it’s all completely free.

If you’ve ever tried to include a stock chart in your blog, you know it’s a real pain: Press prnt-scrn while you’re on some finance website, paste it into a photo editor, crop the image, save, upload the image to your blog, include it in your post. No longer.

Our charts are zippy and responsive, because we think there’s nothing worse than a slow stock chart. Here’s an example chart, for Yahoo over the last seven months. You’ll also notice wikinvest’s user-generated annotations explaining major price movements:

The charts are fully customizable - you can embed a chart for almost all companies traded on U.S. and international exchanges, as well as commodities traded on CBOT and other exchanges. You can select zoom levels, date ranges, size, and whether or not to display annotations.

You can create your own custom chart at http://www.wikinvest.com/special/Embed_Stock_Chart

The award was really earned by the entire Wikinvest Community which has helped make Wikinvest into what it is today. Thanks to you all and congratulations!

Here is Mike below with the award (yes, he’s very very happy).

In case you missed it, there was a full page article on Wikinvest in the Wall Street Journal this morning. We were glad to see that one of our contributors, Scott Redmond, was quoted in the article.  A big thanks to all of you who have already contributed to Wikinvest

In case you’re curious, we’ve gotten a bunch of coverage surrounding our official launch. Check us out in Wired, TechCrunch, Mashable, Podtech, VentureBeat - keep them coming!

After months of hard work by the entire team, we’re taking off the covers this afternoon. It’s a little like giving birth to a child - you’re not quite sure what it’ll be like when you set off on the journey, but you’re pretty confident that it’ll all turn out well. We’re pretty darn excited to have the world start playing with Wikinvest! Many thanks to all of you who made this day possible.