As you may have noticed, now might not exactly be the best time to get involved in the stock market. Sure, year over year, chances are you'll make money. But there's a good chance that if you throw a few thousand dollars into a mutual fund right now it might be worth less in 3 months than it is today. Fortunately, there's more than one way to turn your savings into more savings. And thanks to the internet, a couple of new opportunities have developed over the last few years.
First up, you might want to take a look at online savings accounts and CDs. Since banks like ING Direct don't have to spend a lot of money on bricks and mortar operations, they can offer higher interest rates than many traditional banks. And even many old school banks offer online accounts with higher interest rates than their traditional offerings.
But thanks to the recent economic downturn, many of these banks are lowering their interest rates. While you could easily open an account with a 5% interest rate a few months ago, you'll be lucky to find one over 3% now. If you're looking for another opportunity, albeit a riskier one, you might want to check out a new breed of financial transactions: social lending services like Prosper, Lending Club, or Zopa.
For those of you that have been itching to get a pulse on more European company information and UK mutual fund data, Google Finance has just opened Google Finance UK.
Following in the footsteps of Google Finance Canada, the Google Finance Blog states that this is another implementation of a series of sites that will aim to bring localized financial information to users.
Although there aren't any hints of which country will be graced with the next Google Finance localization, 2008 will supposedly see some new features. Hopefully, the people that have been having issues with Google Finance's lack of dividend information will have their wish fulfilled.
Yahoo! is getting ready to take the wrapper off TechTicker, an online program aimed at technology investors.
TechTicker specifically targets technology stocks in a portal type environment. The new program will offer streaming video, blog posts and breaking news targeting the technology investment sector. The portal and show which are said to be launching in January 2008, pick up where Yahoo! Finance Vision left off in 2002. Thankfully high speed connections are far more common in 2007 and better video compression tools are available to make internet based shows a feasible reality, rather than a pipe dream (no, we're not poking fun at Yahoo! Pipes, ok, maybe just a little). As for the other financial information that will be displayed, we assume it will resemble what Yahoo! Finance already does, but targeting technology specific companies.
With Yahoo! Finance high on the list of financial sites, TechTicker could be headed for great things. Of course, track records aside, we will have to wait for the roll out in order to really decide.
Check out what Yahoo! Finance Vision looked like back in the day.
The key to saving money is knowing what you're spending it on. If you can keep track of every cent, you can discover exactly where your money is going and act accordingly.
Spendview is an online application that enables users to track and visualize balances and expense data in one place. This is done through an engine that tags and categorizes spending in order to make your finances somewhat exciting. Spendview also uses tag clouds and a dynamic chart instead of old fashioned pie charts and bar graphs. This way you can see all of your data at a quick glance instead of mulling over numerous columns and categories.
Users start out by registering for a free account and adding bank, credit card information and tagging transactions with keywords. How secure is the data you enter? Spendview says that its 'secure', and they do use 128 bit SSL Security. However, you should always be cautious when entering private financial data online.
The leader in personal finance is getting set to launch a strong presence online. All startup finance applications start shaking in their winter boots.
Intuit is getting ready for their winter launch of Quicken Online, a web based version of their personal finance application. If you have worried about security in the past with the recent slew of online financial software, Quicken should ease your mind. Intuit has a strong following due to their consumer trust for desktop applications, and they have been working hard to build that same trust for their web based application. So far it is known that this application will hold basic balance charts, reports, and bill payment services.
Quicken Online is currently in closed testing modes, with beta set to open the middle of September. Look out for further discoveries closer to September.
Spend, spend, spend.... track, spend. Spending is easy, but tracking expenses and spends is not only time consuming, but tends to slip the mind every once and a while. Once you have a proper tool to aid in daily expenses you are on your way to some healthy financial data.
Gastus is a free online tool that helps people track daily expenses. Expenses can be categorized each month by type and concept, and display charts and graphs for a quick analyzation.
Will Gastus help generate more money or help you to spend less? No. But it will give you a breakdown of where all of your expenses are.
Google Finance got a little localization for Canada yesterday. The news was accidentally leaked last week, but its now official.
Canadian investors now have another site to rejoice over and check out relevant market information. With Canadian users being the second largest user group for Google Finance, they thought it was best to build out a localized version. The site provides users with top financial news from Canadian sources, perform Canadian searches, Bank data from the Bank of Canada on the home page, and equity data from the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, and Canadian mutual funds.
Netvibes and Pageflakes might be the best start pages for the everyday user, but what about those that have to keep in tune with the financial world 24/7? That's InfoNgens job.
InfoNgen is a start page much like Netvibes, or even iGoogle, but highly targets the financial industry. Sections that are pre set on the start page include:
In The News Economics News Commodities News Key Results Deal News Product News IPO News
InfoNgen pulls in articles from such sites as Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, PR Newswire, Forbes, and top industry locations. To get started and add more content, users are required to sign up for a free account. After that is done, RSS feeds can be added, information can be organized as best suited, and users can discuss content and ideas with colleagues.
Wondering which Web 2.0 company is going to cash out next? So are we, and so was Aidan Henry.
Aidan wrote up a list of the biggest Web 2.0 companies that got bought out over the past year, and a list of the biggest movers that are highly targeted leaders. Among them are market leaders like Digg, Technorati, Netvibes, SimplyHired, 37 Signals, LinkedIn, Ning, and SixApart.
So what will the next major aquisition be? Facebook said it's not interested, and 37 Signals has been trucking along building successful applications for some time now so it's hard to tell. But these companies hold a lot of interest for larger traditional media ventures like News Corp, or top technology companies like Yahoo and Google.
Given acquisition track records, companies that have been bought out by larger companies usually enjoy an increase in exposure, customer base, and all of the technology developments they can handle.....most of the time. With buyouts often come the unknown. Yahoo scored big with del.icio.us and has taken some time to redevelop the popular bookmarking site, but Dodgeball seemed to have sunk when Google took it over and neglected it.
So what's your bet? Who would you write in as the number one spot for the next major acquisition?
If you're just starting out and want to get a leg up on your finances, Expensr, a web based personal finance app might be for you. It is free and allows you to create budgets to track your spending and projected spending. You can upload your bank account statements in a .ofx format, or manually enter transactions as you would in your checkbook register.
A nice security feature is the fact that you upload your bank statements manually. You don't have to provide your bank username and pasword (as with some other finance products). OFX files do contain your bank account number, but not your bank username and password. Expensr does not store the OFX file after parsing it, only the transactions in it (name, date, amount).
Since Expensr is a social network, you can compare your spending against others. This means you get to see the aggregated data of the users of a particular tag. See screenshot below. The green represents the aggregated data from the tag 'woman', and the blue is data from your user account.
StatMatch is a feature where you can really go local by comparing your spending with that of your friends. If a user looking at your profile is in your friend list, and if you have StatMatch enabled (it's disabled by default), then they can match up their core stats to yours in a nice table that shows up on your profile. With this information, you can check out who got the killer deal in rent or who spends more on entertainment. Why is this important? We're not sure, but at least you can attempt to keep up with the Jones's.
This is a beta site and they are constantly adding improvements based on user feedback. Some additional features that would be helpful are:
Help wiki - it would be great to be able to find answers to common questions in a help forum.
Automated categories - it's a bit tiring to manually input categories, (ex. Publix, groceries) for transactions that appear frequently.
Bottom line: Expensr a good place to get started on your personal finance journey. It's easy and has some fun features to help you manage what some people find horribly routine. However, when you start filing something other than the IRS EZ forms, you will probably want to graduate to Quicken or Quickbooks to really help you categorize, sub-categorize, evade, etc.
Another company prepares to enter the Googleplex, this time it's going to help out Google Apps users with security, archiving and policy enforcement.
The acquisition of Postini announced this morning will help Google deliver their hosted applications to businesses, adding in another level of complex information security for organizations. Postini's solutions include Email Security, IM Security, Web Security, Message Archiving, Message Encryption and Policy Enforcement. With the new deal, Google will provide Organizations high quality communications tools, without the expense of on-site solutions while still maintaining the quality and complex information security mandates organizations demand.
Google put up $625 Million for Postini, who will become a wholly owned subsidiary. The agreement is scheduled to close by the end of the third quarter. Google will host a few conference calls to discuss the acquisition. The first conference call will be held at 6:30 a.m. Pacific Time (9:30 a.m. Eastern Time). The second conference call will be held at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (12:00 p.m. Eastern Time). Live audio webcasts of the conference calls will be available at http://investor.google.com/webcast.html.
FreshBooks rolled out their API yesterday, a little early it seems as they were outed by TechCrunch.
FreshBooks is an online tool that users can create, send and manage invoices, track time and accept payments with. This new API will allow developers and businesses to integrate the FreshBooks billing platform into a variety of services and solutions they may offer, allowing for a little streamlining to take place.
The FreshBooks API support materials include an update blog, scripts, samples and examples. There is also a forum to guide developers along the way in creating their timers, planners, and widgets.
If you're a small business looking for an easy way to store and manage invoices online, Invotrak could be the solution you are after. This simple online solution lets users input, track and issue invoices to clients. Its simple and straightforward navigational structures and tracking features make this an effective way to track past due invoices, and incoming revenue without using complicated software.
There aren't many steps involved in setting up a profile and getting up and running:
Create a login
Add client information - client name, contact name, address, email, and notes.
Record invoice - select client from dropdown, set date, amount, term, and upload an invoice from your standard application like word or excel.
Enter any invoice comments
Email to client
Through the user interface, companies can then track what invoices are out and waiting to receive payment on. When payment comes in, a simple click drops the payments to the received category, and adjusts balances in the right column.
The service was created by Draconis Software using Ruby on Rails to manage and keep track of their own invoices. Draconis says that they make every precaution to ensure information that is stored under your profile is secure. That's always great to know, but what happens if something goes wrong? Or, knock on wood worse case scenario, Draconis goes out of business? What happens to our information then? That's the main concern I always have when storing my data online. You can't get much simpler than Invotrak though, however, we would like to see a way to export information to a spreadsheet application for desktop storage purposes.
Mac users, check out the Dashboard widget so you can easily catch a glimpse of your invoices.
For another simple invoice option look at Freshbooks.
The Invotrak service is free, and super easy to use. Check out some screenshots of the interface.
Go figure that little search engine company founded in a garage was just voted to be the most powerful brand in the Brandz Top 100 list. Some of the defining factors to get onto the list include innovation, leadership and of course finance. Google, no doubt, is currently off the scales in all categories.
The Most Powerful Brands list ranks General Electric and Microsoft behind Google, which was valued at $66.4Billion U.S.; Yahoo hit 42 on the list.
Other companies that made it onto the Brandz Top 100 list are Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Wal-Mart, and IBM.
Could PlanHQ be the differentiating factor on whether your business succeeds or fails? Well, no, but it could help you to set some goals and compare forecasts in order to run your business a little more smoothly.
At first glimpse, PlanHQ does not say much about what it does, other than it brings plans to life. Upon further digging users will discover that it's an online tool that helps business grow through planning, take business plans online, developing business plans from scratch, and helps investors report on the success of their investments.
There is a 30 day free trial plan, that lets users configure business plans, set goals for sales and customers, set target markets, outline team members and their skills, and plot out financial performance. Other plans are based on the amount of users and goals, and range from $15/month to $50/month.
