A professional portfolio-alert service that pushed real-time stock and option moves straight to your pager or cellphone — nearly a decade before the iPhone.
Before the smartphone — before push notifications, before mobile trading apps — InformPage compressed a real-time market event into a short text alert and pushed it to whatever device the customer already carried: an alphanumeric pager, or an early SMS-capable cellphone.
Pictured: a representative consumer pager of the era. InformPage did not manufacture hardware.
With internet businesses coming and going, be secure in knowing we are entering our fifth year of stock alerts — no one has been doing it longer.
Long before the smartphone — nearly a decade before the iPhone — InformPage was already putting the markets in your pocket. Launched in 1998, it monitored your stock and option portfolio and pushed real-time alerts straight to your pager or cellphone the moment your positions moved or volume surged unexpectedly.
In an era when “mobile” meant a numeric pager clipped to your belt, this was genuinely cutting-edge: real-time ECN quotes for retail investors while ECNs themselves were brand new, a 128-bit encrypted site at a time most of the web ran 40-bit, and a flat refusal to monetize customer data — staking out a privacy-first position years before the rest of the industry caught up.
It outlasted the dot-com crash that swallowed most of its contemporaries. The service is no longer operational; this page stands as a small monument to a fast, quiet idea that was simply too early.