GOOGLE Finance has just been upgraded in the past few hours to add information on company events like earnings call webcasts and upcoming events that integrate with Google Calendar.
The screenshot below shows the new Events module on the Google Finance page for Zimmer Holdings, Inc. By clicking on the webcast links, you can access audio webcasts in a new browser window without the typical registration screen required when accessing the same event from the company’s website.
The new Events module appears on Google Finance company pages. You can access past webcasts from companies and investment firms, but only if they use Thomson Financial for their webcasting.
Only events for which Thomson Financial is the webcast provider include links to webcast audio. Zimmer uses Shareholder.com for its earnings webcasts, so no audio is provided of its earnings calls. The webcasts for the broker presentations are available because they are from Thomson Financial. Thomson Financial also provides the calendar that Google Finance is using.
By clicking on the “Add ZMH to my calendars link,” investors are taken to the Google Calendar log in/sign up page, or directly to Google Calendar if they are already signed in. Google Calendar alerts can also be sent to your mobile phone and you can do a host of other things with them.
If a company has an upcoming event, you can add just that event to your Google Calendar. That is shown in the screenshot below where I've added Kyphon's annual meeting to a calendar.
When future events are available, such as in the screenshot below, investors can add a specific event to their Google Calendar.
Microsoft’s Outlook calendar format is not supported directly from Google Finance pages, which I think is a major drawback and a little bit evil. Try as I might, I’ve never had the patience or incentive to figure out how to use Google Calendar in full. It’s just too complicated to learn when you’re in a rush (but simple things like adding events are easy to do).
You can now subscribe to an RSS feed of news articles and wire releases on each company.
Google Finance now also includes RSS feeds for news on each company, something Yahoo! Finance has been doing for about two years.
Neither of these upgrades are anything really new, but they do add to Google Finance’s expanding functionality. The addition of RSS was alluded to by Google Finance group product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton in an Interactive Q&A on SeekingAlpha.com on April 26.
Update: I must be using Google Finance a lot more since they added the plus box to the main Google search results pages. Based on Google Blog Search, we were the first to break the news about these changes. There’s now a post on the Official Google Blog about the changes, which include exporting stock prices to a spreadsheet and active ticker symbols on Google News.
Dominic (bio & disclosures) is IR Web Report‘s founder and an online investor relations consultant. He advises leading public companies and investor relations service providers worldwide on using the web for disclosure, engagement and profile building. You can contact him via the contacts page.
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