“The economics of the clouds are just phenomenal,” says Neidenbach. She and Ron Bodkin, the founder and CEO of Think Big Analytics, noted that the exchanges have regulatory requirements to keep petabytes of old data associated with trading, and that adds up. She says the exchange has 10 petabytes of trade data and 3.5 petabytes of data that’s just backups. “We’re not even talking about email or even instant messaging,” said Neidenbach. “It’s a tremendous amount and that’s why we went into this partnership with AWS.

“We have to leverage the public cloud where storage is so much cheaper per gigabyte,” she added.

The exchange did have to spend time making sure the public cloud was secure enough for their data, but also for their customers’ data and that’s a journey that is just beginning. But she certainly implied that given the costs of storage in the public cloud and the amount of data financial institutions must keep, that the journey and eventual public cloud destination was inevitable.

And the end result of having all this data stored in one public place might yield new products. Neidenbach expects that combining trade data with social media might result in new opportunities for trading and research. You had the feeling that the sky might be the limit.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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We’ll see how the stock fares on its inaugural day, and we’ll bring you updates on that. The company is widely seen as a bellwether for how Wall Street will react to companies selling clean energy, solar and cleantech, and also represents one of the few venture-backed cleantech exits in 2012. The company’s investors include co-founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as well as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and DBL — SolarCity’s investors have agreed to buy up about a third of the available float in the offering.

In the meantime, while we track the stock, here’s photos of the bell ringing, featuring SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, Musk and other execs and friends:

Images courtesy of NASDAQ.

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For its part, FinQloud is about what it sounds like. According to a Nasdaq press release announcing the service:

“The platform combines AWS’s secure, flexible, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure with NASDAQ OMX’s experience in providing technology and advisory services to exchanges, regulators and broker-dealers that operate within a complex global regulatory framework. FinQloud may be used by a variety of financial services firms managing data not only from NASDAQ OMX but also from any number of sources.”

In order to meet stringent regulatory compliance requirements, all data connections to FinQloud will pass through an encryption system housed in a Nasdaq data center before making their way to AWS’s infrastructure, and use of R3 will be contingent on clients showing appropriate documentation to regulators.

FinQloud won’t be the financial services industry’s foray into public cloud computing, though. In 2011, the New York Stock Exchange rolled out a cloud platform called the Capital Markets Community Platform that focuses on speeding access to trading data from markets around the world. For years, Wall Street firms have been taking advantage of cloud computing’s easy access to on-demand servers to run compute-intensive risk analyses.

However, perhaps a bigger deal for AWS than FinQloud itself is what it says about how AWS — and other cloud providers — might go about getting into the business of targeting individual industries, especially heavily regulated ones. Close partnerships like AWS appears to have with Nasdaq, which technically is the one selling FinQloud, could help cloud providers establish toeholds in lucrative markets such as financial services without requiring them to stray too far from their general-purpose nature. Cloud providers supply the infrastructure, a market player provides the industry expertise, compliance features and a trusted face, and, in theory, everybody wins.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user emin kullyev.

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Much of the public debate pushing for London’s resurgence has been steered by Index Ventures, probably Europe’s leading venture firm. Neil Rimer, one of the firm’s founding partners, argued back in May that the circular argument is the result of a defeatist mindset; a couple of months later his colleague Robin Klein suggested that London’s huge, dominant financial community needed to step up its game.

Now a report from Bloomberg looks at the issue and suggests that the British government could relax some of its rules on IPOs. Right now, for examples, companies listing on the London Stock Exchange are required to sell at least 25 percent of their shares, compared to just 10 percent on the Nasdaq. Lowering that number may be on the cards.

To attract more technology firms […] Britain is considering new rules that would make the London Stock Exchange (LSE) more attractive to startups. Taking a page from the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act approved by the U.S. Congress this year, the government may cut the minimum stake IPO candidates are required to sell, from 25 percent to 10 percent.

“The U.K is looking into adopting elements of the U.S. JOBS Act, relaxing rules including equity listings,” Rohan Silva, a technology adviser to Cameron, said.

The result, perhaps, may be to claw back some of the ground lost. According to the report, tech IPOs in the U.S. accounted for $18.7 billion raised in the past 12 months, while the entire IPO market in Western Europe — technology or otherwise, across a number of exchanges — accounted for just $5.6 billion. In fact it seems only Russian companies are interested in floating in London — and even then, not very often.

So will it work? There are reasons to be hopeful, but it’s going to be difficult.

For those championing London as a place to go public, the arguments are deep, philosophical, heartfelt. It’s about what Europe should do if it wants to build a better startup culture and turn towards a technology-based economy.

But the counter-argument is simple and practical: why bother? The New York exchanges have greater access to capital and better liquidity; companies going public want to maximize their returns; from a corporate perspective, anyone choosing to go elsewhere is putting a fuzzy principle above the interests of their business. That’s tough to beat.

Bull photograph courtesy of Shutterstock/SeanPavlonePhoto

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Facebook will debut on the NASDAQ on Friday, as expected, under the ticker symbol FB. According to the company, it will offer 421,233,615 shares – which breaks down to 180 million new shares and 241,233,615 shares from existing stockholders, i.e. Zuckerberg and company. That would raise the company and its investors a cool $16 billion.

In addition, Facebook’s current owners have also agreed to relinquish another 63,185,042 in the next 30 days if its underwriters see fit, and given the enormous demand and escalating IPO share target they probably will.

The IPO will value Facebook at an astonishing $104 billion. To put that in context check GigaOM’s look at the other big digital media IPOs of the last year – which no longer look so big by comparison. For the rest of our Facebook coverage during IPO week, check out our special pull-down section on the GigaOM homepage.

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In a stinging blog post, Index Ventures partner Neil Rimer tackles the idea that Europe can’t support tech IPOs — and lays the blame for this situation squarely on the doorstep of Europe’s “defeatist” entrepreneurs, investors and bankers. He says they’re moaning about the lack of a European IPO market, while at the same time creating the problem by heading overseas or choosing acquisition over going public.

Sadly,the last major tech IPO in Europe was Mail.ru Group’s debut in London in 2010, and not one of the 10 largest IPOs in Europe was by a technology or media company.

What is more alarming than the track record is the defeatist attitude that is being taken by european companies considering IPOs. The common sentiment in the boardrooms of these companies is that while in the US the IPO window is open, the London market is shut tight like a porthole.

Bulge bracket investment bankers file through in the perfunctory beauty parades lamenting the fact that european institutional investors are not interested in buying IPOs and doling out the same patently impractical advice; “Wait or consider going public in America.” Consequently, the forward-looking picture is even bleaker; in the US there are currently 196 companies that have filed plans to go public on Nasdaq or the NYSE while there are almost none that have announced plans to float in London.

It strikes me that this is like saying that there is a bread shortage because there are no buyers of bread. Bakers might stop producing bread if people completely lost the taste for it, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case: Shoreditch is as vibrant as ever;  there is no shortage of interest in Seedcamp and we have certainly never seen better companies being built in London.

So why is it that these companies are not tapping local public markets? Perhaps it is that their management teams and boards are dutifully heeding this advice and perpetuating its circular logic.

Rimer, who I interviewed a few weeks ago, thinks London is the place for this to happen. He’s certainly right that the confluence of advertising, technology, finance and market size makes the British capital the most appealing place in Europe for technology businesses to float (already plenty of Russian companies choose London — including, if reports are correct, mobile operator MegaFon.)

There’s a certain irony in Index putting this argument forward — after all, it has made big returns selling companies like Skype and MySQL to American companies. But the point stands.

And he’s clearly setting out a plan of attack for Index, which has some pretty big companies in its portfolio right now that could go public relatively soon.

I’d love to see Europe’s startup community pay it back by trying to take on this chicken and egg issue.

The question is whether anyone has the guts to.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski

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The Chief Accounting Officer of Ener1, who is also the Chief Financial Officer of subsidiary EnerDel, Melissa Debes, also resigned on October 25, 2011. Departure of the CFO, follows the departure of Ener1′s longtime CEO and director of the Board of Directors, Charles Gassenheimer, who resigned on September 30, 2011.

One of the big problems at Ener1 was its support of electric car maker Think. Ener1 was forced to write down a $59.4 million impairment charge for its investment for the first quarter of this year, after Think headed into bankruptcy. A Russian investor ended up buying up Think’s assets, but that was the third time the company declared bankruptcy over its long history.

Then Ener1 faced some accounting weirdness. The company gave a preliminary restatement of its revenues and net income for 2010, and the first quarter of 2011, and said its net loss for 2010 was $165.32 million, which is almost a $100 million more than its previously stated net loss for 2010 of $68.80 million.

Ener1 is the parent company of EnerDel, which if you remember back to the Summer of 2009, received a $118 million grant from the Department of Energy’s $2.4 billion Electric Drive Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative. EnerDel received the funds to help it build a factory that would produce batteries for electric vehicles. The DOE told Inside Indiana Business that EnerDel has received $55 million of the grant, and that the DOE is closely watching Ener1 and EnerDel.

On a Monday that also saw the bankruptcy of DOE loan winner Beacon Power, you can bet that House Republicans will closely be watching Ener1 and EnerDel now, too.

Our test drive of the Think City:

And our interview with Ener1 former CEO Gassenheimer:

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The event, which will give teams of developers 24 hours to create new TV-based applications, will take place over the weekend of September 10 and September 11 at General Assembly. Participants will have access to APIs from a number of existing TV startups and related technologies to come up with compelling new products.

The whole thing is being organized by the founders of Shelby.tv, who saw the success of other hackathons in New York City, including the recent Photo Hack Day, and wanted to spur some innovation in the online video and connected TV market.

The goal is not just to create networking and collaboration opportunities between video-focused entrepreneurs but to introduce new applications into the market that can be developed and productized later. Shelby.tv founder Reece Pacheco pointed to the success of GroupMe, a messaging app that was founded after initially being developed at a hackathon during last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt. He hopes to see the same happen at Hackday.tv.

Already, the inaugural version of the TV hackathon has a pretty impressive list of sponsors, led by tech trading behemoth Nasdaq. While there will be cash prizes for the winner of the hackathon, the big prize will be having his or her application featured on Nasdaq’s Times Square jumbotron. In addition, Pepsi, Vid.ly, Boxee and Twilio are also sponsoring the 24-hour event.

Hackday.tv has a long list of API partners that are making their technology available for experimentation and innovation. Those partners include:

• Aviary
• Boxee
• Framsocket
• Mashery
• MoovAtom
• OpenTok
• Ordr.in
• Sharethrough
• Shelby.tv
• Twilio
• VHX
• Vid.ly
• YouTube
• Zencoder

The founders are also hoping to create video of the event, hiring videographers who will document different hacks that are created over the 24-hour period and presented during the demo period. The idea is to create a video record that those developers can later share with partners and potential investors. “We’re creating video trailers for each hack,” Shelby.tv “super intern” and Hackday.tv organizer Chris Kurdziel told us in a phone conversation. “That way each team walks away with a souvenir of what they’ve built in video form.”

While launching in New York, the founders expect to take the Hackday.tv format on the road, with another hackathon in San Francisco or Silicon Valley sometime in October. After that, they are considering doing similar events in London and other tech hubs.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY-SA 2.0) Flickr user hackNY.org

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Here’s a look at some of the tech stocks and how they’re doing:

• Apple, down about 3.54 percent
• Google is off 3.56 percent.
• Hewlett-Packard lost 3.49 percent
• Cisco was off 4.08 percent
• Qualcomm was down 3.68 percent.
• Microsoft down 1.75 percent
• AT&T down 1.76 percent
• Verizon was down 3.02 percent
• Comcast was down 2.92 percent
• Yahoo was down 0.68 percent
• Sprint is off 9.41 percent
• Clearwire off 10 percent
• Alcatel-Lucent down 12.18 percent

In fact, tech stocks are doing worse than the overall market. The Nasdaq is down about 2.7 percent, while the S&P 500 is down about 2.6 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 1.93 percent. This follows a tough week last week when the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 9 percent.

The sell-off heightens fears about consumer spending as investors worry about sales of tech gear in a downturn. This comes despite some strong showings by companies such as Apple and Google, which recently reported strong earnings.

This may just be a temporary reaction to the bad news. But it highlights the volatility of tech stocks, which are more sensitive to swings in the market. And it raises concerns about future IPOs for tech companies looking for a big debut.

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Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff at the Nasdaq stock exchange

Zillow, the real estate listing site, held an initial public offering of its stock on the Nasdaq exchange Wednesday morning. The stock, which is trading under the single letter ticker symbol “Z”, received a warm welcome from public market investors right out the gate.

Zillow’s stock hit the market at 10:35am Eastern Time at a price of $46.56  $57 per share, more than doubling the IPO price of $20 the company announced Tuesday afternoon. But the stock proved somewhat volatile in its first few hours of trading. By 12:20pm ET, the stock had dipped to $33.24.

Despite the ups and downs, Zillow’s IPO has already been far more successful than the company initially projected. When Zillow filed its first S-1 in April, it expected its IPO to raise a maximum of around $50 million. Zillow initially proposed its stock to be priced at $12-14 but earlier this month, it raised that range to $16-$18, and ultimately bumped it up to an IPO share price of $20. The IPO held this morning brought in $70 million for Zillow.

And all this from a company that has yet to turn a profit. Zillow made nearly $30.5 million in revenue in 2010, but ultimately posted a net loss of about $6.8 million for the year, according to regulatory filings. Ostensibly, the $70 million Zillow made in Wednesday morning’s IPO will be put toward initiatives that will boost the business’ bottom line.

It bears mention that a strong debut does not ensure that a stock will continue to be popular in the long term — or even in the short term. Internet radio company Pandora hit the New York Stock Exchange on June 15 at $20 a share, 25 percent higher than its $16 IPO share price. But since then, Pandora’s stock has had a somewhat tepid response from the public market, and has not hit the $20 mark since July 1. And like Zillow, Pandora has not started to turn a profit despite being a hugely popular consumer web destination.

The good news for all newly public companies is that ultimately stock performance should be viewed through a much wider scope than a few hours, or even a few months, can provide. After all, an IPO is meant to be the start of a long journey toward sustainable growth, and not an end in itself.

Image courtesy of Zillow.com

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