Whether you're a sophisticated early adopter or a newbie to all the latest technology available to you and your firm, these stories should bring you up to speed about everything any financial advisor or firm needs to know about information technology to improve productivity and increase assets under management.

The Principal has launched the Dreamcatcher mobile application for iPhones, a companion to the Dreamcatcher web tool. This is part of Principal’s “Dream Again with The Principal” financial educational campaign aimed at helping people envision their financial goals and putting them into clear focus.

National Financial, Fidelity Investment’s clearing and custody company, announced a new myStreetscape portal for investors working with brokers who use the Streetscape platform.

TD Ameritrade this week will roll out an upgrade of its open architecture platform’s integration with cloud-based electronic signature system DocuSign, as it streamlines DocuSign’s pairing with financial form-filling software Laser App.

BATS Europe said it has resolved the “hardware issue” that shut off all trading on Tuesday.

Microsoft Outlook moved down to second place — overtaken by Redtail — in the CRM software category for advisors this year. It was the first time in the history of Financial Planning’s annual tech survey that Outlook was not in first place.

BATS Europe is confronting “system issues.” The pan-European trading venue operated by BATS Global Markets went down at 9:36 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

Tablets have fundamentally changed the way financial advisors do their work and there’s every reason to believe they will continue to be the dominant tool of choice in the advisory community for years to come.

Fidelity Charitable has rolled out GivingCentral, an online advisor platform, and a dedicated advisor service team.

Thomson Reuters said it would begin providing custom charting of pricing data on key financial markets on two of its information services.

For financial advisors, the introduction of iPad over the past year has changed everything. Notoriously resistant to new technologies, advisers have become envious of the remarkable advancements taking place in the consumer tech market.

Fraud is on the rise in the United States and globally, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2011 Global Economic Crime Survey, with cyber crime making the most significant increase in the two years since the firm’s last survey.

Broadridge Financial Solutions has linked its fixed income processing platform in Canada to the country’s central securities depository through a new module called ClearancePro.

Some 60 UBS Wealth Management Americas financial advisors will kickoff a three-month test drive this week of an iPad application designed to make it easier to interact with clients and access research reports — all in the hope of generating more assets under management.

The average price tag for a data breach now is $7.2 million. How are you supposed to value the loss when your crown jewels – trading algorithms – get put on data sticks or uploaded to remote servers, as happened to Goldman Sachs? And if you're a financial advisor or smaller advisory firm, how do you safeguard data while also taking advantage of social media and mobile devices to service your clients? Here's what you need to know and do to protect your firm and your clients.

Linedata says that it has combined the risk analytics services of Riskdata with its Beauchamp portfolio management platform.

Risk management software firm Algorithmics has just launched a new risk reporting service for hedge funds in the U.S. and signed up fund of hedge funds manager Optima Fund Management in New York as its first client.

Fidelity Investments and Verizon have partnered to offer Verizon’s four million FiOS subscribers access to the Fidelity Market Monitor Application that, for no additional cost, will provide them with quotes, charts watch lists and news.

iPhone 4S sales are off the charts, even with its battery issues. iPad sales are similar. Android now is the most popular operating system for mobile phones. So why aren’t more financial services firms encouraging employees to bring their own devices to work?

Most advisors don’t have a disaster recovery plan. We all like to think it won’t happen to us when we think of the big ones -- tornado or hurricane -- but all firms and advisors need to be prepared for anything that can cause an interruption to our business and serving our clients. Here's what you need to know to get started.