In July a client of FastServers.Net was featured in Business Week Online with the featured articled called “InstantBull.com: Speed Demon”. I took some time to do a Q&A style interview with CEO, Gal Arav to find out how more about InstantBull.Com and his interaction with FastServers.Net.

The full article can be view online via “InstantBull.com: Speed Demon”.

(0) Tell me what www.InstantBull.com is, who uses it, and how they use it.

CEO Gal Arav: InstantBull.com is a free website that just launched at the end of
July and serves as a "lightning fast" interface to the world of stock market
investing. There are 3 main types of information that we aggregate: Stock
Message Boards, Stock Market Blogs and Investor Portal Information. Thousands of
investors have already adopted InstantBull.com - from amateurs to professionals,
and from day-traders to long-term investors. Users are telling us that they are
delighted to be able to use our technology to quickly view all their favorite
websites without having to open up multiple browser windows.

(1) What are the competitive advantages you are bringing to the market?

CEO Gal Arav: Faster, all-in-one access to best-in-class stock market
information. For example, compare our patent pending message board aggregation
to the originating websites such as Yahoo Finance, users can now blaze through
lots of messages by just hovering over the message titles. We’ve done away with
all the awkward back and forth clicking between message lists and their
corresponding messages. Here’s what Phil Lynch, former CEO of Reuters America,
said about us with regards to competing sites: "After using the InstantBull.com
site, I was impressed by many innovative, helpful and time-saving features that
I have not yet seen on other financial websites."

(2) Please tell me why you selected using a dedicated server setup for this
website?
CEO Gal Arav: Some startup companies do everything on the cheap and end up
paying with downtime, bottlenecks and overall user dissatisfaction. Thanks to
some good early angel investments, from the outset we decided to splash out on
top tier infrastructure. It made a lot of sense to setup a powerful dedicated
server solution capable of providing us with the horsepower required for a
real-time market research platform. I’m aware of dedicated server solutions that
FastServers.Net also have for customers with tighter budgets, but in our case we
decided to overshoot the norm. Our early funding also enabled us to go down the
expensive path of filing patents for our key technologies.

(3) After launching the website Business Week Online featured an article
about you, describe the overall article?
CEO Gal Arav: I think they liked it:
"InstantBull.com: Speed demon"
"Faster than a speeding bullet"
"The site is lightning fast, and there’s no software to download to get started.
Oh yeah, it’s free."
"Saves a bundle of time for investors who scan and participate in a number of
message boards"
"If you prefer to use one site to find essential financial information, stick
with Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. But if you like a variety of choices,
InstantBull has the goods."

(4) Tell me how you rely on FastServers.Net in regards to your website
hosting?
CEO Gal Arav: We’ve had almost no service hiccups and I can vouch for the
quality support we have received on those rare occasions - FastServer.Net’s
support people were polite and professionally resolved our issues as quickly as
possible.

(5) Tell me briefly about some of the challenges you have faced with
launching the website?
CEO Gal Arav: Spreading the word (we couldn’t resist calling this "spreading the
bull") about our new service is always going to be one of the biggest uphill
challenges and since we’re up against some real heavyweight competitors (e.g.
Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Dow Jones MarketWatch) we really hope that our
own users will help out by either telling their friends or by posting links and
reviews. On the technical side, we had to overcome many software hurdles in
order to optimize for speed and simplicity. I’d like to thank the guys at
FastServers for helping us with some of the initial IT setup decisions, as
certified professionals they helped us figure out our best options in areas
where we had less expertise. No robot-like automated answers, instead they
presented us with viable solutions that had been clearly thought out.

(6) What are the goals of www.InstantBull.com 1 year from now?
CEO Gal Arav: More time-saving features for our users and some modest
advertising revenue for ourselves - on the importance of money from one of the
greatest minds of our times:
Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut!
Homer’s Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer: Explain how!
Homer’s Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services!
Homer: Woo-hoo!

(7) Please provide any additional information you would like to tell us about
www.InstantBull.com
 CEO Gal Arav: We’d love to get people’s comments and suggestions as we
continue to improve our free service. A BIG THANKS to anyone who has actively
helped to "spread the bull" about our new service, check us out:
http://www.InstantBull.com