Fintech vendor Iress is promising to bring market data to the masses through a tool that allows people to request share process information through Twitter.
Anyone wanting to get a price can tweet the the @iress_data account with a company's share code and the exchange it is listed on - for example, for Apple, '@iress_data #aapl.nas'. They will be tweeted back with the day's high, low and change along with a timestamp of when the information was last updated.
Users have to follow the Iress account to get data and the service only covers firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, Australian Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
Ashley Mendelowitz, MD, Emea and North America, Iress, says: "Iress Web Services is a global market data repository that collects live data from most of the world's major exchanges. Our API allows our products to pull data from that repository, and we wanted to see if we could tie it into Twitter's API to make market data readily available to people who might not otherwise be able to access it."
Iress says that in the future it could enlist Twitter's direct message function to allow users to check their personal portfolios if they have an Iress account, or even build custom widgets for listed companies' investor relations pages that update regularly and automatically.