TOP CONTRIBUTORS

Patrick Cushing

Hermann S

Isabelle ayel

Date / Time

U.S. Call

• Thursday, April 16th at 8pm EST / 5 PST

RSVP

• Able to Attend: Patrick,
• Unable to Attend:

International Call

• Thursday, April 16th at 10:30pm IST (Indian Standard Time) / 7pm MET (Middle Europen Time, i.e., UTC+1) / 1pm EST (Eastern Standard Time US) / 10am PST (Pacific Standard Time US)
  • If you're looking to convert, please use http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html or message me -- Pcushing 11:23, April 13, 2009 (PDT)
• Able to Attend: Patrick, Isabelle Ayel, Hermann

• Unable to Attend: David I have symphony tickets, starting at 8PM, George

Agenda Ideas

U.S. Call

• Content -- How do we encourage more contributions?
  • Modularize contributions? i.e., find people who write just "overviews" while others write "financials" and others write "trends and forces"?

International Call

• What does Wikinvest need to do to expand internationally?
  • Research sources -- what else should be included?
  • International finance news sources (for our upcoming redesign that includes news)
• Which colleges / universities should we reach out to to find investing clubs as we have in the U.S.?

Slides & Call Notes

thevoiceatvoicedup

As far as the rest of the finance world goes I think the question you have to ask is who are you competing with? and why will someone choose to visit Wikinvest instead of the countless other financial sites for news on a particular company. For instance, should I seek information on AAPL my first instinct is to visit apple.com. There I would be able to find all relevant financial information such as 10-Q reports, fiancial statements, earnings releases, financial history etc and this would be directly from the source..... If unsatisfied with my results the next step would be Yahoo finance, Google finance, Reuters, Bloomberg and the list goes on. As time has gone by these sites have filtered much of the spam and irrelevant data. As Wiki is user generated information a lot of people might refrain from utilzing wiki data out of fear of misinformation. I think what wiki is doing is great for the finance community especially those that are just starting out but the key is to reach the first time finance users and this can only be done by gaining exposure in high schools and colleges. What wiki should be seeking is to grow with the younger generation, the older generation is set in their ways and is very hard to unconform. I would suggest reaching out through our educational system as the younger generations really dont have any financial exposure until college if their lucky.

Hermann

The older generation should not be ignored as a potential customer base. Older people have valuable multi decade experience in the markets and many of the people in the age of 40-60 are familiar with modern office technology and the internet (because they use this tools in daily business).

The main asset of Wikinvest is the network of informations. It is interesting to spend hours with the articles and to achieve a better understanding how the markets work. Good references to the sources are proving reliability of the informations.

Research Sources - I added Kitco, minesite.com and ABARE to the commodity references. How is the opinion about forums? I know that a lot of crap is written there but I found also many good writings and investments ideas e.g. on topstocks.au. There are also a lot of valuable informations available on governmental or international organisations sites, e.g.:

• World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• International Monetory Fund (IMF)
• USGS Minerals Information
• International Energy Agency (IEA)

University contacts - attached is a link to a Cologne University Institute

• Center for Financial Research - Cologne University
  • Reading Sample

During the Call

• Appreciates keeping Wikinvest content free, rather than charging for premium features
• Wanted to know when new data features would launch, rather than continue to populate WikiData metrics that may be replaced
• To increase internationalization:
  • Make it seem like a popular destination for readers. He likes having a resource to obtain a lot of knowledge on US Companies
  • Create company / concept pages for the other countries
    • He wouldn't recommend multi-language version of the site
    • If people can't read the original source material, they probably shouldn't be investing in the security
• The biggest advantage to establishing Wikinvest is its community; help create a feeling of community within people so you can rival both Wikipedia and Google Finance
• For the data demo, the lack of currency indicators is confusing and in some cases, even wrong. See the SAP page for an example
• Every company has a reporting currency so we should keep their data in that currency

Isabelle Ayel

• copy-paste of my contribution in discussion

About April agenda

I made a quick search about investment clubs in European University and send you these 3 links:

1-http://appli7.hec.fr/forum_finance/c_finance_society/index.php

French "university"or "grande école" as we name it in France (great majority of the French connection's members, who were well involved in the deployments of the "futures", came from these "grandes écoles")

2- https://secure.timetotrade.eu/wiki/index.php/Cambridge_University_Investment_Club

Cambridge University in UK

3-http://www.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de/1.0.html?&L=3

Frankfurt University Germany. Maybe you have to look for Investment Club in Munich or Heidelberg also.

About Twitter

congratulation for joining the "club". Maybe this article could be interesting for the consiglieres

http://www.prweekus.com/How-Twitter-saved-public-relations-from-PR/article/130530/

About Wikinvest public/audience

Wikinvest website valuable stuffs = charts, concepts

Maybe it will be interesting to give analyses about "new concepts": openmoney, peer-to-peer lending, developpment with no capital...

During the Call

• New data demos are very compelling for increasing usage
• The main problem with internationalization -- we do not speak the same language!
  • Many European schools have exchanges with the U.S. now. Maybe there's better support for translations as a result?
• Rather than compare Wikinvest to Google/Yahoo Finance, Wikinvest should establish its own standard
• Real value is the contributions from a variety of people
  • Find both professionals and person investors who are personally involved in each topic
  • Find people with passion for investing, wikis, and social media so they'll feel involved in their community
  • A sense of community drives people to do their best
• Its really important to fix the issue with the reporting currency in the data demos

JB Schag

• The Money School pages are a little light and should be more in depth with various strategies for users to learn from
• Learned investing by watching father, older, smarter people; create new ways to "look over the shoulder" of other investors using Wikinvest
• Annotating the charts is a great example that would be great to incorporate into the data features
• Agrees with Hermann that translating isn't necessarily a great idea; a lot of local information is lost this way; could be dangerous if there are mistakes
• Wikinvest should establish its own standard with both investing and the power of the community
• Everything comes down to your global strategy; there are barriers to working internationally and they're hard
• Focus on the power of the group and cultivate a community of learning investors
• The era of the USD as a reserve currency is over; currencies and information need to be localized

Alan Jiang

• Data demo really interactive, sets Wikinvest apart
• Contributed a lot more before there were a lot of articles written
• With so many articles written on the site now, he doesn't know exactly where he can contribute
• Its hard editing an existing article than creating a completely new article