Announcing mQuote - Stock Quotes on your mobile phone

A lot of people do not invest in shares. But those who do invariably end up checking their stock prices atleast once daily. No I am not talking about a day trader, but someone who just owns Infy shares because a lot of his friends asked him to buy it in the recession. Since then he has not bought any other share, but still keeps checking the price of Infy share daily and smiles within.

In my opinion after mail checking, stock price must be the second most religiously performed activity for us. No Twitter, you are too early in the game. Even though the price most often does not change drastically day to day, there is this unexplained desire to see what the current price is.

It gets worse when you know that the market is choppy on a given day and for some reason your boss has put you on a day long workshop where you are just not able to check your stock price. Or when you are on your vacation and your wife has imposed a strict no mail checking rule on you. What do you do? Wonder if you could just check that stock price on your mobile phone? You can now.

For all those obsessive stock price tracker I present mQuote. mQuote is a SMS based service which provides you real time price of your stock on your mobile. Just SMS quote <company code> or quote <company name> to 9220092200 or 9243000111. And instantly you will receive the current price of that share. The website http://mquote.heroku.com, provides a demo so you can test it out and feel comfortable using it.

As usual this is one of a hobby thing I did and so maybe quite buggy. I do not take responsibility for the information being provided by this service. Don't hedge your bets based on the information provided by this service. Do use a reliable source of information in case you want to trade a scrip.

Note: 9220092200 is a mumbai local number, and 9243000111 is bangalore local number. From any other location you will have to prefix 0, and it will a STD SMS charge for you.

API for BSE Shares data in India

Earlier today I was looking for an API which provides stock quotes for Indian market(BSE) in real time. But couldn't really find anything close to it. The only option left for me was to scrape the information from any one of the sites which provide live quotes for Indian shares.

After eye-balling couple of sites I shortlisted on http://bseindia.com. Since this is the official site of the Bombay Stock Exchange, I thought they would provide me the information as real as I could get. Moreover the web page which provides scrip information looked quite simple for me to scrape.

Luckily I did not have to scrape the HTML data to get my content. I reverse engineered the process of displaying the scrip information on the browser and realized that bseindia.com was actually using an API. The API though would return all the information as a comma separated list.

Finally I created a gem out of it (yes it was a ruby script) and thought it would be a good idea to share it. So here it is, my first open source ruby gem called BseQuote. You can build it yourself after downloading the code from github. Share your feedback if you find it useful.

(Picture credit: cc Niyantha / Flickr)