“ A statesman is very busy, and he needs to be very well informed. So what he learns has to be delivered smartly and quickly.
How? - President Obama receives every morning a report called “the President’s Daily Briefing Book”. He also carries a (security-modified) BlackBerry, which keeps him connected wherever he is. This must be challenge for his staff. How do inform a man, if he only has five, 10- or 20 minutes for it each morning? How do you ensure that he remains totally in charge, when he is on the move?

I am no statesman, but actually I have, in a modest way, a problem similar to his. I have been an active financial trader throughout most of my life, but I cannot - and will not - sit in front of a PC screen all day. I often just have five, 10 or 20 minutes for an overview of the global financial markets. Over the years I have missed a “Lars Tvede’s Daily Briefing Book” and a method to stay in control when I was travelling, vacationing, or at meetings.

Simple, but not stupid

I have often looked for solutions. Yes, I did subscribe to real time services with endless jungles of financial data, and yes, I could check market prices with a mobile phone. But no, it didn’t solve my problem, because what I wanted was fast, actionable, mobile intelligence. I needed a global scanning system that would point me to the biggest risks and the best opportunities worldwide – in no time. And it should alert me with relevant text, numbers and graphs, if something important to me happened.

I discovered that my friends Peter Ohnemus and Michael Stennicke shared my problem, so we decided to make a company together to solve it – for ourselves and for others. Our aim was to make “The Apple of finance”: Simple and mobile, but not stupid.

We founded CarryQuote and wrote requirement specifications in 2006 and started hiring people and setting up offices and filing patents the year after.

By the way, who are Michael and Peter? A graduate in engineering and economics, Michael is a former financial trader and successful hedge fund manager who has won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award. Peter is a board member of Rothschild's Bank and winner of the Swiss Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1999. He has participated in four IPOs (public listings of companies).

Member website and smartphone

The CarryQuote service contains a web/based global market scanner and a smartphone application. The website scans the entire world for opportunities. It shows what is cheap, what is expensive, what is overbought and oversold, what is risky, and what is not. It compares nominal yields and real yields of all markets and asset classes. In summary, it gives you the total market feel in a few minutes as well real time alerts to all events that are critical to any user through the day. It is the "Daily Briefing Book" that I had dreamed of for so many years, combined with the famous "red hotline" a president also has.

The mobile part of the CarryQuote service works on PCs, iPads and all five smartphone platforms (Microsoft Mobile, Symbian, Android, BlackBerry and Apple iOS). The application takes a few seconds to download and the alerts are instant. The website and the mobile service talk to each other. On the website you can tick what you are mostly interested in, including critical price levels and financial indicator levels. The system will subsequently alert you on the phone, if any of those levels are reached - also if your PC is turned off. The alert philosophy means that "no news" is good news in the sense that you can relax and focus on whatever else you are doing. However, if you do get a mobile alert, and if you decide to continuously follow something new that you didn't plan on, you can send that instruction from the mobile.

Alliance with CNBC

In 2009 we signed a strategic cooperation agreement with global financial media giant CNBC whereby we would integrate their vast content feeds in CarryQuote's system and cooperate closely on global marketing. It turned out to be both fun and instructive to work with CNBC's team, as they brought us a huge knowledge about user ergonomics and media psychology which we didn't have ourselves. By working with them as design partner and by jointly testing the system on different user groups, I think we managed to create something even more intuitive and user-friendly than we could have achieved on our own.

So what was the result? - A product that includes more than 95% of global trading action in real time, three simultaneous none stop financial video streams, numerous daily video clips with opinions and highlights, 200,000 searchable video clips, alternative investments prices and indicators, text news, global real time alerts on almost anything you can think of, ratings systems, great charting, and much, much more. To get a sense of it, just click on these three videos:

CNBC launched the retail version of this product in December 2010, and the take-up was instant - explosive, almost - and exceeded our wildest imaginations.

White label and real time snapshots

One reason for the success is that that none of this is expensive. Again inspired by Apple, we have negotiated first-ever "ITunes" style agreements with stock exchanges and other data providers, so that users don't need to sign and pay monthly fixed fees to each of the global stock exchanges on the system. Instead they pay a tiny click fee every time they get a real time update, and we bundle a number of these realtime updates into the monthly package. We call that "real time snapshots". By "real time" I mean that the price you see on the mobile screen is probably less than two seconds old.

It's professional data, in a simple format, and at affordable prices. In early 2011 we launch the corporate versions where financial institutions or local business media companies can put their own brand on CarryQuote, and they can add their own, proprietary data streams to make the service unique for their staff and clients. As a general rule, we can brand the service within 2 days, adabt it completely to the styleguide used by a bank within 2 weeks and make a version that includes the banks' own content such as research documents and video clips within two months. And they can also use our battletested platform to simply distribute their in-house data to clients. The global sales of these white lable solutions is headed by Christian Erlandson, who was previosuly Head of Sales in Thomson Reuters UK, where he was personally responsibel for over 1 billion dollars in annual revenues.

Red Herring Global 100 Award

The world's leading venture capital magazine, Red Herring, conducts every year a screening of thousands of start-up companies in Asia, North America and Europe and produces on that basis a list of the 1.600 companies that they believe have the highest potential for generating "explosive growth". The best 200 are invited to present their businesses before judges in California, and the top 100 are subsequently elected. We were delighted when CarryQuote in 2009 received this coveted Award. Former recipients include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.

We have also receive the Bully Award as one of Europes 30 most promising private tech companies and the IMD Swiss Startup Award as one of the most promising young companies in Switzerland.

I believe that 5-10 years from now, this is a billion-dollar company. And I have never had as much fun with a company.