James Kelly

A forward thinking businessman from the East coast commissioned Talk of the Trade. His vision was of a web site where people could come and see professional stock traders exercising the past time of day trading in real time.

There was to be a twist; a panel of four “professionals” would be executing trades during daily broadcasts, and a trained chimpanzee would also be making trades with a special control panel.

The goal was to see if the strategies used by the real people would be able to beat a trained chimp.

At the time, audio and video streaming was in its infancy. Couple that with much smaller bandwidth and lots of browser compatibility considerations and you ended up with a real challenge.

My team and I were able to overcome all these challenges as elegantly as could be expected considering the technology available at the time. The project was a success but ironically, the funding agent ran dry due to a decline in the stock market. In short, this was when the “bubble burst”.