Agoracom

AGORACOM is a sponsor of the Roth China Vegas Conference and reporting on some of the incredible companies that are presenting at this conference.  As many of you know, we are very bullish on the long-term future of Chinese Small Cap Stocks for two reasons:

1]  The obvious reason - China is the fastest growing economy on the planet and nothing is going to slow down its ascent over the next 50 years and beyond. Investing in growth companies there just makes too much sense.

2]  Many Small Cap Chinese Stocks are listing in the US (OTCBB, AMEX and graduating higher) with great financial results.  Unlike many dubious US Small Cap Companies, Chinese Companies don’t seem to believe in losing money or failing to execute in a business plan.  As such, 7-digit revenues and profits are very common.

AGORACOM AS A STARTING POINT FOR CHINESE SMALL CAP COMPANIES

In addition to the featured company below, you can refer to our China category for other featured Chinese Small-Cap Companies, or view our extensive coverage of them on AGORACOM TV .  As always, we will disclose any IR relationship with any public company.  Given the sheer number of great Chinese Small-Cap Companies out there, you can expect us NOT to have an IR relationship with most of these companies.

TODAY’S FEATURED COMPANY

China Advanced Construction Materials (OTCBB: CADC)

80% of China ACM revenues are directly derived from major state-owned construction companies.  China ACM is a producer of advanced construction materials for large scale commercial, residential, and infrastructure developments. The company is primarily focused on producing and supplying a wide range of advanced ready-mix concrete materials for highly technical, large scale, and environmental construction projects

Financial Highlights for Q1 Ended September 30, 2008

• Revenue decreased to $5.0 million, up from $6.0 million in the corresponding period in 2007.  However, decrease in revenue is due to a switch to higher margin products, as reflected in gross margin increases below.

• Gross profit increased by 170% to $2.7 million, representing a 52.3% gross margin, compared with gross profit of $1.0 million, or a 17.2% gross margin, for the same period in 2007. The increase in gross profit is mainly attributable to a deliberate shift in the Company’s product and services mix.

• Net income increased to $1.1 million, as compared to a $1.0 million for the same period in 2007.  However, this quarter also included one-time expenses related to completion of a reverse merger transaction.

CHINA ACM ANTICIPATES $9 MILLION IN NET INCOME FOR 2009

“”We look forward to beginning the projects recently awarded to us such as the East Datong to Gudian railway and the Beijing to Shi Jiazhuang high-speed railroad. As a result of these and other projects underway, our current backlog stands at over 1.5 million cubic meters of ready-mix concrete through June 30, 2009, securing our ability to achieve a net income of at least $9 million for fiscal 2009, after adjusting for certain transaction-related charges and expenses.”

Xianfu Han, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Good evening to you all.  Despite significant weakness in the markets during October, I am very pleased to announce that AGORACOM set a monthly record for unique visitors (149,385) and total visits (741,562).  All of our traffic stats are tracked and reported by Google Analytics.

We attribute our October success to a couple of important factors.  First, in keeping with our advice to pubco clients that marketing during turbulent times is actually quite effective, AGORACOM launched 30-second TV ads on BNN, Bloomberg and CNBC in mid-September.  Using Google Trends, we saw an immediate impact with US searches for “Agoracom” sky-rocketing by mid-October.  FYI, the anecdotal feedback has been tremendous from current and prospective clients who have seen the ads.

Secondly, comScore reported that traffic to financial websites has actually jumped as a result of market turmoil, serving as further proof that small-cap public companies need to maintain marketing during this period.

Thanks to our great members and our great clients for helping make AGORACOM a 2nd generation financial community in which smart investors and smart public companies can communicate in near real-time, without problems relating to profanity, spam, flaming, stock bashing and stock hyping.

Regards,
George

Good morning to you all. The enclosed video is just 2:52 but provides a strong outline of Obama’s technology policies. One of the policies that we found particularly exciting is the creation of online forums providing citizens with an ability to post questions and receive answers in real-time.

Where have we heard that before? Barack, if you’re looking for a working and proven platform, give us a call.

We’re excited about the fact that President-Elect Obama gets it. He understands how to use technology as a powerful communications tool, rather than fearing it. He understands that people are going to have both positive and negative conversations - and chooses to be a part of it.

White House 2.0. Has a nice ring to it.

UPDATE (NOV 16) - Obama today announced that he will be using YouTube to post weekly addresses and other updates to the nation.

Regards,
George

Nemis credited the company’s retail shareholders, many of whom use the small-cap
investor relations website Agoracom, for strengthening management’s position.

“Without the Agoracom support, we never would have come to a balance with Rosseau
and never been able to negotiate the kind of agreement that we did negotiate and that
was my main concern.”

Richard Nemis, Chairman Emeritus, Noront Resources
Annual General Meeting
October 28, 2008

On October 9th, the most recent and biggest battle for a Canadian junior resource company - Noront Resources - commenced.  As the company’s investor relations firm, we went to work protecting the interests of management and the board - but we weren’t alone.  The AGORACOM Noront Shareholder Community was bigger, more motivated and ultimately more effective than the AGORACOM Aurelian warriors - and that was one hell of a crew.  Here is the tale of the tape over just 19 days.  The figures are quite simply massive and unprecedented.

PAGE VIEWS:             2,232,789
UNIQUE VISITORS:     41,709
PAGES PER VISIT:       58.90
AVG TIME PER VISIT:  22:09
TOP 10 COUNTRIES:   Canada, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Austria, United Kingdom, Peru, Switzerland

On October 27th, after a 19-day e-mail, web, telephone, letter writing and media campaign that the dissident shareholder group never could have foreseen, the two sides agreed to a jointly determined single slate of directors for election at Noront’s annual and special meeting.

Much like the Democratic and Republican political conventions, once the nominees have been finalized, both sides agree to lay down their arms and unite behind the new leadership. True, it will take many investors some time to completely trust and support the new board but that is to be expected following any such battle.

For our part, AGORACOM unequivocally supports the new board and will continue to do its part to advance the best interests of the company and its shareholders.

On a broader scale, however, something has permanently changed the stock market landscape. It’s big and notice of the change was served the following day.

On October 28th, the AGORACOM Noront Community finished the lesson first started by the AGORACOM Aurelian Community, which forced Kinross Gold to extend it’s “friendly offer” 3 times before finally taking control of Aurelian Resources.  Specifically, Bay Street no longer has unfettered control. The boys in the towers can no longer count on making deals to the detriment of retail investors over scotch.  Main Street now has Web 2.0 muscle and will use it to amalgamate and protect its interests.

CONCLUSION

Words can not express how proud I am of every AGORACOM Noront member/shareholder.  You saved the day.  You are pioneers that shook the small-cap world and returned it to its rightful owner - the retail investor.  Above all, you are a courageous, intelligent, cooperative, selfless and noble group.  Be proud and take a moment to fully savor your accomplishment.

Tomorrow, let’s get back to work.  Noront Resources will not be the last company to go through this process.  This is especially true given current market conditions.  Spread the word by sending this message to every investor you know, with the goal of having a fully functioning HUB (client or non-client), for every great small-cap company. Investor communities are never going to be the same.

Finally, I’ll save the last word for Chairman Emeritus, Richard Nemis.  On behalf of everyone at AGORACOM and the entire AGORACOM Noront Community, thank-you. For everything.  Anytime, anywhere, just pick up the phone. You have an army at your service.

With great respect,
George, Paul and the AGORACOM Team

It gives me great pleasure to report on a positive development in these markets, especially when it involves one of my best friends.  Specifically,Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. (NYSE: MSO) today announced an agreement to invest in, and enter a commercial agreement with, Pingg Corp. (www.pingg.com), an online event management site that offers stylish invitations and easy-to-use event planning tools.

Pingg was created by seasoned entrepreneurs Lorien Gabel and Matt Harrop, who together have founded, built and sold two successful technology startups. Yep, they’re on the verge of taking web business #3  parabolic while I still toil here at AGORACOM :-).

The site offers customizable invitations that can be delivered electronically, in print or shared on a social network.  Pingg is taking on long-time incumbant Evite by bringing a fresh Web 2.0 perspective to the space.

Pingg.com was launched in February 2008, a whole 8 months ago and has already managed to attract MSLO to the table.   Sick I tell you, just sick. I am password protecting this post from my wife and shareholders (Lorien is actually a shareholder).

Since then, approximately 2.5 million invitations have been sent through Pingg.com. Its business model combines both online advertising and paid services.

If I can take any revenge on Lorien and Matt, it is in posting their ridiculous profile pics below + telling the world that Lorien’s middle name is “Tree” and Matt’s hair color was blue when he founded start-up #1.  Now I feel better.

Congrats boys.  Much love and respect for yet another job well done.

Regards,
George

Taking a step back from the markets for a moment, I have to point out that Michael Arrington and TechCrunch have once again proven themselves to be completely out to lunch.

First, they insist on covering every utterly ridiculous Web 2.0 “company” that is typically nothing more than a bunch of coders getting together and launching a Hail Mary in hopes of creating an overnight billion dollar company.  No business model, no hopes of monetization, just a “it is so cool that 10 zillion people will use it and I can sell it to Google” model.

Support for my contention comes from:

[A] The rapidly growing level of disappointment amongst TechCrunch readers via comments over the past year. Whereas commentors used to tread lightly in fear of getting on the bad side of the beast, they now freely attack and criticize every TC writer with the strongest attacks aimed at Michael Arrington himself.

[B] The even more rapidly growing number of companies in the TechCrunch deadpool, most of which received meaningful coverage from TC itself.

“CYPRESS” VIDEO TAKES TECHCRUNCH OVER THE DEEP END

Today, TechCrunch and Michael Arrington himself have fallen even deeper into the abyss with what can only be described as a “drama queen-esque” series of posts criticizing some Web 2.0 founders for having fun on vacation “while Rome burned”.  Arrington even goes on to add “the video video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0.”  ………… D-R-A-M-A   Q-U-E-E-N.

This is nothing more than tabloid style journalism looking to capitalize on the panic that has gripped Silicon Valley. It is nothing more than sensationalism.  Wall Street has its AIG party to serve as its poster child of excess, so Arrington and TechCrunch sought to find their version for Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than 20 people that rented a villa in Cyprus that created a video lipsynching to Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing. This group didn’t take taxpayer money and spend $440,000 in a weekend, they booked some vacation time 3 months ago and enjoyed it.

Don’t just take my word for it, a quick scan of comments to this post in the series clearly demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of readers are criticial of TechCrunch’s coverage, almost to the point of being fed up with the rapidly descending quality of articles.

Arrington and TechCrunch better get back to some serious journalism or they may be headed for their own Deadpool. The days of a bunch of nerds showing up on their doorstep, slobbering all over Arrington’s ego and getting coverage are over. Time to look for real companies with real revenues and real business models.

Regards,
George

I am very pleased to announce AGORACOM traffic results for the first full-year since the launch of our small-cap, wiki-powered “Investor Controlled Discussion Forums” on October 5, 2007.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, these 2 snapshots from our Google analytics is worth 101,000,000 words [CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGE, CLEAR GRAPH]

Suffice it to say, we are ecstatic with the results and we want to thank all of our great clients and members that believed in our model and breathed unbelievable life into this paradigm shifting platform. As demonstrated by our recent launch of TV ads on Bloomberg, CNBC and BNN , as well as, the addition of Peter Grandich, we will continue to re-invest back into the success of this community for the benefit of all. Thank-you!

When we made first made the announcement, we set out to destroy the stock discussion forum status quo that we have all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and assorted noise. Many thought it could not be done because we could neither change habits nor unseat the incumbents. We not only knew we could, we knew that we would. Now, more than lip service, the following numbers speak for themselves:

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

(Figures for October 5, 2007 - October 5, 2008. All figures reported by Google Analytics)

• Unique Visitors 1,245,854
• Visits 7,639,273
• Page Views 101,204,915
• Pages Per Visit 13.25
• Avg Time On Site 10:00
• Number Of Countries/Territories 207
• Top 10 (Canada, USA, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico)

The numbers look even better when you consider

• We built our model on quality vs quantity. As such, this is pure discussion. No spam, flaming and bickering traffic.
• We are only focusing on small-cap and micro-cap stocks …for now.

THE STATUS QUO IS CRUMBLING

We are very happy to see the data back up our theory that investors deeply desire the ability to amalgamate and discuss individual stock investments in a civilized community. investors are no longer willing to accept the unacceptable.

Until now, the trash has ruled the day, forcing the masses to abandon discussion forums and conduct due diligence either on their own, or in small groups. It is inefficient but it is the best option we’ve had for nearly a decade.

Eventually, the market corrects inefficiencies and AGORACOM has set its sights on correcting this one.

By refusing to sacrifice quality for quantity, AGORACOM is attracting and will continue to attract smart and conscientious investors that understand the wisdom of crowds. Eventually, quality begets quality and a massive community that both generates its own content and moderates itself will replace the status quo.

HAPPY TO SEE A HAPPY COMMUNITY

Despite the plethora of great data illustrating our success, nothing makes us happier than reading the reaction of our members. Here are just some of the raving testimonials we’ve been able to pull from the site so far.

While we’re talking about our members, I want to take this moment to thank each and every one of them for believing in our model, spreading the word and breathing life into it. Without them, this would be one hell of an application with no users. A special thanks goes out to all HUB Leaders that abandoned their former communities at Stockhouse, Raging Bull, Yahoo Finance and others in hopes of a better experience. I’m glad our promises to you have been fulfilled.

BLOGS CAN NOT REPLACE DISCUSSION FORUMS

With the advent of financial blogs - and some pretty great ones that include Paul Kedrosky, Barry Ritholtz and Mark McQueen to name but a few - some might argue discussion forums are no longer necessary, even outdated. Don’t make that mistake. Blogs are great for insight into the most important economic issues from a wide array of great minds. However, they rarely stay focused on a particular topic for more than a day.

Stock discussion forums, on the other hand, provide investors with an ability to exchange ideas and analyze one particular stock 24/7/365. You might read about macro events (i.e. sub-prime or Apple earnings) on a blog but figuring out the ongoing impact on your specific stock investments requires an extended micro discussion that blogs can not provide.

CONCLUSION

This is Wiki meets IGC (investor generated content) at its finest. There are bigger communities to be sure - but can you find another vertical in which the need for a drastically more efficient model is needed more? Trillions of dollars are at stake. People’s futures are at stake. The implications of inefficient or imperfect information are severe.

Stock discussion forums are vital to the lives of so many people. I believe we are about to witness a paradigm shift that makes them valuable once again. Stay tuned for more.

Regards,
George

Gang, if you want to follow my micro posts, you can follow me on Twitter as well. Here is an example of what I have posted today:

Regards,
George

On September 15, we announced the commencement of 30-second television ads on Bloomberg and CNBC in the United States, as well as, BNN in Canada.  Unlike search engine marketing, it can be used to be hard to measure the effectiveness of offline branding campaigns because potential new visitors don’t call you.  If we were specifically marketing our IR services, you could measure the number of prospect calls or web inquiries.

Fortunately, we now have Google Trends. Google Trends analyzes how many searches have been done for a specific term, relative to the total number of searches for that specific term over time. In this case, I wanted to see the search trend for “AGORACOM” in the United States.

In order to make comparisons easy and put them in relative terms, Google assigns the searches over time a  baseline score of 1.00.  As such, anything above 1.00 since September 15 is a good sign and anything below 1.00 is a bad sign. How good or bad would depend on how far off 1.00 the trend is.

So what is the trend for AGORACOM so far? A Google Trends chart is worth 1,000 words:

The spike is so big that the baseline of 1.00 looks like we had no searches at all in 2008 when, in fact, the spike meant the chart had to be set to increments of 10.  To put this into perspective, Imagine what the chart of a small-cap stock would look like if it was trading pretty healthy in and around $1.00 for most of the year and then suddenly spiked to almost $20.

I do concede this is still early and we will have to check this again in 30 days - but we are off to a great start.

AMERICANS SEARCHING FOR “GOLD STOCKS”

If you want to take a look at your own trends, go here.  You can view a search trend for the entire world or for a specific country.  The caveat is that Google Trends doesn’t give you reports on thinly traded search terms. As such, if your corporate name doesn’t register, try things like your industry.  For example, I queried “Gold Stocks” and the following tells me that Americans are becoming VERY interested in them!

If you are a small-cap CEO and don’t recognize the power of Web 2.0 by now, I give up

Regards,
George

Dan Kimerling over at TechCrunch identifies that companies like Google, Six Apart and Plaxo were born during bleak times - but then makes the mistake of drawing a causal connection between their success and the subsequent economic turnaround. As a result, he states the following:

“Given the current economic environment, continued technological innovation
is one of the things that is likely to turn the economy around and help
restore confidence in the health of the world wide economic engine.”

Sorry Dan but you are way off with your conclusion. Saying that great tech innovations lead the economy out of tough times is as illogical as saying terrible tech innovations sitting in the TC death pool are leading the economy into tough times.

THE TRUE MORAL OF THE STORY

The true moral of the story is that - in tough times - people create tools with real utility and real business models. There is neither the patience, nor the money for kids with “cool” ideas (aka DeadPool), so entrepreneurs are forced to get back to the basics in tough times and create technologies that can actually be utilized by people willing to pay for them. They are adopted into the mainstream and flourish as the economy inevitably enters recovery and prosperity.

This only further supports my well documented rants that the last 4 years has seen far too much emphasis on “cool” but utterly useless tools. It is no coincidence - but it is ironic - that the cool phase occurs as VC’s become flush with cash thanks to the success of real technologies born out of tough times.

Unfortunately, the availablity of funds leads to waaayyy too many dumb ideas, which are only accentuated by blogs such as TechCrunch that get caught up in the mania, which only leads to waaayyy more dumb ideas.

SURPRISE !! DUMB IDEAS DON’T LAST

Unfortunately - but inevitably - dumb ideas don’t last. If you need any further proof, just take a look at both the size of the TC Dead Pool and it’s accelerating rate of growth. VC’s get squeezed by the lack of exits and suddenly people in Silicon Valley are shocked at the drop off in VC funding.

TechCrunch itself is an example of this when Dan states the following in his post:

“VC funding, essential for many startups, will not come if VC funds
do not see IPOs occurring because the IPO market is all but non-existent
and corporate buyers cannot go to credit markets in order to fund acquisitions.”

Unlike Dan, however, I won’t make the mistake of creating a causal connection betwen crappy technology innovations and a weakening economy. Crappy technologies suffer in a weak economy, they don’t create a weak economy.

Likewise, great technologies are born out of scarcity and flourish in a growing economy, they don’t create it.

I hate to see the economy in a recession - but at least I can look forward to smart people once again creating great technologies.

Regards,
George