Are you a fan of the GTD personal productivity system? Well if you like “Getting Things Done,” here's GFD, Getting Finances Done, which shows you how to map David Allen's same principals to managing your personal finance and achieving your financial goals.
Applying GTD principles to your personal finances - Part 1 [Getting Finances Done]
Use Prepaid Travel Cards to Budget Travel Expenses
Vacation is a time to let loose and have a little fun. It's all too easy, however, to let having a little fun turn into spending way too much. Use prepaid travel cards to keep spending contained, secure, and in budget.
Photo by eliazar.
Finance and frugality blog WiseBread shares a set of tips on using prepaid travel cards for safe, secure, and budget-friendly travel spending.
A prepaid travel card is generally usable in the place of a debit or credit card. You can withdraw cash at an ATM, pay for purchases, and make travel reservations. And as the name suggests, you prepay these expenses by loading money onto the card.
It is just as secure as a debit or credit card, since the prepaid travel card is protected by a PIN and/or signature. In fact, some would say that prepaid travel cards are even more secure, since the money is not linked to your bank account and has a limited balance (which limits your exposure).
It can also be a handy tool for budgeting, since you would load only the money you plan on spending for the trip onto the card, which helps you stick to your travel budget.
Check out the full article at the link below for additional tips and tricks including what to look for when shopping for a card like avoiding cards with a cash-out fee. Have your own tips for keeping your money secure and sticking to a budget while traveling? Let's hear about it in the comments.
And every day when we pick her up from school she says, “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” I always ask for the good news so that I can prepare and physically brace myself for what is surely news that will grind the …
Rants, links, blog news, and breaking wisdom from Jeff Jarvis, former editor, magazine launcher, TV critic, now a J-professor at CUNY. Always on top of new media things. Prolific, fast, frequently dead on, and a pal of mine. …
If money's tight and you need a little extra time to cover a bill, service Billfloat can take care of it for you and you can pay them back later.
After entering the company you need to pay, you give BillFloat the amount of the bill and your account number. It'll let you know how many days it'll float the bill (a minimum of 30) and how much you'll owe BillFloat—which is generally $5, but decreases with the number of bills you pay. BillPay will collect a little more information about you, like how you're going to pay them back, and then you'll be all set. Just make sure you'll have the money in a month, since BillFloat won't float its own bills.
Life on the fast track can be taxing. With the ever-growing list of responsibilities, we have more and more bills to pay and an even longer set of reminders and tasks there is to keep track of. Life on the fast track can be taxing.
In order to help reduce the burden of remembering the things you need to do and actually focus on the task at hand; we have 2 great iPhone apps to recommend. Both of these apps have been featured on MakeUseOf before: NotifyMe and Bills.
This week, we will be giving away 5 promo codes for each application. Find out how you can get one, after the jump.
But first let’s take a look at the apps individually.
NotifyMe 2
NotifyMe 2 is the updated version of NotifyMe and only supports iOS4. At the very core, it is still a reminder application. You create tasks/reminders which are synced over the air to NotifyMe’s servers. When your tasks are due, you receive a push notification sent to your iPhone.
All tasks/reminders can also be accessed online via the cloud server, notifymecloud.com and can be used to track your list of reminders easily.
In this updated version, you can also create local reminders which are stored on your device. This is a huge help you are only looking to create short-term reminders without internet access.
NotifyMe 2 also supports task sharing — any reminder can be shared with any authorised NotifyMe 2 user and will appear on their upcoming screen.
For a more in-depth review of the previous version (which will also provide you with a rough concept of how the app works), please read Never Forget Anything Again With NotifyMe for iPhone
Bills
Bills (also known as Bills ~ on your table) is a simple payment tracking application. This app helps you track pending bills and their corresponding due dates efficiently and elegantly as well.
Bills can be set to automatically repeat daily, weekly, monthly or annually. When a payment is due, you’ll receive a push notification with a gentle reminder (or pre-reminder, which you can set to occur days prior).
For a more in-depth review, check out Never Forget To Pay Another Bill Again With Bills ~ On Your Table
NEW YORK — Katie Couric and the “CBS Evening News” team did some striking work during a two-day trip to Afghanistan last week, only to see some record-setting low ratings in return. The Nielsen Co. ratings have to be discouraging to …
By now, you may have heard about how on last night's edition of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made fantastic comedic hay out of a Fox And Friends segment, in which the gathered panel indulged in some outsized fearmongery over Cordoba …
Licensing Server News. Posted by Tim Bray on 24 August 2010 at 10:57 AM. It's been reported that someone has figured out, and published, a way to hack some Android apps to bypass our new Android Market licensing server. …
Each day, $4 trillion dollars of currency are traded. For international businesses and travelers, trading dollars for other currencies serve a legitimate purpose. However, nearly 80% of these transactions are undertaken by a handful of major banks. Experts agree that most of these transactions are made for purely speculative purposes.
Wealthy traders and big financial institutions make huge bets on the fluctuations in currency value and they can make massive profits if their bets are correct. This type of speculation helped to worsen the recent financial crisis and serves no purpose other than making a few people and institutions even richer.
Today, I introduced H.R. 5783, the Investing in Our Future Act. My legislation would simply impose a small tax — of five thousandths of one percent, or 0.005% — on these currency transactions. The money raised would be put toward investments in children, global health, and climate change mitigation.
For the average person or business, this small tax will hardly be noticed. But, due to the extreme speculation that takes place, it would raise significant funds. Studies estimate that a worldwide 0.005 percent tax on dollar transactions would raise $28 billion a year and reduce currency speculation by 14 percent.
Here at home, the funds from this fee would be used to improve the quality and affordability of childcare. This funding would provide more childcare options, so that working families can obtain the quality care their children need to begin school ready to learn.
Internationally, the bill would create a U.S. fund to assist developing countries with the impacts of global warming. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, President Obama pledged to fund our country's commitment to mitigating the effects of climate change. This bill would make that promise real.
Finally, the legislation would create a Global Health Trust Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions of people each year in developing nations. This money will fund treatments and prevention for these diseases, as well as research aimed at eradicating them altogether.
For too long the needs of the financial industry have trumped initiatives that will help lift people out of poverty and give children a healthy start. The Investing in Our Future Act will aid in getting our priorities back in order, and reduce financial speculation by Wall Street.
You can help - please call your Member of Congress and tell them to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 5783. Find your member at http://house.gov
When AOL bought hyperlocal news site Patch in June, 2009, it covered five towns in Connecticut and New Jersey. On Tuesday, it will open its 100th Patch, and by the end of the year it plans to open 400 more for a total of 500.
I recently visited AOL’s headquarters to learn more about what Patch is all about. “We look at what we are doing as digitizing towns,” says Patch president Warren Webster (see video interview below). Patch was first founded and funded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong when he couldn’t find a resource on the Web for volunteer activities his family could do together in the small Connecticut town where he lives. Armstrong bought Patch afterwards when he came to AOL, but only took back his initial investment in AOL shares—and he is obviously very interested in the product. He stuck his head in the conference room where I was getting my demo because he saw the Patch screen projected on the wall.
Matching volunteers with local organizations is still one of Patch’s features, but its main focus is covering local news and creating an in-depth directory of local businesses and places of interest. Each Patch covers a small town with a population between 15,000 and 75,000, places like Fairfield, Connecticut, Mill Valley, California, Scarsdale, New York, and Morristown, New Jersey (which will be the 100th Patch).
The front page covers local news much like you would find in a local small town newspaper (“Police Investigate Drowning,” “A Guide To Walkable Westchester,” “Coyote Attacks Another Young Girl In Rye, Bites Neck“). Each town has its own editor, a “walking newsroom” who writes stories and assigns them to an average of 11 freelancers, who also fill out listings in the directory and take photos. There are also events, announcements, and volunteer opportunities. Readers can add their own.
Some complaints have surfaced about Patch’s low pay and the grueling working conditions (mostly, it seems, from older out-of-work journalists who aren’t used to the rapid-fire pace of Internet publishing). Webster responds that Patch pays “competitive market rates for community journalists” and that “75% of local editors are making the same or more than they did at their last job in journalism—the other 25% came from journalism school or were freelancers.”
But the real engine of Patch is the database it is building up of local businesses. So far it has 105,000 local listings, and is building out more every day. Before Patch launches in a town, it creates a directory of the local businesses, parks, hospitals, schools, and other public places. It launches with about 1,200 for each town, which get entered into Patch’s structured database. Each place gets its own profile page on Patch, with a description and highly detailed data such as teacher/student ratios for schools or suggested dress code and parking options for restaurants. For instance, here is directory listing for the Crabtree Kittle House & Inn in Chappaqua, NY.
The local directory of places is how Patch makes money. If a business wants an enhanced listing, complete with a video tour (shot by one of the 40,000 freelance videographers who work for another AOL acquisition, StudioNow) and preferred placement, that costs $1,000 a year. Patch is going after Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising dollars.
These profile pages are very search-engine friendly, and any time a Patch article mentions a place in the database, it is automatically linked. “A lot are using their Patch profile as their place on the Web,” says Webster. Patch also offers a self-serve ad tool that turns any directory listing into an online ad unit which can be used on any Website and link either back to their Patch listing or to their own site.
Webster explains Patch’s rollout in terms of phases. The first phase is to get up and running in hundreds of towns and get local residents engaged. The goal is to reach half of each town’s population. “We exceeeeded every metric we had set for ourselves,” boasts Webster. “Phase 2 is how do we get people to buy things from local stores.” That is where the coupons and local deals come in (you saw that one coming). The coupons are shown as ads on the homepage of the towns where the businesses are located, as well as on their directory listings.
The local coupons are still pretty primitive compared the experiments we are seeing from geo startups like Foursquare and shopkick, but Webster hints that a mobile Patch app is coming soon. And when I asked about whether the directory would become available to other developers and startups through an API, he notes that could be coming soon as well: “We are looking at every possible way to distribute Patch content.” Once Patch gets into gear, it could definitely start driving a whole new class of advertising revenues for AOL.
Each day, $4 trillion dollars of currency are traded. For international businesses and travelers, trading dollars for other currencies serve a legitimate purpose. However, nearly 80% of these transactions are undertaken by a handful of major banks. Experts agree that most of these transactions are made for purely speculative purposes.
Wealthy traders and big financial institutions make huge bets on the fluctuations in currency value and they can make massive profits if their bets are correct. This type of speculation helped to worsen the recent financial crisis and serves no purpose other than making a few people and institutions even richer.
Today, I introduced H.R. 5783, the Investing in Our Future Act. My legislation would simply impose a small tax — of five thousandths of one percent, or 0.005% — on these currency transactions. The money raised would be put toward investments in children, global health, and climate change mitigation.
For the average person or business, this small tax will hardly be noticed. But, due to the extreme speculation that takes place, it would raise significant funds. Studies estimate that a worldwide 0.005 percent tax on dollar transactions would raise $28 billion a year and reduce currency speculation by 14 percent.
Here at home, the funds from this fee would be used to improve the quality and affordability of childcare. This funding would provide more childcare options, so that working families can obtain the quality care their children need to begin school ready to learn.
Internationally, the bill would create a U.S. fund to assist developing countries with the impacts of global warming. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, President Obama pledged to fund our country's commitment to mitigating the effects of climate change. This bill would make that promise real.
Finally, the legislation would create a Global Health Trust Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions of people each year in developing nations. This money will fund treatments and prevention for these diseases, as well as research aimed at eradicating them altogether.
For too long the needs of the financial industry have trumped initiatives that will help lift people out of poverty and give children a healthy start. The Investing in Our Future Act will aid in getting our priorities back in order, and reduce financial speculation by Wall Street.
You can help - please call your Member of Congress and tell them to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 5783. Find your member at http://house.gov
When AOL bought hyperlocal news site Patch in June, 2009, it covered five towns in Connecticut and New Jersey. On Tuesday, it will open its 100th Patch, and by the end of the year it plans to open 400 more for a total of 500.
I recently visited AOL’s headquarters to learn more about what Patch is all about. “We look at what we are doing as digitizing towns,” says Patch president Warren Webster (see video interview below). Patch was first founded and funded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong when he couldn’t find a resource on the Web for volunteer activities his family could do together in the small Connecticut town where he lives. Armstrong bought Patch afterwards when he came to AOL, but only took back his initial investment in AOL shares—and he is obviously very interested in the product. He stuck his head in the conference room where I was getting my demo because he saw the Patch screen projected on the wall.
Matching volunteers with local organizations is still one of Patch’s features, but its main focus is covering local news and creating an in-depth directory of local businesses and places of interest. Each Patch covers a small town with a population between 15,000 and 75,000, places like Fairfield, Connecticut, Mill Valley, California, Scarsdale, New York, and Morristown, New Jersey (which will be the 100th Patch).
The front page covers local news much like you would find in a local small town newspaper (“Police Investigate Drowning,” “A Guide To Walkable Westchester,” “Coyote Attacks Another Young Girl In Rye, Bites Neck“). Each town has its own editor, a “walking newsroom” who writes stories and assigns them to an average of 11 freelancers, who also fill out listings in the directory and take photos. There are also events, announcements, and volunteer opportunities. Readers can add their own.
Some complaints have surfaced about Patch’s low pay and the grueling working conditions (mostly, it seems, from older out-of-work journalists who aren’t used to the rapid-fire pace of Internet publishing). Webster responds that Patch pays “competitive market rates for community journalists” and that “75% of local editors are making the same or more than they did at their last job in journalism—the other 25% came from journalism school or were freelancers.”
But the real engine of Patch is the database it is building up of local businesses. So far it has 105,000 local listings, and is building out more every day. Before Patch launches in a town, it creates a directory of the local businesses, parks, hospitals, schools, and other public places. It launches with about 1,200 for each town, which get entered into Patch’s structured database. Each place gets its own profile page on Patch, with a description and highly detailed data such as teacher/student ratios for schools or suggested dress code and parking options for restaurants. For instance, here is directory listing for the Crabtree Kittle House & Inn in Chappaqua, NY.
The local directory of places is how Patch makes money. If a business wants an enhanced listing, complete with a video tour (shot by one of the 40,000 freelance videographers who work for another AOL acquisition, StudioNow) and preferred placement, that costs $1,000 a year. Patch is going after Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising dollars.
These profile pages are very search-engine friendly, and any time a Patch article mentions a place in the database, it is automatically linked. “A lot are using their Patch profile as their place on the Web,” says Webster. Patch also offers a self-serve ad tool that turns any directory listing into an online ad unit which can be used on any Website and link either back to their Patch listing or to their own site.
Webster explains Patch’s rollout in terms of phases. The first phase is to get up and running in hundreds of towns and get local residents engaged. The goal is to reach half of each town’s population. “We exceeeeded every metric we had set for ourselves,” boasts Webster. “Phase 2 is how do we get people to buy things from local stores.” That is where the coupons and local deals come in (you saw that one coming). The coupons are shown as ads on the homepage of the towns where the businesses are located, as well as on their directory listings.
The local coupons are still pretty primitive compared the experiments we are seeing from geo startups like Foursquare and shopkick, but Webster hints that a mobile Patch app is coming soon. And when I asked about whether the directory would become available to other developers and startups through an API, he notes that could be coming soon as well: “We are looking at every possible way to distribute Patch content.” Once Patch gets into gear, it could definitely start driving a whole new class of advertising revenues for AOL.
A few weeks back I wrote about building authority through questions & answers. That post looked at some of the most popular Q&A sites available for SMB.
Large animal medicine takes a different tack. These animals are used for industry — food production, breeding farms, racing, and so on. (The lines are blurred in some cases, such as horses that are really pets, and greyhounds used for racing.) "The client" here is the manager, producer, or trainer, while the "patient" is the dairy herd, the swine operation, or the overall breeding potential of a winning stallion. While humane treatment is an important factor, the goals are maximizing performance, productivity, and profit. Large animal medicine focuses on designing a Herd Health Program, where the outcome of an individual case takes a backseat to the cost and benefit for the overall group.
LearnVest founder and CEO Alexa von Tobel turned down Harvard and a life on Wall Street to make personal finance education accessible to women, and she has no intention of failing.
She thinks learning how to manage your money should be simpler, a passionate belief which comes from her personal need for her New York-based company’s product, a series of online tutorials on personal finance which have led some to dub her “Suze Orman 2.0.” On Tuesday, LearnVest announced the launch of three new on-demand, online Bootcamps covering basic personal finance, cutting costs, and investing. These products are just the latest iteration in von Tobel’s quest.
The 26-year-old von Tobel got the idea for LearnVest while working at Morgan Stanley, realizing that she had no idea how to manage her own finances.
“Here I was responsible for millions and millions of dollars and I didn’t know the first thing about getting a credit card or insurance,” von Tobel said. “I needed tools like these.”
Instead of attending Harvard Business School, von Tobel put all the money she’d earned after college into building LearnVest. Since then, the company has raised over $5.5 million in financing, most recently closing a $4.5 million round led by Accel Partners in April.
The LearnVest CEO has been spending a great deal of time in the media spotlight recently. She was recently named to Inc.’s 30 Under 30 list of young entrepreneurs and has received media coverage from a number of local and national outlets including BusinessWeek and the New York Times. The ‘Suze Orman 2.0’ moniker first came from a Fox reporter.
But behind the media attention that even has the attractive blonde’s coworkers teasingly calling her ‘Finance Barbie’ is an entrepreneur possessed. Her self-deprecating humor and amiable demeanor are genuine, but von Tobel is shrewedly packaging herself and LearnVest as an accessible and fun medium for learning about personal finance. And she’s doing it from a cubicle alongside her employees in Learnvest’s cozy New York office.
Usage statistics suggest it’s beginning to work, with Learnvest receiving about 360,000 unique visitors in the U.S. per month according to Quantcast, a Web-traffic-measurement service..
While von Tobel is certainly passionate about giving women unbiased advice on their personal finances, she is also keeping her eye on earning money to repay her investors.
And that’s where LearnVest’s latest product, the online bootcamps, come in. The three-week programs consist of daily emails with information and easy to do items that take minutes, according to von Tobel. The investing bootcamp is LearnVest’s first paid offering, costing users $7.99.
“It’s cheaper than ‘Personal Finance for Dummies’ and easier to understand and accomplish,” von Tobel said. “We don’t want users to be overwhelmed.”
LearnVest’s content also provides affiliate marketing opportunities for the New York startup, where LearnVest earns money by suggesting personal finance products like credit cards.
Besides affiliate fees, LearnVest also sells advertising, in the hope that financial services firms and other brand advertisers will pay a premium for female users taking advantage of LearnVest’s educational content over what they’d pay for such users on general-interest websites.
Next Story: Your mobile app is spying on you Previous Story: Dark Roast Media integrates Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes into its social game
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
Five Best Personal Money Management Sites
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
Five Best Personal Money Management Sites
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
Planning a new small business? You may want to consider doing it online. In this small business news roundup, we look at a variety of tools and tips for.
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Personal finance site for women LearnVest has had a big year. Launched last fall at TechCrunch50, the startup raised its first round of funding from Accel Partners and seed investors a few months ago ($4.5 million to be exact).
LearnVest has a simple goal: to help women organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like an online version of financial planner Suze Orman blended with personal finance site Mint.com.
Today, the startup is launching three online programs, called ‘bootcamps,’ to educate women on various financial subjects, including a Financial Basics Bootcamp, Cut Your Costs Bootcamp, and Investing Bootcamp. Instead of creating a book-like online experience, LearnVest is making email newsletters the foundation of the educational sessions.
For example, the Investing Bootcamp, which costs users $7.99, teaches women how to make smart investing decisions and properly allocate their portfolios. For three weeks, women will receive daily emails with advice and actionable items that they can perform on LearnVest, making the newsletter interactive. For example, for the Financial Basics bootcamp, one of the daily actionable items is ‘Get Your Credit Score.’ Cut Your Costs Bootcamp topic range from Bootcamp topics range from ways to save on energy bills to exactly how to negotiate a lower cable bill. Learnvest will incorporate all of the information users complete and input in bootcamps into their LearnVest account.
Alexa von Tobel, LearnVest’s CEO and founder, tells me that the idea is to encourage women to not only learn, but also motivate them to make actionable decisions about their accounts and finances at the same time. She chose a newsletter format because the ‘LearnVest woman’ simply doesn’t have time to read the same information in a book. Women are more inclined to read a daily tidbit in an email vs. sitting down with a book, says von Tobel.
LearnVest held a pilot bootcamp in January and saw impressive results—8,000 people signed up for the basic financial bootcamp. With the new additions LearnVest expects to sign up a total of 40,000 participants. LearnVest plans to launch additional bootcamps in the future, including sessions realted to how to get a mortgage for a home.
The integration between the bootcamp educational sessions and the user’s LearnVest profile is key to the success of the initiative. As we wrote in our initial review of LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level and will diagnose your financial health and give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve. LearnVest will create customized plans for you, depending on your goals, and allow you to chart off your improvements and achievements.
Von Tobel says that LearnVest is steadily adding more female users flock to its site and is currently seeing 500K uniques per month. The next step is to take the site mobile, says von Tobel, and help women access LearnVest on the go.
photo: elycefeliz
Do you want to become rich beyond your wildest dreams? The question may seem right out of a late-night infomercial — unless you follow one strategy that may actually help you achieve it: Act poor.
If you do this, you’ll be fast on your way to having a million dollars — or more. That money can buy you a lot of stuff, of course, which would allow you to act rich and show off in no time. But if you’re smart, you’ll use it to buy freedom and give yourself options that the rest of your graduating class won’t have because they just weren’t as smart coming out of the box.
What do I mean by “act poor?” Pretty much act like you have for the past four years. Maybe even live with Mom and Dad for a year or so, promising that you’ll tell them when you’re coming home at night and help with the dishes. (As a parent, I had to say that.) The point of keeping your expenses low is to save your socks off.
Your friends probably won’t be doing this. The moment they get jobs, they’re going to want a better car; fewer roommates; dinners on the town. And that’s ever so tempting to do since you’ve likely suffered through lean years as a college student. And that new job you’re getting could allow you to pay for some luxuries, even if it doesn’t pay a lot.
But there’s a great pay off to living like a college student. If you manage to save really prodigiously for just a couple of years, you can build an emergency fund that will tide you over when times are really bad. And you can get started on long-term stock market investing at the best possible time.
How could I possibly say that this is the best possible time to be investing in the stock market, when stocks have gone nowhere for a full decade? I’m a student of the market, the author of Investing 101 and can say with some authority that the market’s miserable decade-long performance is exactly what spells huge opportunity for you.
A company called Ibbotson Associates has been compiling data on investments for decades. Let me throw a few of their statistics at you so you can understand why I’m so bullish — and particularly bullish for those of you who get to start investing now.
Average stock market returns from 1926 to the present work out to 9.6% for big company stocks and 11.67% for small company stocks. But stocks rarely hit that average in any given year. Instead, prices dive and soar, scaring out the faint of heart — and those who don’t understand why they’re investing. These price swings are often lasting, which is why you never invest short-term money in stocks. Put the rent money in the stock market, and a normal market swing might just send you back to living with Mom and Dad. But over the long run, those downswings are matched by equally rewarding upswings.
Consider: During the decade of the 1920s, big company stocks returned an average of 19.2%, according to Ibbotson — way above the long-term average. But the next decade was miserable, with returns on big company stocks dropping 0.1% over the 10 year period. In other words, if you invested $10,000, at the end of that decade, you would have a little less than $10,000 and probably feel demoralized. What happened then? In the 1940s, market returns were pretty manic — alternating between big losses and huge gains. The average return, however, ended at 9.2%. Still, because of the really rotten returns in the 1930s, investors could expect a “catch-up” decade and they got it. During the 1950s, average stock returns rose 19.4%.
Stock gains were below average in the 1960s and 70s — up 7.8% and 5.9% respectively; then way above average in the 1980s and 1990s — up 17.8% and 18.2% respectively. Are you detecting a pattern?
Okay, so the relevant decade for you was the one just completed, when stock prices fell 1% on average, according to Ibbotson. That’s the worst decade in history, which is a really good sign when you’re starting now.
It’s not clear whether your “catch up” returns will hit this year, next year or some time in the future, but the chances are great that you’ll get a stretch of above-average returns. What does that mean in dollars and cents?
For the updated version of Investing 101, I did an analysis of what would happen to somebody who put $1,000 a month into the stock market starting in January of 1970 — the last really miserable decade for stocks– and stuck with it for 30 years. The first decade was rotten (5.9% returns), but the next two decades were awesome.
At the end of 30 years, this investor had $4.03 million. If he earned just the average return over that time– or earned his returns in a different order — he would have had $1 million less — $3.08 million to be precise. Why? He had the least at stake when returns were rotten and a lot of money to compound when times got good.
I know $1,000 a month is an insane amount and feels really crazy to you now. You don’t have to save that much to get a big reward; you just have to start saving as much as you can.
But if you get a job where your employer offers a 401(k) plan, it’s not as hard as you might think to save even that stunning $1,000 a month. That’s because your contributions come out before tax, which reduces your out-of-pocket cost because it also cuts your tax withholding, and most employers match your contributions — some even at 100% on the dollar.
In other words, you contribute $500 and your employer contributes $500. And because your contribution comes out before tax, your paycheck is reduced by just $400 (assuming you pay 20% of your income in state and federal tax).
Think you can’t save that much — or even at all? Try tracking all of your expenses, suggests Danny Kofke, a special education teacher and author of How to Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher’s Salary.
Little things like going to lunch each day, instead of packing a sandwich, are likely to cost you about $5 bucks a day, $25 a week and $1,300 a year. The soda that you buy from a vending machine is likely $1 more than the one you bought at the store. And, of course, if you put off buying that new car and drive your junker (or take the Metro or bus), you’re likely to save $150 to $300 each month on car payments, too.
“Times are tough to get a job, but if you can start off without immediately getting used to spending how much you’re making, you can get way ahead,” Kofke said.
This is the formula that Thomas Stanley explains in The Millionaire Next Door and is, in fact, the most reliable way to get rich. If you play your cards right, you could be the youngest millionaire on your block.
Kathy Kristof is a syndicated personal finance columnist, speaker and author of three books, including the recently updated Investing 101 (Bloomberg, 2008).
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This is why you don't spend money you don't have, people!
The Real Housewives of New Jersey's Teresa Giudice has publicly denied her $11 million debt and her home's impending foreclosure, but just because you can pretend everything's fine doesn't make it true, and girlfriend is going to have to learn that the hard way!
An auction house has just released news that they'll be holding a Bankruptcy Auction at the reality star's home for their belongings, scheduled for August 22nd, and they've listed ALL the items going!
Ouch!
The list includes:
* Schaefer & Sons Grand Piano
* Wolf 48″ Stainless Steel Range
* 1080 Pure 42″ LCD Television
* Chippendale Style Arm Chair & Pair of Oversized Candle Sticks
* Pair of Shell Leaf Carved Crest Leather & Fabric Sofas
* Round Pine Kitchen Table & 8 Upholstered Tudor Style Chairs
* Four Section Center Seating Group
* 6' Ceramic Satsuma Temple Urn
* Large Gilt Frame Wall Mirror
* Greek Revival Style Round Occassional Tables
* Demi Lune Scrolled Base Table
* Decorative Fireplace Accessories
* Panasonic Viera Oversized LCD Television
* Dark Finish King Size Bedroom Set
* Oversized Wall Mirror & Kidney Shaped Vanity Table
* Love Seat, Upholstered Arm Chairs & Area Rug
* Credenza, Mirror & Decorative Items
* Connelly Antique Style Pool Table
* Mahogany Poker Table & Chairs
* Mahogany Home Bar & Stools
* Faux Marble Chess Set
* Foosball Table
* Suit of Armour
* Bar Height Gaming Table
* Chandeliers
* Chandelier & Sconces 1
* Chandelier & Sconces 2
* Chandelier & Sconces 3
* Framed Paintings
* GE Monogram Stainless Steel LPG Grill
* Sea-Doo Bombardier X20 Jet Boat
* New Holland LS190 Skid Steer
* Tandem Axle 10' Dump Trailer
* Fisher 28100 X-Blades Stainless Steel Snow Plow
Who wants to bet that Prostitution Whore Coke Fucking Whore Danielle Staub is going to be seated front and center at that shiz, buying all of their tacky ass fine things before she abducts a street urchin and forces him to enter The Cave of Wonders. You know, because she needs a 'diamond in the rough' to get that effing lamp.
Oh wait, wrong super villian! Our bad!
LOLs!
What do U think?? Isn't Danielle Staub actually Jafar from Aladdin??
Tags: aladdin, bankruptcy, bankruptcy auction, crazy people, danielle staub, foreclosure, jafar, mansion, psychopath, psychotic, real housewives of new jersey, teresa giudice
A reader writes:
As a budding scientist who has been involved in the HIV field, it is rather frustrating to see media reports of the latest breakthrough in research without a full understanding of the findings and their significance (not that the medical establishment is not complicit … we put out these press releases in order to justify continued research money). As you are well aware, the field had been fraught with repeated false hopes and, after more than two decades of trying, we are no closer to a preventative vaccine than when we first started.
These findings today do not really change this fact. The same group has previously described another such neutralizing antibody but have been unsuccessful in their attempts to elicit this response in other individuals (this is the premise of a vaccine). The very fact that the vast majority of people fail to mount a significant immune response against the virus (unlike we do to most other pathogens) suggests that a vaccine may not even be possible in the first place. Pharmaceutical therapy, for better or worse, will remain our best response to this disease for the foreseeable future.
That being said, without any signs of the disease abating, research like this cannot be discounted. Just don’t expect results any time soon.
I don't. The Dish has long been dismissive of the search for a vaccine against HIV, but this did seem like a positive development. Another writes:
Thanks for that piece of news, Andrew. It actually brought tears to my eyes. I keep forgetting how much we suppress those hopes for a cure, then I read something like that and there's this flame, this glimmer of promise and I'm suddenly in tears. We forget how much that hope for a cure means to us, and how much we've pushed it aside and filed it away.
Right now I'm in this perfect storm of unemployment, heathcare crisis and AIDS.
Since I am, according to some, too lazy or drug-addled to find work, I've had to choose between my COBRA payments and my med copays and Dr. visits. I chose my COBRA payments for fear of that dreaded insurance lapse that would kick in pre-existing exclusions and not getting that all important certificate of coverage for my next (hopefully) job. Since I actually have a home (not sure for how long) and not totally homeless and destitute (yet) I don't qualify for a lot of help. Even if I did now, the state of GA, like many states, now have a Ryan White waiting list to get meds. Even my discount med cards from the drug companies didn't help enough to make them affordable.
So I'm waiting, waiting, waiting - so much has to fall into place, IF I can get a job in the next month or so, and IF they have good benefits, and IF the timing is just right, I might just be able to keep my insurance and go back on my life-saving meds. IF in the next month or so, I don't, I"m hitting several walls, my unemployment running out, my COBRA ending, foreclosure, bankruptcy. That's hoping too that after almost a year off my meds now, that I'm not blindsided by some totally preventable HIV related disease that would put me in the hospital and suddenly make any hope of this turning out well fly right out the window.
I have an older brother who is a wealthy retired executive from Philips, and very much a ditto head. They can't see giving me money since they would just be "enabling" me and keeping me from really looking a job (yes he really said that, almost a verbatim FOX talking talking point). Being a Christian though he did help me rewrite my resume. He keeps saying "just get private insurance" and even "just start my own company" but he hasn't a clue. With my meds running at $10,000 a month and having HIV/AIDS, I'm uninsurable through private health insurance, he doesn't understand that and almost refuses to believe it.
To address a lot of the current bashing of the unemployed: I'm a sharp hard working guy. I had the highest SAT scores in my class, I was pre-med at Wake Forest, two years ago I was making almost $60,000 a year, running an entire print production facility and doing it well. I've worked in consulting firms, F500 marketing departments, I have a killer resume. Yet…
So thanks again for that article. I do still hope. I've been in this crisis from the beginning, HIV+ back before there was even a test or a known cause. I had a partner who was only months ahead of me in progression, yet for every new drug that he just missed being able to take advantage of, I was able to. So our paths that at one time seemed to be almost lockstep veered apart and he died some 20 years ago and I'm still kicking around (I hope). I would just be crushed though that after living the miracle that being a 20+ year long-term survivor entails, that because of seemingly mundane things like a job and health insurance it might all be for nothing.
The two investigations by the European Commission surround alleged abuse of the company's dominant market position in the mainframe market. Read this blog post by Sam Diaz on Business Tech.
Spain is a beautiful place comprising of many important cities and places. The climate is very differentiating. The major climatic differences can be found.
The two investigations by the European Commission surround alleged abuse of the company's dominant market position in the mainframe market. Read this blog post by Sam Diaz on Business Tech.
Spain is a beautiful place comprising of many important cities and places. The climate is very differentiating. The major climatic differences can be found.
Google's won the first round of the enormous lawsuit Viacom brought against it. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for not having copyright lawyers inspect all the videos that get uploaded to YouTube before they're made live (they're also asking that Google eliminate private videos because these movies — often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives — can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers).
The lawsuit has been a circus. Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes “roughing them up” to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were “really” pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.
Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ruled that YouTube was protected from liability for copyright infringement by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA has a “safe harbor” provision that exempts service providers from copyright liability if they expeditiously remove material on notice that it is infringing. Viacom's unique interpretation of this statute held that online service providers should review all material before it went live. If they're right, you can kiss every message-board, Twitter-feed, photo-hosting service, and blogging platform goodbye — even if it was worth someone's time to pay a lawyer $500/hour to look at Twitter and approve tweets before they went live, there just aren't enough lawyers in the universe to scratch the surface of these surfaces. For example, YouTube alone gets over 29 hours' worth of video per minute.
Viacom has vowed to appeal.
In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.
Stanton said there's no dispute that “when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material.”
Calling Stanton's reasoning “fundamentally flawed,” Viacom said it was looking forward to challenging the decision in appeals court.
Judge sides with Google in $1B Viacom lawsuit
(Thanks, Mike P!)
(Image: Viacom, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from mag3737's photostream — used with permission)
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Hey, if you wanted webcomics about freelancers, why not Doomed to Obscurity? That one's been out there for a couple of years now. Too obscure?
Posted by: Milhouse |
July 7, 2010 3:21 AM
Another really great web industry comic (it has a higher ed bent but is overall broadly applicable) is Tales from Redesignland - http://redesignland.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Georgy |
July 7, 2010 3:48 AM
Wow. Some of those are way too real. And in case clients see this, I won't say which ones.
Good luck on the new project. I would guess the new media programs at art schools just graduated many new candidates. I'll tell you more once you sign this disclosure…
Posted by: George Bounacos |
July 7, 2010 5:29 AM
200 page NDA. LOL!
Posted by: Jae Xavier |
July 7, 2010 2:06 PM
Cooooooool, and some of it too true
Posted by: blestab |
July 8, 2010 1:22 AM
Thanks for your article Deane!
We're HUGE fans of ReadWriteWeb over here at World Wide Creative, so it's great to see this cartoon picked up so early in its existence.
With an endless source of material to work with, it looks like Agents of Digital will be around for a while. We'll keep 'em coming for as long as clients keep being clients, programmers keep programming and creatives keep being creative.
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