While the economy and stock market has been tanking, we have been experiencing one of the strongest growth spurts in our 12-year history. Much of the increased demand for our products can be traced to AdvisorVault 2.0, our new secure online vault platform that allows advisors to share documents with clients.

AdvisorVault is pretty much a no-brainer for advisors. AdvisorVault is less expensive than standalone online vault platforms marketed to advisory firms. Such standalone vaults are not integrated with a marketing website, website content, email newsletters system, and other features that we offer to help advisors market and communicate. Some standalone vault systems do offer many features that are valuable to advisors, but they don't provide the same value as AdvisorVault. They cost about the same or more than what we charge for a website packaged with AdvisorVault, and AdvisorVault offers all the same features or more than the standalone vault systems. Point is, even though other companies may specialize and sell nothing but an online vault, AdvisorVault works as well or better.

Everyone knows that TV and the Web are melding. Videos are increasingly being used on the Web. comScore.com yesterday reported that U.S. Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos in November 2008, a 34% increase over the same time a year earlier. On YouTube this past November, 5.1 billion videos were viewed; more than 146 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 87 videos each, and the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video.

What’s really scary is that in my lifetime, we’ll probably be able to click on the couch that Oprah sits on and see its manufacturer and lowest price vendor. (My wife will bankrupt me!)

A Hamilton County Indiana Superior Court judge froze financial advisor Marcus Schrenker's assets and those of his wife late yesterday, after Schrenker reportedly parachuted out of his company-owned plane over Alabama Sunday while the plane continued flying on autopilot before crashing into Florida swampland two hours later. A manhunt is under way, according to reports.

Click here for the latest news about this strange incident.  

If you’ve been yearning for a way to use the Internet more effectively with clients, check out our new Personal Client Portal platform. It fills a gap between your firm’s existing software applications and your clients. This is a new type of application, and there is nothing else like it.

Your financial planning, performance reporting, and customer relationship management applications are disconnected from your clients right now. Our new portal system bridges the gap between your applications and your clients.