A-list tech blogger Om Malik at Gigaom, blogged about the Netgear (NTGR) earnings release yesterday and used something you don't see too often - a chart that wasn't a stock price chart. The chart used fundamental data on revenues and margins from the Gridstone Research platform. Charts like this and with deeper data, take seconds to create on the Gridstone platform.

We are thrilled that our charts are helping bloggers and business journalists report better stories. If you write about stocks in the Technology or Consumer sectors (soon all sectors) and if you think a chart says it much better than words, talk to us .

Earnings conference calls are usually predictable fare: a concise synopsis of results presented by company management, and then a structured Q&A session with a select group of Wall Street analysts.

This earnings season, several company management teams found themselves answering detailed questions from an unknown analyst - Joe Herrick of Gutterman Research. The only problem is – he’s an imposter, gaining access to the calls by posing as known analysts from major firms. His fifteen minutes of anonymous fame were sealed by a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal on February 16, 2008 which described his duplicitous accomplishments (read the article here ).

I was talking to a user a few days back who uses our Search extensively. He gave me an example of how he was using our Data Search feature.

Last month, after the AT&T earnings call on Jan 24th, the Street was abuzz over a data point. The data point in question was the difference between iPhones units shipped, as per Apple and iPhones activated, as per AT&T. Sanford Bernstein put out a note, attributing the difference to reasons that were not entirely favourable to AAPL. Many people didn’t agree with Bernstein’s conclusions but that is not the point.

In a situation like this, a buy-side analyst will want to make up his own mind. First of all, he’d want to see the numbers himself. If he wasn’t a Gridstone user, he’d be rummaging through transcripts and filings for AT&T and Apple to find the right data points. For a Gridstone user it would take less than a minute.

The Gridstone platform took a quantum leap forward recently when our Search feature came out of Beta. Thanks a million to all the users who tried it and provided their suggestions and feedback. To illustrate some unique aspects of Gridstone’s search, I search for “INFY attrition” – i.e., commentary about attrition for Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ: INFY).

Take a look at the results screen here. In the rest of this post I will explain how Gridstone's search is way ahead of any other way of searching financial information.