Q4 Blog

I attended an interesting CIRI (Canadian Investor Relations Institute) round-table luncheon yesterday, and the topic of discussion was Understanding how the buy-side makes decisions . The format of the session was great; it was almost entirely Q&A and provided the opportunity for participants to openly dialogue with the speakers.  The panelists were Stephanie Griffiths, Lead Portfolio Manager for Mackenzie Ivy Enterprise Fund, and Craig MacAdam, Portfolio Manager with the Aurion Capital equity team. Both were frank and concise in their answers, and while much of the information they provided was fairly intuitive, I did find some of their comments surprising and interesting. Read more…

When the SEC announced the new Reg. FD guidance, a flow of blog posts followed – many speculating on the net result of these new changes. More than one purported that the announcement would spell the death of the press release.

I’ve been following numerous bloggers and Social Media Release (SMR) folks on Twitter for several months now and I don’t think the new Reg. FD guidance will kill the press release.  If anything, press releases will evolve and take advantage of new media technologies such as SMRs.

Read more…

I’m pleased to announce that we have closed our latest round of funding, bringing the total raised to $3M (CDN) since the fall of 2006. Investors include a mix of institutional funders and angels.  You can access the full press release on our web site:

Q4 Web Systems Closes $1.2M in Funding for Web Disclosure

Here are a couple of my quotes from the release:

I’m very pleased to close this latest round of funding in this current market climate. We continue to receive validation for our business model from the addition of new clients, business partners and our ability to attract investment. This latest round of funding will enable us to continue scaling the business while we roll-out our next generation platform in 2009.

This regulatory guidance is a significant change to how material information is distributed to the market. Not only does it lower costs for issuers, but it also creates opportunities for a number of companies, of which we are one. This investment is a validation of the market potential for our platform and web disclosure in general.

If you’ve had a chance to go through the 47 page guidance and specifically the section regarding “dissemination” of information and what “public” means in the context of RegFD and the corporate web site you’ve likely been left scratching your head thinking “ok, so now what?”The issue of what constitutes public information is one of the grey areas of the latest guidance. The purpose of this post is to try and provide some additional color to the guidance and help you understand what it is going to take in order to use your website as your “public” channel of disclosure under this new guidance.

To be considered “public” the corporate site needs to meet 3 criteria.

1. a company web site is a recognized channel of distribution
2. posting of information on a company web site disseminates the information in a manner making it available to the securities marketplace in general, and
3. there has been a reasonable waiting period for investors and the market to react to the posted information.

For the purpose of this post I’m going to focus on the first two criteria.

From the guidance:  Whether a company’s web site is a recognized channel of distribution of information depends on the steps that the company has taken to alert the market to its web site and its disclosure practices, as well as the use by investors and the market of the company’s web site

In general, for you to use your site as the main channel of disclosure it requires that you act like it is the main channel and that the market recognizes it as such. This means that you need to change the behavior of your company along with the perception of the market – which is going to take some effort. Here are a handful of suggestions (along with language from the guidance) for you to get started with:

Read more…

As Jason mentioned in his previous post, we are getting ready to kick off a busy summer quarter. With this, we have a new set of priorities and goals that we want to achieve. This is going to be our second quarter implementing the Rockefeller habits, we learned a lot the first time around and will be aiming to improve the way we track and score our progress.

One of the biggest changes we are making this time around is in the area of product development, implementations and support. Historically we have divided our development efforts into 2 distinct teams, a Product team that focused on building new features for our products and an implementation team that worked on implementing our products for clients and supporting those installations. As part of our recent re-adoption of Scrum project management, the entire group of developers were given the task of deciding on what kind of team structure we should work under. To make a long story short, the team decided on one group after much discussion, but the really great thing I’d like to point out is that we were given the option to chose for ourselves, this shows an amazing level of trust that is often times hard to find in the corporate world.

Photo credit: roy_mac_an_iarla

Another big change is that new team will be sitting together in one room, we feel this will not only help us as a group work together, but also to foster creative thinking and continually improve our products and processes. This also allows us to learn and feed off each other on a day to day basis. Learning is a never ending job for software developers and being surrounded by other smart people makes learning easy and fun!

We are all really excited about the coming months, and excited to be working on more great features for our clients.

Fresh off my vacation, I was pretty excited to get back to work this week with new found knowledge from the Certified Scrum Master course I took a couple of weeks ago. We have a couple of big release projects starting this quarter for both Q4 WEB and Q4 PRESS and there are a few new Q4 WEB clients in development right now so it’s shaping up to a busy summer for Q4.

Q4 PRESS was very well received at CIRI and NIRI 2008 and we’ve got a whole host of new features that are being planned out which will become part of the next release at the end of Q3 2008.  Stay tuned for the list of features and more detailed release information.

We’re also in progress with moving to a new data centre along with the next release of Q4 WEB as we’ve simply outgrown our current solution.

I feel like I say this quite a bit, but this is a very exciting time for Q4 and I’m glad I had a chance to get away for a week and recharge for this quarter!

If you weren’t able to attend CIRI 2008, you can catch up with Darrell’s live blog during the “Capital Markets Fraud Investigations – White Collar Crime” session which has been reposted on Zu Blog

As part of our ongoing effort to improve and upgrade our infrastructure I’m pleased to announce that the new Q4 data center is now fully redundant and SAS 70 TYPE II certified.

SAS 70 is an internationally recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Our data center’s SAS 70 certification enables us to further our expansion into the enterprise market by delivering certification of the controls needed for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

This certification deals with the controls related to service delivery, operations, infrastructure maintenance, change management, backup of programs and data files and logical and physical data center access.

Over the next couple of months we’ll be transitioning all clients over to the new data centre. Q4 has always provided a highly secure service delivery but now our customers will feel even more confident that our services are safe, secure, reliable and compliant with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, Disclosure, Disclosure controls, Compliance, SAS 70, Sarbanes Oxley, Investor Relations, IR Web Sites

Last week BFI Income Fund (TSX: BFC.UN) went live on Q4 WEB. We’re thrilled to add BFI to our growing list of clients looking to increase the efficiency of managing their corporate web site disclosure.

“We are very excited to be using Q4’s content and disclosure management system to easily manage and control changes to our corporate website,” stated Chaya Cooperberg, Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for BFI Canada Income Fund.  “In today’s regulatory environment, it is very advantageous and reassuring that the system automatically tracks and logs all changes and approvals, ensuring greater protection and compliance. We were extremely impressed with Q4’s ability to smoothly implement their solution in conjunction with our site re-design, and we are pleased to be at the forefront of using this technology.”  

BFI’s web site can be found at: http://www.bfi.ca/

Full Press Release

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, Investor Relations, IR Web Sites, Disclosure, Compliance

Earlier this week we announced the closing of latest round of funding. Here’s the full press release:

Financing to fund ongoing development of innovative workflow compliance and disclosure solutions and expanded sales and marketing efforts

Q4 Web Systems Inc. (“Q4 Web Systems” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce that it has closed $1.8M CDN in private placement financing from investors including a Schedule A Canadian bank.  The proceeds of the financing will be used by the Company to expand sales and marketing activities and accelerate the development of Q4 Web System’s innovative suite of workflow and collaboration solutions for managing capital markets disclosure and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
“We’ve grown rapidly over the past year and are pleased with our investors’ confidence in our company, our products and our plans for expansion across North America,” says Darrell Heaps, President and CEO of Q4 Web Systems.  “Increased regulation has strained the resources of issuers who are challenged to balance Sarbanes-Oxley compliance with corporate disclosure and the expectations of real-time transparency “  said Mr. Heaps.  “Our suite of innovative solutions addresses the management, tracking and distribution of disclosure and automates many tasks, saving time and money while speeding the delivery of material information to the market. “

Q4 Web Systems’ products aid in the certification of disclosure controls and procedures as specified in Sarbanes-Oxley Act section 302 and Canadian Securities Administrators’ Multilateral Instrument 52-109 and streamline compliance with CEO/CFO certification and Bill 198.  They do so by automatically routing information upward and generating time-stamped, auditable records of all viewers, versions, comments, edits and approvals.

About Q4 Web Systems
Q4 Web Systems is a leading provider of end-to-end disclosure management software. help publicly-traded companies increase efficiency, reduce compliance risk and gain complete in-house control over their disclosure. Q4’s innovative solutions automate many of the manual tasks related to disclosure, saving issuers time and money while speeding the delivery of their material information to the market. Companies across North America rely on Q4Web Systems to manage their disclosure more efficiently, more effectively and with less risk.

For further information: please visit http://www.q4websystems.com/ or contact: Darrell Heaps, President and CEO, Q4 Web Systems Inc., darrellh@q4websystems.com, Tel: 1-877-426-7829, or (416) 626-7829 ext. 222

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, Venture Capital, Disclosure, Investor Relations, financing, software