Penny Herscher

http://pennyherscher.blogspot.com

3 Comments

    • Is the New Generation of Financial Content an Opportunity or Threat for Investor Relations? [view article]
      Sure thing, David. FirstRain finds our subscribers (institutional PMs and analysts) qualitative data points and trends that they would not otherwise see -- from the web. We do this by generating daily reports that are personalized to the universe of each subscriber and collecting a database of searchable web results cetagorized by investment topics. More recently, we've added the ability to extract and graph trends in events like executive departures, refusals to comment, etc.

      In terms of comparison to SeekingAlpha, we author no original content ourselves. We address the need for unique, pertinent data and perspectives with research models (software developed by our analysts) and technology to automatically glean unique data from the entire web in a bottom-up fashion. Whereas I believe SeekingAlpha approaches the problem by selecting the best of the best, and organizing it to make it impactful to the reader.
      Apr 08 10:56 AM
    • Is the New Generation of Financial Content an Opportunity or Threat for Investor Relations? [view article]
      David,

      Great to see a thoughtful discussion on IR departments and financial blogs. Especially timely with the panel sessions about the web as a research source at last week's AQ Research conference (London) and today's Investorside Independent's Day conference (NYC).

      On the buy-side, we find that our customers - analysts and PMs -generally feel some mixture of opportunity if they do, and exposure if they don't, when it comes to using web results and blogs in their research process. On the corporate side CFOs, IR, and even CMOs are also waking up to this opportunity. For every Jonathan Schwarz (Sun) releasing results to his blog before putting them on the wire, there are hundreds of CEOs trying to figure out how to leverage the web.

      Penny
      Apr 07 07:41 AM
    • RightNow Proves 'Software as a Service' Isn't Perfect [view article]
      The key issue here is the RNOW was not truly a SaaS vendor. They had an on-demand delivery model but their revenue model was perpetual - like an enterprise software vendor. Now as they transition to be a true SaaS vendor they will reap the benefits of the visibilty and immunity to downturns. But they will not be completely immune until their revenue is 100% subscription, or ratable, like Salesforce - or FirstRain.

      pennyherscher.blogspot...       Feb 04 09:28 AM
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