One reason we still rely on the traditional news channels (company publishes a press release, press agency packages it into a news item, broadcasters spread it), is because we don’t know something is going to happen until it already has. Yet, many “news” are perfectly predictable. CCBN provides a calendar of forthcoming earning announcements to Yahoo! Finance. Likewise, AOL’s When.com consolidates future product releases or event dates into one place. The difference between them is, Yahoo! integrates with other systems through Starfish TrueSync, while you’re stuck inside When.com’s calendar.
Does someone know how to find when a company will issue its next S1 SEC filing? I guess this information exists somewhere (at least the people working on the document should know) but I couldn’t find any public source for it. So we’re left either with waiting for the news, or trying to anticipate them with software spys. Talk about Charibde and Scylla: either you depend on intermediaries to get the information you need (ie. getting the news depends on their agenda, not yours), or you have to spend time thinking where and how to set your information traps.
Information sources should let people know what’s coming. It needs to be done in a way that integrates well into our tools and habits, such as calendar and task management software (right now, Yahoo let me track earning announcements easily enough). Of course many events are not forecast or planned in advance. But the future is a lot easier to foresee when you have a good knowledge of the past – for instance, who’s surprised by the recent turmoil in the Middle East?
2016 necro-update: when.com is defunct save a few icons, probably has for years. AOL paid 225M 1999 dollars for it! Ted Barnett gave an interview in 2015 about these ancient times.