Bot News
Botfolio/diegeldseite: Not Quite Gold Yet

By Brian Proffitt

Watching the economy in these harried times is like watching a ship rolling on the open ocean: lots of ups and downs and a general feeling of queasiness.

Artificial Life, Inc. has put together two Web sites to help you track what's going on in the financial world--pulling all of the facts together so you can hopefully make some sense of it all.

The sites, Botfolio and diegeldseite, are variations of the same theme, though in English and German, respectively. The Botfolio web site targets the English speaking financial markets while its German counterpart, diegeldseite, targets the middle European and Germanic speaking countries. Both sites are powered by the ALife-SmartBot, ALife-SmartFinance, and ALife-PortfolioManager tools.

Visitors to the Botfolio site will initially be greeted by three handsome-looking bots who will introduce themselves and their functions in typical bot-toned speech. Don't worry if this annoys you, because they will quickly get through their initial speech and then fade to the background. You can also change the setting to skip this Flash-driven intro on subsequent visits to the site.

In the actual working site, you have a whole range of charting options to go through, from individual ticker data to whole-market charts. All of the charts are interactive and easy to use.

Navigation in the Botfolio site has a few problems. Whenever a market chart appears in the central frame of the home page, there is no obvious way to get back to the information on that page other than hitting your Back button. (I found out that you need to hit the site's logo in the upper left corner of the page.) For individual ticker symbols, a pop-up window appears, which I think would be a good idea for all of the charts presented.

I also had some problems with one of the bots. When I asked Steve, the bot geared to educating site visitors on finances, "What are mutual funds?", I received a good, concise answer. When I went on to ask questions like "How should I allocate my assets?", Steve was stymied. Steve seems to do better with definitions, though a query about what asset allocations are got me the definition of assets alone.

The Portfolio Manager, however, was more of a pleasant experience. The bot in this section is Ashton, which takes a more proactive stance, like asking you if you want to create a new profile, or what investment goals you might have. This kind of interactive hand-holding is pulled off much better than the general help bots, and I thought it really added value to the site.

Outside of the Portfolio manager section, which requires a free registration, there is still an unfinished feel to this site, as some sections are still in the process of being completed. Artificial Life has announced services such as fund performance analysis, fund performance comparison, and news management and filtering, but I was not able to find them on Botfolio, though I did see news links on diegeldseite.

I think this is a site you should keep an eye on, but not commit your financial planning to just yet. Artificial Life is still clearly working on this site and I believe it will ultimately be a useful experience once its complete.