This was 2008, Welcome 2009
This year went by fast. It feels like we just started, squatting in a friends office in Midtown beginning of 
January.
In February we attended Money:Tech ‘08, anxious to discover potential competition. Having received good feedback and encouragement we continued and built our first prototype of Strateer. This prototype allows to visually build and backtest trading strategies in a matter of seconds. And more important it got us really excited about the prospect of having such a tool to better invest in the stock markets.
The prototype allowed us to raise our Angel round that finally closed in June. We started building a world class development team which ended up being distributed between China, Pakistan, Belarus, Germany, France and the US. With this team at our hands we built our first public product that launched in November: Alerts4all.com.
Alerts4all is the first easy-to-use real-time stock market alert tool for the individual investor. Wall Street tools for Main Street - Chapter 1. Blog reviews were positive and we landed articles in Barron’s and Marketwatch.
The meltdown of credit markets, stock markets and the overall economy was unsurprisingly the most affecting development for us. It affected our funding environment (-), the access to talent (+) and most important our customer (?).
In 2008 we saw a proliferation of financial blogging and the use of Twitter. Stocktwits is probably the most exciting development. Community driven investment discussions and decisions will be key for what we are up next year with Strateer.com
We would like to thank all those people that supported us with their ideas, their feedback, their contributed time and of course their check book last year. Without you we would not have been able to get that far.
2009 will be a challenge. We believe that Strateer is a child of the changes we see on the capital markets. 2009 will be about non-nonsense and getting things done on a tight budget. But 2009 will yield as well opportunities for small, innovative, fast and hungry companies. We are looking forward to continue to build this company with the enthusiasm and support of all the people around us.