More than a year ago, I helped Iperia with one of its first demos of the then-under-development service creation platform IperiaVX. The demo was for a “trader desktop” - an integration of voice and data functions in a portal for a hypothetical financial broker.

One of the examples in the demo was a stock watch situation. Using IperiaVX, the trader could quickly see when a stock fell below a pre-defined alert level, and a list of her clients with holdings in that stock. As a result, the trader could record a single voice broadcast about the situation, and with a few clicks, send the message out to all the relevant clients with instructions on how to take action - sell it off, buy it for the dollar-cost averaging, etc.

Now, just expand that to the scale of a multi-billion-dollar financial services firm - like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or Bear Stearns, for example. How happy would their clients be to get that kind of rapid information? And how much in trading commissions would that generate?

Especially on a day like today, when the stock market is diving, having a service like this to offer isn’t just good in the short term. It’s a competitive advantage.

So my mind snapped to that demo this morning, and a lot’s changed since I wrote and recorded the voiceover track for that old trader desktop. But the potential to help traders and their clients react fast to market moves - that opportunity still exists.