University of Nebraska (Lincoln) Wins TradeKing's $100K API Campus Challenge

The "Stock Bros" team from the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has won national award in the the TradeKing $100K API Campus Challenge.

The Stock Bros app allows users to trade through TradeKing from any location. The app features a browser plug-in, an Android application, plus a cloud-based notification service to Android Platforms. As a user browses the web, a Google Chrome extension scans pages for stock symbols and appends a stock quote to the page. When a quote is clicked, it opens a larger view of the quote along with a chart pulled from the Yahoo! Finance API. The app then joins with capabilities via the TradeKing API to add the symbol to a watchlist and even trade the stock through TradeKing, all without leaving the page where the symbol was located. From the browser extension, traders can further manage push notifications that are sent via their web service to the Android application.

Stock Bros won the competition following four months of development work on the part of 29 competing teams of undergraduate college students from around the country. The winning Stock Bros student team received $58K in prize money in recognition of its top national finish.

"Since September, I've watched closely as the Campus Challenge student teams worked diligently to understand the online brokerage industry and put their creative skills to work developing next generation apps to let investors learn and trade in innovative new ways," said Don Montanaro, CEO and chairman of TradeKing in a statement. "My fellow Campus Challenge judges and I were incredibly impressed with the caliber of work submitted by these students, which made choosing the national winner a difficult task.

"The Stock Bros team from the University of Nebraska rose to the top of our list based on the creative approach it took to app development, its underlying technical proficiency and its mashup of two additional APIs," added Montanaro.

Twelve schools participated in the challenge. Four schools participated in the Core School Division with support from the professors and faculty. Teams from Villanova University, Loyola University Maryland, McKendree University and University of Nebraska, Lincoln, entered in the Core Division competition.

An Open Division, with students at other schools, received entries from eight schools. Students from Baruch College (CUNY), Harvey Mudd College, Lehigh University, Minnesota State, NYU, University of Michigan, University of Maryland and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) participated in the Open Division competition.

In July 2011, TradeKing launched its open API to help developers, partners and tech-savvy investors create customized trading platforms and apps. The API Campus Challenge took this approach and challenged academic innovators to continue creating new apps and mashups to let customers trade in the ways that best fit their individual styles, according to TradeKing.

[Editorial Disclosure: Greg MacSweeney, editorial director for Wall Street & Technology, was one of the judges for the TradeKing Campus API Challenge.] Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio