Yesterday, a company claiming to be the first of its kind in the financial industry was launched. Gstock is "a technical analysis-based website for private and institutional investors." It harnesses volunteer computing power, similar to the way SETI does, to become, according to its claim, "the world's first-ever virtual supercomputer dedicated to stock picking."

I talked to Oren Rossen, co-founder of Gstock along with Nir Ben Levy, and found a fascinating entrepreneurial spirit, much in the manner of early Google days.

Melly: Oren, what is your background?

Oren: After working as an analyst and being the treasurer of the MIT Israeli chapter, I became a consultant to companies that could see through the technology but had no business perspective.

Melly: Tell me how the idea for Gstock came about and how you developed it?

Oren: About two years ago, I received a call from someone in the business department of the Technion, the #1 technical university in Israel, with an interesting question: "We have a donor who is extremely wealthy and who believes that the next big thing is supercomputing based on grid or distributed computing. He is willing to pore large sums of cash on a project that would both have a technological edge and be commercially viable. However, we don't have a clue what can be done commercially with so much computing power."

I was familiar with non-profit ventures on the Internet that use distributed computing networks such as SETI@home or protein and DNA mapping, but there was no valid business based on distributed computing.

I discussed it long with Nir and one day it just popped out. It was very ambitious, but the idea was to gather huge computing power and give the private investor an edge on any fund manager to basically win the market. If until now private investors had to compete against giants and professionals (who have better resources), then we can now equip this regular private investor with a supercomputer, and not only that, he would also enjoy the flexibility that professionals don't have building his portfolio in a very dynamic manner.