InvestorsEdge Overview
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Who We Are Our Corporate Partners Our Clients System Configurations

Hello from InvestorsEdge
We have been flooded with E-mail over the past few months with questions from our users. By far the most popular question has been, "How do you do that?". So we took it upon ourselves to design a page that will answer most of the questions that people have about who we are, how we do what we do, and what our service has to offer.
Who are we?
Ethos Corporation was formed in April, 1995, with the vision to create a site on the World Wide Web that would not only offer up-to-the-minute financial information, but would also act as a forum for publicly traded companies to present their corporate financial information. Ethos Corporation was formed by 2 programmers, 2 former institutional desk managers, an investor relations professional, and a media specialist. Ethos Corporation is headquartered in Mill Valley, California, and can be reached at (415) 389-4799.

The Growth of InvestorsEdge

The framework for InvestorsEdge was created in May, 1995. This framework included stock and major index information. The site was officially launched online in July, 1995. Mutual Fund information, Money Markets, and Closed-End Funds were added in August. The Personal Portfolio Tracker and Auto-Refresh feature were added in August as well. Headline News and Custom Indices, such as the Internet Market Watch, were added in October. In early November, the number of securities in the portfolios increased from 10 to 15, and in December, the Most Active section was added to the service.

For 1996, we have some exciting enhancements that will be made to InvestorsEdge. Early in 1996, we are launching a Premium Service that includes the following services:

    50 Stock and Mutual portfolio
    Earnings estimates: yearly/quarterly/projected
    Analyst Actions and Coverage
    52 Week High/Low and P/E ratios
    Consensus Buy/Sell Recommendations
    Research Report Headlines
These services will be available on every publicly traded company in America. There will be a service charge for this Premium Service, but it will certainly be the most timely and accurate information available on the Web.

Also coming in 1996 will be the I.P.O. section. This section will include information on companies that have gone public in the past year, and which companies have filed to go public. Unlike other services on the Web, InvestorsEdge will allow users to perform a historical search on companies by date of I.P.O., then dynamically calculate the price it was offered, the current price, and the net change in the value of the security. Of course, this feature will be free to the end user ... and be unparalleled on the Web.

Our Corporate Partners

The technology driving InvestorsEdge, combined with the explosive user growth, has resulted in several successful Strategic Alliances with some of the top Internet-related companies. Our corporate partners include Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Nelson Publications, and Data Broadcasting Corp. It is through these partnerships that InvestorsEdge can continue to provide the best financial information on the Web.

Our Clients

It is through the corporate sponsorship of our clients that InvestorsEdge can provide the caliber of information free to the end user. A list of our clients can be seen by clicking here. Giving a broader exposure base to our clients, allows them to have their investor relations materials made available to an unlimited number of potential investors. By acting as an augmentation of our clients' investor relations departments, their job is made easier, and their companies information is made more available than ever.

How We Do It !

InvestorsEdge is powered by Microsoft and Hewlett Packard! From our NT Servers and Microsoft Internet Information Servers that feed you the HTML (web pages), to the SQL server that powers the back-end, we are a Microsoft shop.

Our static-page server - WWW.IRNET.COM - is a dual Pentium 100 with 1GB FDD and 128MB RAM. We are running Microsoft Internet Information Server on NT Server 3.51. WWW houses all of the "static" pages and Java applets. Until recently, every page on InvestorsEdge, with the exception of the homepage, was dynamically generated by the database. We changed this when performance became an issue. Now we have individual "static" pages for stock and fund request, portfolio login, clients, and portfolio setup.

The brains behind InvestorsEdge, SERVER1.IRNET.COM, is a Hewlett Packard NetServer 5/133 LS2. It's a three way Pentium 133 with 128MB RAM and three 2GB hard drives running Microsoft NT 3.51, the SQL Server, and a second Internet Information Server. This HP NetServer provides excellent network throughput and disk redundancy through the use of NT disk mirroring.

Finally, a single pentium machine is responsible for collecting data from Data Broadcasting and sending it to the SQL Server.

When CGI requests are made to WWW or SERVER1, they are relayed to the SQL Server on SERVER1 via a named pipes network. SERVER1 receives the stock request from WWW and then pulls the requested information from the appropriate table. The appropriate DB Library is then executed to take the data and form it into HTML. The HTML is then passed back via CGI to the Web server (either machine), and back to the end user. The libraries and scripts were all developed by Ethos, Inc.

We are pleased to announce a substantial performance increase thanks to the upgrade of our SQL Server from MS 6.0 to the new Microsoft SQL Server 6.5. This upgrade took place in July, and the user throughput has increased 20%! Thanks Microsoft! If anyone out there is thinking of migrating to a Microsoft SQL Server for use on the Internet, we would be happy to talk to you about it !

Server Statistics

    Average Hits per day : +- 1M Average daily distinct user accesses : 18,500
    Average daily SQL Server transactions : 2.2M
    Average daily SQL processes : 3.4M (1.2M stock feed updates, 2.2M user requests)
We hope this may have answered any questions you may have had about who we are, what we do, and how we do it. If you still have further questions, please feel free to email us at info@irnet.com

Thanks for using the service, we hope you enjoy it !