CIRI Ontario opened the fall season at the Albany Club yesterday with a presentation on ‘Using Advanced Technologies Effectively.  Speakers included Michael O’Connor Clarke, VP of Thornley Fallis Communications; Natalie Johnson, Manager of Social Media with General Motors and Parker Mason, Web Content Specialist with the CNW Group. (More info on event/presenters . Michael O’Connor also blogs about this event)          
Attended by approximately 60 people, the topic was focused specifically on blogging and so the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube were largely omitted.
For the …

Earlier today the SEC Chairmen, Christopher Cox unveiled the successor to the form based EDGAR database.   The new system is called IDEA (Interactive Data Electronic Applications) and will be built on an XBRL based platform that will give investors access to faster and more detailed financial information than ever before.
IDEA is the latest in a string of significant announcements that have come out of the SEC including, XBRL mandate and the guidance on web disclosure and RegFD. There have already been a number of posts regarding this announcement and it …

While Catherine prepares for her well-deserved vacation, I’ll do the honours by posting this for her. Catherine was recently interviewed by CMA Management Magazine regarding corporate disclosure and electronic reporting in Canada. You can read the full article here.
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Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with John Hughes from Deloitte. John shared some recent findings regarding “Fundamental Investors” that I thought were quite interesting. John said:
All companies make a choice (consciously or unconsciously) in deciding how they will present themselves to the market. The quality of the information provided to the market is a factor that contributes to increasing valuations and lowering cost of capital. This “premium” is not something a company can obtain for itself over night, but even incremental market gains from a long-term investment in …

Seeing as many of you may be hip-deep in annual reporting I thought I’d share this interesting piece with you. A designer named Nicholas Felton has published an annual report of his life for the last 3 years. Although fluffy from a content perspective, Nicholas has some very creative ways to display the information of the year gone by.
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Article from Don Tappscot from the first day of the World World Economic Forum in Davos showed up yesterday. It has an interesting note about transparency that I wanted to share:
One of most insightful for me was with Samuel DiPiazza, the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers. PWC has been a leader in the next generation of reporting – they call it value reporting – where the financial report is about al lot more than earnings and financial information. XBRL and the Web 2.0 are poised to transform reporting, where the focus will …

With the over arching trend of corporate disclosure being transparency, the pressures and risk of creating and distributing disclosure continue to increase. In addition to the financial disclosures, the majority of corporate disclosure occurs in non-financial form. These include commmunications such as press releases, corporate reports, presentations and web site content. The information disclosed through these channels is critical to providing the context and insight into the operations and results of your company. Not surprisingly, all of this information represents significant strategic value to your company while also …

CSR is a big word and seems to attract attention from many aspects. 
Unfortunately, recent survey results suggest many US companies are not going to impliment such a policy this year either.  This news is from a slightly different perspective than I’m used to reading it from, being an HR based company – but CSR covers a lot of ground and there’s room for everyone.
I think I like the perspective of this opinion bit - that CSR comes from community and government enforcement.  Waiting for businesses to change on their own will take too much …