If you look at my older posts, you’ll see I’m pretty big on security. Methods of attack are changing and with the exception of hacking the Pentagon it’s getting much more difficult to penetrate big corporate security.

Many large financial firms have been victims of security breaches; included in this illustrious list are … TD Ameritrade, J.P. Morgan, Fidelity Investments, Ameriprise — even credit agencies are susceptible. If you want to get really paranoid check this some of these identity theft stories.

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Andy Gluck at Financial Advisor Magazine has an interesting roundup of the customer relationship management (CRM) options for investment advisors. He touches on the two traditional industry options: Junxure and ProTracker. Next, I was expecting him to talk about some of the new web-based options that Joel Bruckenstein wrote about back in January. (I haven’t heard anything recently about Redtail, Upswing, Advisor Tools or Nation Builder.) But Andy didn’t mention them at all.

Instead, the article mostly talks about an interesting new option for wealth managers, XLR8. Its a custom template written on top of Salesforce.com, the best Internet CRM out there. I *love* Salesforce.com. They have one of the best web UIs around and have been leading the way creating an extensible web-based platform; this is how XLR8 built their product.

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The American Family Association (AFA) is a religious/political group known for such things as protesting the swearing-in of America’s first Muslim congressman, demonizing homosexuality, and praising the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. A group called Faith Financial Planners tried to run an ad on Morningstar’s web site promoting a book called “Money on Loan from God.”

Morningstar wouldn’t run the ad so Faith Financial Planners called the AFA who responded by trying to smear Morningstar — one of the most respected names in our industry.

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With all the Web 2.0 hype floating around right now, it’s easy to miss Web 3.0 right around the corner. There is a war being waged over which Web 3.0 framework will be dominant. Microsoft, Sun and Adobe are working on three competing alternatives for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which is what I’m calling Web 3.0. If any one of these new RIA technologies catches on, it will sound the death knell for HTML/JavaScript application development. I’ve spent the last couple weeks researching the new tech (my excuse for not posting to the blog recently ;).

Lets start by defining the current state of web development — Web 2.0. In this post, I’m referring to the technology side of Web 2.0, which adds important features to JavaScript. Namely, the ability to multi-thread and the ability to update browser HTML without refreshing the browser. It lets HTML apps act more like desktop apps and less like simple document viewers. It probably doesn’t sound like much because it isn’t. Web 2.0 would have been more accurately named Web 1.5.

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