Taking into account 85% of our mobile traffic across a sampling of our clients sites comes from iOS (iPad/iPhone/iPod) devices, we wanted to find out which device people in the IR space prefer.  We consider “in the IR space” to be IRO’s, retail investors, institutional investors and bloggers/analysts/media people.  We consider “not in the IR space” to be people who do not work in IR in any capacity and people who do not invest.

These are the results of the survey:

If you’re interested, here are the questions we asked:

1) What best describes you:

• I work in an Investor Relations office (IR manager, director, executive etc)
• I’m a retail investor
• I’m an institutional investor
• I’m an analyst, blogger or media person

What is your primary mobile device?

• Apple (iOS)
• Android
• Blackberry
• Windows Phone 7
• I don’t know/other

Do You Use and iPad?

Yes/No

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Following on our recent announcement of our Investor Relations iPad and iPhone apps, I’m please to report that last Friday we launched an iPad investor relations app for Stanley Black and Decker.

The Stanley iPad app supports landscape and portrait views, Stanley’s latest news and stock price, ability to subscribe to their podcasts, videos from their 2010 Year in Review as well as other IR information. This is our second IR app that has been posted to the App Store with the first being for Avion Gold Corporation

One question we get is “why do you only support Apple devices?”. The answer is simple, we looked at aggregate stats of 25 client sites that run on our Q4 Web platform and found that on average, 85% of the traffic from mobile devices was from iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod) devices.

It’s interesting given Android is leading global mobile OS installations, however Apple is gaining market share. According to Nielsen, from October 2011 – December 2011, Android market share dropped from 61.6% to 46.9% while iOS increased from 25.1% to 44.5%.

That said, I’d be interested to hear about what is your device of choice is. Take a moment and answer our poll below.

If you can’t see the embedded survey, try this link.

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With the addition of Stocktwits and including our existing integration with Twitter and Facebook, our content publishing from Q4 WEB now has a potential reach of over 925 million people worldwide!*  You’ll notice a much cleaner and simpler Social Media dashboard which makes sending your content updates to all supported Social Media channels quicker.

Have a look at the video below to see what’s been updated:

What Do You Think?

Do you have questions or comments about these updates? Let us know by commenting on this post!

What’s Next?

We’ve already started on our next release which is due later this year, details are at a high level right now so if you’d like to get involved, drop me a note, I’d love to get your feedback!
* As of June 2011 Facebook has 750 million users, Twitter has 175 million users and Stocktwits has 500,000 users

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StockTwits simplifies the social distribution of your IR content and connects you with the largest online global network of financial influencers.

By using the StockTwits API, Q4 enables you to distribute your company messages to targeted investor audiences. You’ll also gain broad exposure for your company’s IR content and benefit from StockTwits’ distribution to Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN Money and Bing Finance.

You can see how it works by viewing the demo below:

StockTwits Integration Now Part of Q4 WEB! from Q4 Web Systems Inc. on Vimeo.

API Integration is more secure and is designed to make it easier for companies to publish content to multiple channels at once. And everything you do in social channels is available to your investors in real-time on your website – which removes the current delays and uneven access to information investors experience when companies use traditional disclosure methods.

Look for more information about our latest release coming soon!

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One of the questions that stood out to me from yesterday’s webinar was when an attendee asked if we had any samples to show how small cap companies are leveraging the IR website best practices Catherine was speaking about.  Catherine had shown great examples from some larger companies, namely, Nexen and Potash and explained how they have done a great job of conveying their messaging as well as making it easy for their audience to find information quickly.

Although I can’t share some of the examples from the projects we haven’t launched yet, I can say that part of our project process at Q4 is to help clients realize these best practices through using our modules which have been designed with IR best practices in mind.  Throughout our implementation process, we work with our clients to help them improve their IR websites and apply best practices to their site.   In the past we have primarily focused on migrating our client’s websites to our platform when they join the family and applying these best practices is now an additional service included with our implementation process.

Since our Spring 09 release, we’ve added Full-Text RSS feeds for news, presentations and events, Share This social sharing which allows any page to be shared through all the social networks, Investor Briefcase, Page-specific meta data and host of of other improvements to our IR website product – that all our clients receive automatically!

Of course we’ve always had email alerts, stock quotes, press release feeds and all the basic IR required items but we’re taking a different approach and simply using these best practices to not only make the IR section better, but to make the overall website better.

Look for a follow-up in a week or so when we launch some before-and-after shots of what we’ve done for a couple of new clients that are in development.

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I think what I enjoy most about the process for implementing the Rockefeller Habits is that it’s actually very similar to using Agile processes for developing software:

1. Focus on the highest value items first
2. Make progress on those items
3. Have a retrospective
4. Find new (and usually more difficult) problems
5. Repeat 1 – 4 often

For us, seeing a problem as an opportunity for improvement is the key. At the end of each quarter we get together and brainstorm what problems popped up during the quarter and then we widdle them down to which ones we can address the next quarter.

This exercise is usually the most emotionally draining but the mood improves very quickly when those problems are turned into solutions. This is the 4th consecutive quarter we’ve gone through this exercise and it was interesting to see how the complexity of the priorities increased as the quarters went by.

The very nature of Scrum is to constantly improve by having retrospectives at the end of each sprint.  The Team talks about what went well, what didn’t go well and what they want to try during the next sprint. We’ve proven it’s been effective in our development teams so we decided our #1 priority this quarter is to extend the use of Scrum principles to the rest of the departments within the company.

After living with the Rockefeller Habits for a year, I can say without a doubt that the process works.  Everyone rallies around the priorities and collaborates on solutions that help remove waste and increase efficiency across all departments.  I would be interested to hear your thoughts about how you’ve used similar processes in your company or if you have questions about some tactics we use to keep this process running smoothly.

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Anyone who has worked for company experiencing explosive growth can appreciate the difficulties that come with it and the the importance of maintaining focus with respect to corporate objectives.  Chris Jones posted back in July with respect to our adoption of the Rockefeller Habits as well as our re-adoption of Scrum as a way to maintain alignment across the company.

Since Q2 2008, we have been living our values. The single most important value we realize at Q4 is a dedication to constant improvement. 
Lately I’ve been blogging a great deal about Reg FD and social media so I thought I’d switch gears to ring in the new year and post about our corporate culture.

I remember our first initial sessions trying to implement the Rockefeller Habits and there were many long nights, weekends and, ahem, ‘spirited discussions’, however, we progressed and improved upon those sessions each quarter.

Our re-adoption of Scrum actually helped the corporate alignment process as we now have company-wide retrospectives to learn about is and isn’t working.  In each retrospective we end up with a set of tangible improvements to make in the next quarter and during subsequent retrospectives we ‘scrub’ which of these we were able to implement.  These improvements don’t need to be earth shattering, as  a series of small improvements add up over time.

‘Agile’ seems to be the latest buzzword in software development and many companies are adopting Agile principles to how they develop software – meaning they are leveraging the 4 main values from the Agile Manifesto:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

I won’t go into great detail about these statements, but in general terms they mean that we agree there is value in the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more.  A simple example would be ‘would you rather have a piece of software you can provide real feedback on quickly, or a 200 page spec document that is outdated the second it’s finished and then stuffed in a filing cabinet only to never be looked at again?’

We’ve extended Agile principles to other aspects of our business and each business unit starts the day with their own daily stand-up -  essentially a 15 minute meeting status update – and all department heads meet up once a week for a “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure we are setting weekly goals to track toward our quarterly priority.

Working in short iterations from a business perspective and the frequent quick and time boxed meetings does wonders for productivity.   Our goals and priorities are clear and enforced by creating weekly priorities based on the bigger quarterly and yearly goals.

The key message in how we operate is that we work as a team, we adapt to change quickly and we learn frequently through retrospectives.  This commitment to constant improvement is a recipe for success and I’m looking forward to another great year at Q4.

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FNX Mining

FNX Mining Company Inc. (“FNX”), a Canadian Nickel Company, produces, develops and explores for nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium and gold in Canada’s prolific Sudbury Basin. FNX optioned five former producing mines from Vale Inco early in 2002 (McCreedy West, Levack, Podolsky, Victoria and Kirkwood). The properties contained extensive historic surface and underground infrastructure, including roads, head frames, declines, power facilities and buildings.

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Barrick also recently went live on our latest 3.5 release which includes a whole host of new features in addition to RSS Feeds.

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