Canada's top investor relations websites awarded
THE Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants has awarded its Award of Excellence for Electronic Disclosure to oil and gas company Nexen Inc.Runner up in the annual awards for electronic disclosure, which I recently rated as among the most reliable of such awards programs, was past three-in-row winner PotashCorp, the international fertilizer company. (Disclosure: We have [...]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. confuses me — and Bloomberg
AFTER making a big deal last quarter about no longer relying on paid PR wires to distribute its earnings releases, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) has gone back to the traditional approach this quarter.I cannot find an explanation for why the company has decided to once again issue its earnings release first via a PR [...]
A mock "notice-and-access" earnings release
FOLLOWING up on my earlier post about a “notice-and-access” concept for disclosure news releases as a way to cut costs for issuers, I thought it would be interesting to put together a mock release based on an actual company’s quarterly results.Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MRK), the pharmaceutical giant, reported Q3 2007 earnings earlier today [...]
Governance websites behind the times
GIVEN the vast amounts of corporate governance information that companies have been forced to publish in recent years, the findings of a survey released yesterday may come as something of a surprise. According to the survey by research firm Affluent Dynamics, which polled 200 high-net-worth investors and financial advisors, 67% of financial advisors and 58% [...]
Twitter: the newswire killer
A FEW months ago, there was a lot of hubbub in the technology blogging community about a new service called Twitter. The service asked people to write short messages about what they were doing, and then it delivered the one-liners to their friends in near real time via instant messaging, SMS and the Web. Initially, [...]
The truth about Sun's Web-first earnings release — Update 3
Note: I’ve added more specifics around the sequence of events around Sun’s release, including adding a screenshot taken from Yahoo! Finance which shows times various news items became available there. I’ve also added a link to a PRWeek article that provides a more balanced report than IR Magazine. I’ve also added an update about Business [...]
Is Shareholder.com client breaching SEC privacy rules?
APPLIED Micro Circuits Corporation (NASDAQ: AMCC), one of the first companies to make use of the new e-Proxy process, is using cookies to identify and track people using the website hosting its annual report and proxy statement. Under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rule for the voluntary e-Proxy process, “a registrant or its agent [...]
Shareholder forums vs. board blogs
THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s concept for an electronic forum where shareholders can discuss and possibly vote on corporate governance issues is too prescriptive and costly, and will mostly benefit a small group of vendors only. At their roundtable on proxy access in May, the SEC floated the concept of an electronic forum in [...]
The Web evolves from foraging to sucking
THE web is evolving from a model where people go out in search of information using a browser and search engines to a model where they increasingly pull in information of their choice from the Internet into a variety of software applications and personal homepages. The choices users make for what information sources they allow [...]
A short open letter to Thomson and Shareholder
Dear Thomson Financial and Shareholder.com: We’ll keep this short. Just one question. When any of your current IR website clients want to leave your service and switch to a new provider, is it true that they will lose access to anyone who has subscribed to their RSS feeds? Come on, we know you’re reading this. [...]
SEC upgrades XBRL viewer
THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Interactive Financial Report Viewer, a free online utility for viewing XBRL filings, has been upgraded with new features, including a chart builder and the ability to export reports to a spreadsheet. Launched in December 2006, the free open source utility is designed to demonstrate to analysts and investors [...]
SEC’s New Edgar Search Useful for IROs. Is RSS Next?
AFTER a short time in testing, the Securities and Exchange Commission has flicked the switch to make its powerful new Edgar full-text search public. I used the beta version a few times and found it extraordinarily efficient to be able to search filings by keyword. I hope other regulators are paying attention. For IROs, this [...]
The state of podcasting in investor relations
AT THE recent 2nd Annual Podcast & Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California, three men stood up to talk about podcasting in investor relations. Only problem was that almost no one came to hear them. According to Jason Lee Miller of news website WebProNews, the “presenters were nearly speaking to echoes in the conference room.” [...]
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