News Digest for November 8, 2006

There are 7 items … Inside the mind of the Net generation | Accounting firms call for reporting overhaul | A Report by the World’s Largest Auditors Urges Relaxed Standards for Liability | UBS Embraces the Buy Side | CEO Bloggers? Bring it On | Four steps to success |What are online RSS feeds?

Inside the mind of the Net generation
During a session at the Web 2.0 Summit, author and consultant Don Tapscott shared results from a research project on the Net generation, the first humans to grow up digitally.

Accounting firms call for reporting overhaul
PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young will call for static quarterly financial statements to be replaced by real-time, internet-based reporting encompassing a wider range of performance measures.

A Report by the World’s Largest Auditors Urges Relaxed Standards for Liability
The heads of the six largest auditing firms in the world issued a call for relaxed liability standards for their companies yesterday, in what appears to be the start of a campaign to protect their franchises while reducing the risk that bad audits could bankrupt one or more of them.

UBS Embraces the Buy Side
In theory, the new group of analysts could come up with different recommendations on stocks than the large crop of so-called sell side analysts already working for UBS’s investment bank. In compiling their recommendations, the buy side analysts will also consider research recommendations from analysts at other Wall Street firms, sources say.

Four steps to success
Dennis Halpin, IR director at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corporation (WPSC), had an epiphany at a Niri conference a few years ago when an equity analyst talked about his biggest IR peeve: a web site with no real information and lousy navigation. ‘I felt like he was looking straight at me,’ Halpin shudders. 

CEO Bloggers? Bring it On
Both the professional investing community and the investing public are ready for this change, and there are no logical reasons for such a change not to occur. Unless politics get in the way. Let’s hope not.

What are online RSS feeds?
RSS — which stands for “Really Simple Syndication” — is a kind of computer code that allows you to “subscribe” to various Web sites, which will then send you new headlines and blurbs soon after they’re posted. Your computer will also occasionally check in with the sites you subscribe to for updates.

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