First Solar Q4 2007 Conference Call - Visualization

Below you'll find two applications of an innovative text visualization technology from IBM. We've entered our transcript of the First Solar Q4 2007 Earnings Conference Call to Many Eyes, which yields (1) an interactive visualization 'tree', and (2) a tag cloud that indicates what words or phrases were most prominent on the call, and allows you to drill down to the actual mentions of those words.

In the upper box, try typing in a word like 'we', 'better', 'price' or 'demand'.

Check it out - and please leave a comment below to let us know if you think this is a helpful tool to make the most out of our conference calls. (Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky)

Comments

[Froddo:]

I think these tools are really cool and provide an interesting overview! I particularly like the fact that you can drill down using the 'tree tool', but I think they would both be even better if you could drill down to see the specified words highlighted in the context of the full transcript.
Just my humble opinion.

2008 Feb 14 07:39 AM

[David Lentz:]

The first view was by far the more useful, and would have been more so if the text had wrapped to fit in the window, or by right-clicking on a section of it, the linear transcript was opened and positioned to that point. I found it especially useful in that it tended to tie together the question and the response to that question, or to identify questions that were ignored, or talked around.

The second view was pretty, but pretty much impossible to do anything with, as I failed to find a way to drill down or to examine in detail anything that piqued one's interest.

Always good to try out new ways of doing things.

2008 Feb 14 09:10 AM

[anon:]

It's pretty annoying, actually. A quicker way to find stuff in a conference call is "ctrl+F". Actually, the way now present conference call transcripts is even worse. Instead of listing the entire call on one page you have to click through 10+ pages now. Did you do that in order to get more advertisers (i.e. you can list a separate advertiser on each page) or are you just trying to piss off your customer base?

2008 Feb 14 04:51 PM

[Long-Short Guy:]

It would be useful if the excerpts in the tree could link to that line in the transcript, so you could go and check out what was said in the transcript.

2008 Feb 14 04:52 PM

[David Jackson:]

Anon,

We heard from readers that scrolling down through very long documents -- in this case transcripts -- was annoying. So we switched to a paginated view.

Big mistake. We severely reduced the usability of the transcripts.

In our next release (within a month), we'll restore the one page view of transcripts.

2008 Feb 14 05:01 PM

[solar jim:]

I like it.

2008 Feb 15 10:53 PM

[turleymuller:]

David,

I am agree with Anon, having 10 pages is hard to deal with. Having to click around pages just looking for a particular part is tedious. Also, It's impossible to print out. I can't stand reading on screen, and print most everything to read a hard copy.

A suggestion, you could add a print view link that includes the whole text on a single page as well has having the transcript split up. That;s what most everyone else does, such as Barron's.

Nonetheless, I really appreciate your work and service. Terrific job.

2008 Feb 24 09:31 PM

[sschristianca:]

agree on the mulitple page. On one hand as a user it is extremly annoying for me. On the other hand, I understand you need to make page views for revenue. So to meet between the two, do as the last reader mention which is create a print view link that shows the whole article while keeping the mulitple page.

on another note, is there any thought on changing your RSS feed to a full feed? I hate the partial feeds and unsubscribe to all partial feeds except for you guys as love the content. This will unfortantly change as it is really annoying. why not just serve an ad within the rss feed?

2008 Apr 07 03:43 AM