Brooke’s Note: If you’re like me and have doubts about social media, this is the kind of article that may make you think twice. I sent two tweets (beyond our auto-tweets of new articles) this week and intend to send more. No snickering, Pat Allen. See: Why RIAs would rather go to Twitter than talk to a wholesaler.

H. Jude Boudreaux spends just 30 minutes a day on social media sites but in the last two years, he’s gotten eight new clients who found out about him from social websites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

That’s a big deal for a small firm. Boudreaux started Upperline Financial Planning LLC in New Orleans in 2010 and that brings his total of clients to 40.

Boudreaux, 35, doesn’t want to spend money on marketing and has found his niche interacting with people on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. See: What three highly wired financial advisors have to teach us about social media.

Brooke’s Note: As those of you who know me well are aware, I rarely use a cell phone. I sure as heck don’t have an iPad. But I bought one once — for Nevin, our chief technologist. See: RIABiz makes its first major capital investment — an iPad. I figured that if I couldn’t find a use for such a thing, maybe he could. Since then, I have not seen that device and from what I can see, I won’t anytime soon. So Peter Giza made my day by letting me know that the days of the iPad are numbered. It has put me back on the tip of the burning, edge-cutting spear.

“Tablets will be dead in five years” was the headline of the Washington Post Technology section for April 30, 2013. This headline rang out after Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins told the Milken Institute in a speech said that he feels that smartphones will become the main source of compute power for a large portion of the user community. Thorsten was heard to have said “I doubt where there is a tablet a few years from ...

Brooke’s Note: Watching Addepar grow is like viewing one of those time-erasing films of a tree growing on the Discovery Channel. What takes years at most companies happens in weeks or months at the start-up. What interests us is that every move the firm makes seems to take it deeper into RIA territory. These hires seem to be no exception.

Addepar has been in classic startup mode for its first three years — i.e., bringing on engineers, developing its product and finding its footing in the RIA space. See: Addepar slashes prices, opens up its architecture and shows RIA custodians some love as it confronts market realities.

But, the fact that the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm made three big hires in the first quarter of this year — including a much-needed chief operating officer and a vice president of sales who comes straight from Advent Software Inc, — may confirm that it’s ready to focus on sales and scale. In the first quarter of 2013, revenue nearly doubled from where it had been previous to Jan. 1, according to the firm’s 26-year-old president, Mike Paulus.

“We’re really ...

Brooke’s Note: Envestnet is many things. But at its core and beyond, it is very much a moose-like e-commerce website. That starting point doesn’t make technological trailblazing optional. The company is an agglomeration of acquisitions so its technology was not as smooth as the trail of a comet. But a minor Envestnet Manhattan Project reported on yesterday seems to have closed many a gap — not without flustering some advisors perfectly happy with the old system — and left its technologists with rings under their eyes. What gained some mention here is perhaps a bigger game changer — an advanced benchmarking system — that apparently we’ll hear more about Thursday but which Lisa gives a good sneak peek of.

Envestnet yesterday unveiled its overhaul of its platform dubbed ENV2, which gives RIAs the opportunity to use the platform with the iPad or any mobile device.

The effort involved overhauling the 10-year-old system and the company gave advisors a preview of the new platform Wednesday at its 2013 Advisor Summit in Chicago’s Hyatt Hotel, just off of the city’s famous Michigan Avenue.

The conference attendance doubled to 1,100 from ...

Brooke’s Note: The cloud does not seem like an exclusive club to me. But at least a couple of top RIA technology experts say that not all clouds are created equal and that Fidelity may be on to something with its latest effort to create a plug-and-play home for financial advisors. Needless to say, not everyone agrees.

Fidelity has announced it will begin offering a third-party cloud-based virtual desktop to its advisors. It’s a move some are hailing as an industry first in terms of total integration of an advisor’s office needs.

“They’re first to market with something like this,” says Joel Bruckenstein, publisher of Technology Tools for Today, who argues that the ability to access all small-business and back-office software, as well as industry-specific software like CRM and portfolio reporting, on any mobile device with just one click is a game-changer.

But, the other major custodians — including Pershing Advisor Solutions and TD Ameritrade — are a bit annoyed with all the hype. Fidelity isn’t offering anything new, they say. In fact, many advisors can — and do — already contract directly to store their business needs on ...

Brooke’s Note: If Mark Hurley and Joe Duran turn out to be wrong (as per today’s other article) about concentrations and consolidations of the RIA business, it will be because they underestimate just how determined independent entrepreneurs are to stay that way. Certainly the Finance Logix conference in Vegas is far from top of mind for them. Here’s a company, in Fiance Logix, and an entrepreneur, in Oleg, that you would not likely know existed even a couple of years ago and now it and he are in full flurry with industry leaders and RIAs — not waiting around for big branded firms to take them by the hand. And not forgetting to live it up on the journey.

Tim Welsh has done some consulting for Finance Logix.

Simplicity, big data, widgets and the future of financial planning were the top themes at the second annual Finance Logix advisor conference held at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas this past weekend.

Finance Logix, known for its innovative and award winning financial planning technology platform, served as host to over 75 advisors, broker-dealer and custodian executives, along ...

Brooke’s Note: We wrote this article yesterday, but then the web traffic to it started soaring again today. So I checked Schwab’s website and, once again, it wouldn’t come up. So I e-mailed Schwab spokesman Greg Gable, who responded by affirming that indeed his company had suffered a second attack on its systems. “We’re having intermittent access issues to our website due to a denial of service attack similar to yesterday which we’re actively addressing. We’ve asked clients who are affected to please try to log in again or if there matter is urgent, to please call.” What is clear from what our sources say is that denial-of-service attacks are dashedly difficult to counter. See: Walt Bettinger apologizes. Our expert source in this article said it’s like you having breakfast with a friend and having 20,000 people talking at you at the same time. Making out what your breakfast partner is saying is … very difficult. A detailed explanation is spelled out at the end of this article.

The Charles Schwab & Co. website(s) went down toward the end of the trading day ...

That old maxim about the keeping your friends close and enemies closer is playing out in the RIA arena as two relative newcomers to the RIA business have placed some of their firms’ harshest critics on their respective advisory boards.

Today BrightScope Inc. announced that Michael Kitces, partner and director of research at Pinnacle Advisory Group Inc. and publisher of the blog Nerd’s Eye View, will serve on the firm’s advisory board and will also serve as an advisor to the company and its executives.

Kitces and BrightScope’s managing principals, Ryan and Mike Alfred, found common cause in this article where they felt advisors were being disrespected by the owner of a rising online advisor. See: After outcry, Betterment 86’s (but not on purpose) a blog post inflaming advisors.

And, Riskalyze announced that that Ryan Shanks, CEO of Finetooth Consulting and founder of JoinAFirm.com, has joined its advisory board.

Brooke’s Note: Let’s face it. Half the fun of owning gold — just ask King Midas — is being able to count it. But amazingly enough in 2013, the ability of reporting software to account for the ownership of real bars of the stretchy mineral is still fighting to get out of the Stone Age. Even after being mired for a few days on this subject with Lisa I am not entirely clear what makes it so terribly difficult. I get it that, unlike common stock, you can’t store gold essentially on a silicon chip. But still! So here we write an article to cite a small advance in gold counting that is none the less a potentially big improvement from where it’s been. Just keep the children at a safe remove from your touch.

A New York based startup packed with luminary board members such as former Citigroup and Merrill Lynch exec Sallie Krawcheck and former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt — and supported by at least one high-level Goldman Sachs guy — has broken through a major barrier to doing business with RIAs.

Gold Bullion International LLC, founded in ...

Brooke’s Note: We have written about a series of very large, interesting, big-staffed, VC-backed, turbocharged Silicon Valley-based technology startup ventures of late. WealthSite, while technically in Silicon Valley and fairly startup in stature, is also the antithesis of VC-backed and fast out of the gate. This baby is bootstrapped, skunk-worked and tiny. But it also appears to be making more profits than all other such startups combined, and with the kind of niche that has an organic nature derived from its nurturing in bootstrap-land. Kelly does her usual good job in bringing to life this story of competing with Advent by conceding its data awesomeness, particularly through in-depth customer interviews with some major league RIAs.

David Ford is the son of a founding partner of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and worked at Goldman after graduating from Stanford, but he struggled with one aspect of starting his own RIA.

When he founded Gatemore Capital Management LLC in 2005, Ford couldn’t find portfolio-reporting software that did what he wanted for his high-charged multifamily office. He went through three or four different reporting options but one produced too many errors and ...