Robert Passarella Joins Radar Blogging Team--O’Reilly Media Alert: Wall Street meets Web 2.0

Sebastopol, CA—O’Reilly Media’s closely tracked Radar blog has amped up its coverage of the game-changing Web 2.0 technologies that are bringing exciting new data sources and research tools to the investment world. And the recent addition of Wall Street veteran and Money:Tech 09 conference co-chair Robert Passarella to the blogging team means Radar will be regularly spotlighting and analyzing the alternative data and news sources available on the Internet.

Passarella brings to Radar his longstanding interest in the intersection of business and technology along with his innovative and original analysis about harnessing collective intelligence. Indeed, in his first post earlier this month, Equity Research in the Age of Web 2.0, he challenged the investment community to get the Internet edge:

“Everyone on the buy side and sell side has Bloomberg, Reuters, and Dow Jones. And if everyone knows everything at the same time what advantage is that?” wrote Passarella, who has worked for Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns. “The key is to meld the old with the new. Mixing your custom newfound data with established sources from your vendors to provide leading-edge mashups that help you complete or flesh out a company’s position within the competing forces--think Michael Porter on steroids.”

“So where are we headed?” asked Passarella. “We are headed to a place where the tools, practices, and techniques are starting to emerge. It’s a place where anyone with a need and drive can learn to scrape data, do their own automated channel checks, while benchmarking and creating reference data. Have an idea; model it yourself, grab the data from Amazon, benchmark it against Yahoo Finance, and set up your filters in Google Reader for stories or articles related to your themes.”

Tune in to Passarella on Radar to learn how Wall Street and Web 2.0 can work together.