Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Google
Google Finance launched
After last month's rumors, Google took nobody by surprise today with the launch of Google Finance. The new financial portal is pretty slick, with a similar feel to Google Maps. Stock charts are powered by Flash rather than AJAX and have a very flexible interface. Along with all the usual info like market cap, volume, and so on, Google Finance also annotates its charts with recent news articles and even blog and newsgroup chatter. One feature I found cute is the "Management" are of the page that lists the company's higher ups—if you hover your mouse over one of their names, a little headshot of them will pop up. Ironically, when I hit the page for Apple (AAPL), it showed no photo for Steve Jobs, possibly the most-photographed CEO in the valley.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tom Biro said 10:49AM on 3-21-2006
If Google's groups were to catch on, this would be a serious player in the field that Yahoo! Finance has owned for a while now. The moving charts were very slick, I thought that the ability to click on each of the letters next to them and see where that was represented was pretty awesome.
Well, at least we now have some more fun and initiative going in a space that has been somewhat quiet for a while now.
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Shep Eddy said 1:06PM on 3-21-2006
I've used Yahoo Finance for years and Google offers nowhere near the depth of options for keeping track of one's portfolio. The charts are indeed slick but it's not enough for me to switch over to Google. What I would really like to see is a chart that tracks my portfolio as a whole (as if it were a mutual fund).
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Samuel said 7:49AM on 3-22-2006
Well why couldn't they fill in Franc for Google Maps at the same time!?!
Samuel
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