We have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the content on our site, but quite a few people expressed interest in seeing more data. A few months later, WikiData was born. We wanted the feature to contribute to the overall effort of providing community members with a cohesive narrative on the companies and industries in which they are interested in investing. This meant that we needed more meaningful data. Revenue and net income have an obvious place in the valuation of companies, but understanding the factors that influence these two omnipresent metrics can be invaluable to investors. For instance, showing that net income has fallen because the price that an airline pays per gallon of fuel has doubled over the last 3 years adds a whole new dimension of value. Providing a mechanism for comparing the fuel costs for multiple airlines adds an another facet by allowing the community to see how industry wide trends can affect individual companies within an industry in different ways. WikiData is still in its infancy, but it is growing rapidly and will eventually cover thousands of companies across more than 100 industries.  Here’s a list of industries that have already been populated with WikiData.

The NCAA tournament was pretty exciting this year…especially for Mike, who picked Kansas to go all the way and won the office pool. The final game was pretty exciting - how about that three pointer by Chalmers to tie it? Mike was curled up on the couch in nervous anxiety as KU trailed by 9 with two minutes to go…then suddenly couldn’t stop yelling “Oh Boy! What a SUPER SWELL shot! I win!” as Kansas poured it on in OT.

Tim enjoyed some satisfaction early on as he watched his alma mater Stanford pound Roger’s Cornell. Poor Roger suffered most from bracket-busters like Davidson, while Parker was somehow vindicated in his LAME strategy of picking only the favorites when all the number one seeds made it to the Final Four for the first time in history. Rog came in last among those who filled out the entire bracket, and so he got last pick of the prizes…we’re still waiting for him to row the 10-K erg piece that he owes. Mike, meanwhile, will be sporting a mean Wikinvest lab coat in the new offices next month.

Can’t wait ’til next year, when the Madness strikes again.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of interest in the Bulls and Bears sections of articles. We originally envisioned the bulls and bears articles developing in ways similar to the neutral articles - one cohesive story woven together in a narrative. Sometimes we found people doing that, but a lot of the time, we saw contributors come in and add a specific bulls or bears reason, and it was often hard to rank the importance of any given reason compared to the others. So we’ve been working on the next iteration of the Bulls/Bears feature which we’re launching next week. There are two big improvements to how it works:

1. You can now create individual Bullish or Bearish reasons for a stock (instead of needing to incorporate them into an article). Of course, like most things on Wikinvest, you can improve an existing reason by editing it. An added bonus: all your editing is done in-line!
2. We want the Wikinvest community to help determine the relative importance of the reasons by voting whether they agree or disagree with the reason.

Check out the new feature by clicking on the Bulls or Bears tab on a company article.

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).

I’m down in Austin with Carol at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival - we’re a finalist for a 2008 SXSW Web Awards that are being held tomorrow night. *fingers crossed*

(A little bonus picture for you meat lovers: This is the massive bbq pit at the famous Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, TX. We’re flying back to San Francisco, CA with fifteen pounds of this stuff for the hungry Wikinvest Team.)

We’re in New York today giving the folks attending MoneyTech 2008 a little sneak preview of a feature called WikiData that we’ll be launching in a month or two. Although we’re not quite ready to unveil it because we’re still putting on the finishing touches, here’s the basic idea. We’ve been hard at work building a wiki-like platform for financial data. This isn’t the same old financial data you find on a lot of other investing sites (stuff like income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements). This platform will help capture metrics that measure and compare companies in an industry. This kind of data is usually publicly available in a variety SEC filings and company annual reports, but it takes a huge amount of effort to comb through it all. So we’re building a repository of this data to collect it all in one place. Each data point will also have the source reference.

In case you’ve never heard of Money:Tech, it is a conference organized by Paul Kedrosky and the folks at O’Reilly (the producers of Web 2.0 and ETech) focused on exploring what happens at the intersection of Web 2.0 and Wall Street. It was pretty fun sharing the same stage with folks like Jim Cramer and Paul Kedrosky!

Woooo! Rock Band has arrived, just in time for a much needed morale boost as we’ve been preparing to demo WikiData at MoneyTech. Mike has quickly staked his claim as the resident drumming guru, exhibiting his percussionary prowess with fast and furious freestyle drum solos. Roger and I have mostly stuck to jamming on the guitar, and I sing occasionally too, while Parker alternates between vocals and drumming. This is one hell of an addictive game, and it’s unclear whether RockBand will ultimately increase or decrease our productivity. Still, we really can’t wait to download more songs as they become available on XBox Live. In the meantime, the upstanding residents of Noe Valley will continue to enjoy a free rock show every afternoon around 2pm as they walk their dogs past our office.

(PS, you can actually read more about investing in Rock Band on Wikinvest.)

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

Foos is here!

We really should have done this awhile ago, but we heard from enough of you that you wanted to be able to subscribe to a feed of the Daily Angle that we decided to build the feature last week. Over time, we’ll add more things you can subscribe via RSS for all you feed demons - send us feedback if you have any particular requests.