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Monday, August 15, 2011

Background Examine Resources Simple And Price Efficient

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Time to Fix A Low Credit score With a Bad Credit Loan

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Credit scores begin from a low 300 towards the cream with the crop 850. A regular customer includes a credit score assortment of 600 to 700 but some might have much more than this. A FICO score will be the foundation of most lenders and credit score bureaus of computing your creditworthiness. A good credit score falls on an average of 720 and above. Where does one obtain the info on their respective credit scores? By law this is offered for totally free as soon as a yr coming in the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Your scores and credit score history exhibits your present and closed accounts also as your payment background.

Loan companies do generally take a look on your free credit score background because the basis on whether or not they will grant your loan at a good rate of interest or deny this altogether. If right now you're intrigued on applying for a mortgage that necessitates a substantial credit score then it would be very best to use for FICO score monitoring which usually provides you an update in your scores on a weekly foundation. Subscribing to this on-line service alerts you when you have reach your substantial score goal so long as you setup a threshold for it. Some would go as far as sending you an sms to inform you whenever your scores have alter for the much better or for the worst.

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Request a duplicate of your credit report as needed if not wait around for it once a year but do keep track of your background for just about any errors. In the event you see discrepancies then you are able to dispute them by going through your reviews thoroughly.

Spend your expenses promptly. Include some much more around the minimal quantity which you usually pay since this would cause your credit score to rise and would be obvious for most lenders that you are a good borrower because you spend on time and is also sincere in settling your expenses.Steer clear of maxing out in your credit restrict. This will surely cause your credit score scores to drop that quick. Cancel credit score cards which you are not utilizing or don't need and pay on time for the bank card bills.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Help Making Money

You’ve doubtless heard about the Airbnb fiasco – being dubbed #ransackgate by some – that’s been exploding the last couple of days. If you’re not familiar with the story, we first covered it here, and there’s some terrific source material from the woman who’s home was ransacked and robbed here and here.

Today Y Combinator founder (and Airbnb investor) Paul Graham wrote this:

I’ve just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted.

The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.

I’ve talked to the Airbnb guys and they are already doing everything they could be doing to help this woman.

Even if you don’t believe they are nice guys (which they are, among the nicest of all the people we’ve funded), do you really think they are so dumb that they don’t realize it’s not worth the bad PR to save money and effort in this situation?

A few thoughts:

1. What the hell?

2. Airbnb’s Christopher Lukezic told me on Wednesday that the company was not responsible for EJ’s losses, that they would be paying anything for her losses, that they are just a service to match people and that they were helping the police find the people who did this. This was on the record, and it was a call we emailed about first. I didn’t take him by surprise. And I read this back to him before I posted.

3. Paul Graham says instead “The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.

That’s a lie. What he said is what I wrote in no. 2 above, and what was in the original post.

4. Following publication of that Post, Airbnb Brian Chesky called me and I updated that post with his comments, mentioning that there was some miscommunication. I retweeted that there was an important update, and added a bold header at the top of the post mentioning the update.

5. I then added another update, an email from Lukezic. And another update pointing to a guest post by Chesky on the issue. It is absurd to think that I made up the statements that Lukezic made to me in our first interview. It wasn’t even really relevant to the story.

6. Chesky repeatedly thanked me for the updates by email and on the phone. If Lukezic wants to publicly call me a liar, he should do so directly.

7. I’ve seen this exact behavior before with the Scamville stuff a couple of years ago.

The real problem here isn’t some mixup in communication with me. The real problem is that the victim wrote that follow up post yesterday calling Airbnb out and making new allegations of an attempted cover up.

It kind of feels to me that what Airbnb really wants to do is call the victim, EJ, a liar. But they’re certainly not going to do that (although if they have evidence that she’s lying, they should be talking about that). Instead, they focus on us, call me dishonest and suggesting that the whole story is “bullshit.”

One thing I love about our readers is that they’re independent thinkers. Often they don’t agree with my opinions, and say so loudly. But this goes too far. I’m not the person who grossly mishandled a PR crisis. I’m not the person who made factually inaccurate statements on the record. I’m not the person who tried to convince a woman who’s life has been shattered to remove a blog post.

At least have the decency to stand up and say you’re wrong, Airbnb, and apologize for the lies. Because hiding behind investors, and attacking the press, is both dishonorable and stupid. That’s no way to gain customer trust.

PS – If you review our historical coverage of Airbnb, it’s hard to say there’s anything but a pattern of cheerleading the company on since it launched in 2008. And we’ve been massive, unquestioning supporters of Y Combinator over the years as well. I don’t know what Paul Graham means by “typical Arrington fashion,” but I do know this. It’s not my job to fix it when companies do stupid things.

One of the biggest reasons we enjoy the weekend is more time with family and friends. We can make our weekends (and weeks) even better by spending more time being social:

This paper exploits the richness and large sample size of the Gallup/Healthways US daily poll to illustrate significant differences in the dynamics of two key measures of subjective well-being: emotions and life evaluations. We find that there is no day-of-week effect for life evaluations, represented here by the Cantril Ladder, but significantly more happiness, enjoyment, and laughter, and significantly less worry, sadness, and anger on weekends (including public holidays) than on weekdays. We then find strong evidence of the importance of the social context, both at work and at home, in explaining the size and likely determinants of the weekend effects for emotions. Weekend effects are twice as large for full-time paid workers as for the rest of the population, and are much smaller for those whose work supervisor is considered a partner rather than a boss and who report trustable and open work environments. A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.

Source: "Weekends and Subjective Well-Being" from NBER Working Paper No. 17180

For more on happiness check out Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project or Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.

You should follow me on Facebook here or on Twitter. You'll find content there I don't post anywhere else. You can also subscribe via email or RSS. Check out the blog's most popular posts of all time.

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MAKE | News From The Future: Transparent Batteries

News From The Future: Transparent Batteries... Stanford researchers have invented a transparent lithium-ion battery that is also highly flexible. It is comparable in cost to regular batteries on.

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Language Log » News Flash: BBC Admits Error

Update #2 — Google News Archive has nothing for AptiQuant, and LexisNexis yields 26 hits, all from 7/29/2011 or later. This is additional evidence that AptiQuant is a hoax, though it doesn't tell us what kind of hoax it ...

Language Log » News Flash: BBC Admits Error

Monday, August 1, 2011

Making Money Advertising

When we think of scientists, we often picture distinguished researchers in white coats, methodically conducting experiments in labs that run like well-oiled machines.

Unfortunately things are usually less glamorous. Science labs have a lot going on, and while they’re generally very focused on making sure safety protocols are followed and contamination is minimized, there are some things that are a little less organized. Like ordering supplies — oftentimes reagents are either ordered in excess (resulting in waste) or forgotten about until they’re needed (resulting in delays).

Quartzy, a startup that’s part of the most recent Y Combinator batch, is setting out to fix that problem. The company launched around 18 months ago and has 4,500 scientists worldwide using the service — and there are plenty more who could use help keeping their supplies in check, many of whom are spending thousands of dollars on supplies every year.

At first glance, the service seems a bit like a science social network. You sign in and create a profile, then link up with your coworkers and other colleagues. But founder Adam Regelmann explains that the site isn’t really about connecting with your colleagues in a social sense — rather, it’s about keeping track of which supplies your lab has in stock, and what needs to be ordered . He adds that it’s a problem he’s faced himself as a MD and PhD from Columbia, which is when he had the idea for the company.

Anyone in your lab can log in to see the current inventory status, which helps make sure that they don’t place order requests for things that they don’t need. The site also lists expiration dates, which is important for reagents that only last for a relatively brief amount of time (like some enzymes).

Inputting the inventory information into the system is something each lab will need to do themselves — there’s currently no direct integration with vendors, so your inventory won’t automatically be updated each time you order more supplies. Regelmann says this is partially because the industry is very fragmented, so labs are oftentimes ordering their supplies from many different vendors (some of which use arcane technology) which makes integrations difficult. Update: Regelmann adds that while the service doesn’t tie in directly with these vendors, Quartzy does allow labs to upload their existing inventory Excel spreadsheets to quickly get their labs up and running on the service. And Quartzy also includes online versions of each supplier catalog, so you can quickly add supplies to your database by keying in vendor names and catalog numbers — the system will automatically populate the rest of the information.

Quartzy does more than keep track of your lab supplies. It’s also building out a review database for supplies commonly used in laboratories (you can rate how effective a given enzyme was, for example). At this point the database is fairly small, with around 1,000 reviews, but it’s an idea that has potential.

Also very cool: Quartzy has a feature that’s the scientist equivalent of asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. It’s quite common in scientific communities for researchers to ask friends and colleagues in other, nearby laboratories for a certain reagent that they only need a small amount of (Regelmann says he’d get five or so such requests per week during his research days).

Quartzy helps with this by letting users run a proximity-based query that lets them see if anyone in their city happens to have what they need. And it’s smart about doing this — any results you see will be anonymized. You can send a message to the anonymous researcher and ask if they can spare a dash of whatever you need (they’ll be able to see who you are), and if they’re interested they’ll respond.

So how does Quartzy make money? So far Regelmann says that the company is focused entirely on growth. Down the line it will let science supply vendors purchase advertising on the site, giving a very targeted channel directed toward a group of people who are typically hard to reach (he explains that many vendors often have time informing scientists about new products). And scientists will get exposed to new products they might not have otherwise known about, so it stands to be a win-win situation.

Quartzy’s team currently includes three programmers in addition to founders Regelmann and Jayant Kulkarni.

Twitter is raising money at a $7 billion valuation.

Cue the bubble-bubble talk. Cue the Twitter-doesn't-have-a-business-model talk.

Please.

We estimate that Twitter is doing around $100 million in revenues through its emerging ad business, and selling access to its firehose.

"So freaking what?" we hear the naysayers say. "A $7 billion valuation on $100 million in revenues is insane!"

Really?

Look at it this way: in 2001, Google earned $7 million in profits on $86 million in revenue.

Anyone who had invested in Google at a $7 billion valuation in 2001 would have been called the world's biggest moron. (Especially considering the fact that an actual bubble had recently popped.) A 1000X profit multiple!

And anyone who had invested in Google at a $7 billion valuation in 2001 would also have tripled her money in three years, when Google went public in 2004 at a valuation above $20 billion. (And if she'd held on to her stake, made a 20X return over 7 years.)

Of course, not every company making $7 million in profits is worth billions. But every once in a while, a few of them are. And it's investors' job to invest in several of those that might look like the next Google, be mercilessly mocked by the armchair quarterbacks, and have enough winners out of the lot that they can laugh all the way to the bank.

Here's what Twitter has in common with 2001-era Google:

A simple, beautiful product that users love and that's growing like wildfire

A professional CEO and a visionary, involved co-founder.

Twitter also has network effects that Google doesn't have, but these aren't as important as most people think.

But that's not the thing that makes Google and Twitter worth billions, as opposed to hundreds of millions.

The thing that makes you worth billions is a revenue-generating product with huge momentum.

It doesn't matter the absolute numbers of your revenue, whether it's $100 million or $10 billion or $10 million. What matters is the slope of the curve. Whether customers can't get enough of your product, as was the case with Google when they launched search advertising and couldn't believe just how many people were buying.

(The reason the absolute value of the numbers don't matter, by the way, is that the value of an asset is the net present value of its future cash flows. In an early stage business, growth rates are more important to estimate future cash flows.)

From 2001 to 2004, Google's revenue grew from $86 million to $1.5 billion. That's staggering.

Is Twitter going to achieve similarly stunning revenue (and profit) growth?

Nobody knows, but stranger things have happened.

If we had to guess, we'd say Twitter insiders, including Google board member John Doerr, see Twitter's revenue growth and it makes them think Twitter could grow revenue that fast.

We wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Don't Miss: The Next Twitter Trend (We Hope): #Twintros

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Friday, July 29, 2011

personal finance money management

OS X Lion isn't out yet, but it could be hitting the Mac App Store as soon as next week. For many Mac users, the decision on whether or not to upgrade to Lion is boiling down to one incompatible app -- Quicken for Mac. We've been hearing from our readers for several weeks that Quicken is the sticking point.

In this post, I'll discuss what your options are to control your personal finances with a Lion-compatible Mac app. You'll be glad to know that Intuit's flagship app isn't the only game in town.

Intuit sent out a note to "Valued Quicken Customers" over the last few days stating that Quicken for Mac 2005, 2006, and 2007 will not run on OS X Lion. Intuit offered some solutions that had TUAW readers steaming:

Move to Quicken Essentials for Mac

The slimmed-down, next-generation app will work on Lion, but it doesn't have all the features users of the standard Quicken are used to. Intuit is even offering a 50% discount, but points out that you need to make the move before you upgrade to Lion since the app won't import your old data under Lion...

Move to Mint.com

This is Intuit's replacement for the old Quicken Online, and it's a web-based personal finance site. However, there's no way to move your existing Quicken data to Mint.com. Great thinking there, Intuit.

Move to Quicken Deluxe... on Windows

Brilliant idea, Intuit, if you have a Windows machine handy. If you're in an all-Mac home, forget it. If you want to run Windows 7 under Boot Camp on your Mac just to run Quicken Deluxe, you have to get a license for Windows 7 ($188 for Windows 7 Home Premium Full Edition on Amazon) and Quicken Windows ($35 for Quicken Deluxe on Amazon). Running a virtual machine under Parallels or VMWare adds additional cost.

Why not take this time to move away from Quicken altogether? Here are my suggestions for other apps that will take your existing financial data into the world of Lion.

iBank 4

Probably the best solution for most Mac users moving to OS X Lion is iBank 4 (US$59.99). It's available on the Mac App Store, it imports files from Quicken for Mac or PC, and it even has a mobile companion (iBank Mobile, $4.99) for tracking expenses and monitoring account balances. Feeling anxious about moving your data from Quicken to iBank? Don't be -- they even have a set of online video tutorials to set your mind at ease.

Money 4

Another personal finance application that is Lion-ready is Money 4 from Jumsoft ($18.99). It imports and exports Quicken QIF files, handles recurring payments, and does portfolio management. Reviews of the current version aren't exactly glowing, but many of the comments appear to be from people who don't understand even the basics of accounting, so your mileage may vary.

iFinance for Mac

Here's another finance app with a mobile companion. iFinance for Mac ($29.99) also imports Quicken QIF files, and the universal iFinance Mobile app ($1.99) is a good way to capture expenses on the go.

MoneyWell

One of the more higher-rated Mac personal finance apps is MoneyWell ($49.99). It supports importing financial transactions directly from many banks and other financial institutions, and imports a number of the Quicken formats that have been developed and then abandoned over the years. Anyone who purchases the current 1.6.8 version from the Mac App Store receives a free upgrade to the upcoming (Summer 2011) 2.0 release.

Koku

The Mac app that gets the award for the brightest page in the Mac App Store has to be Koku ($29.99). If you can make it past the purple background, there's some great information in the description. Like many of the other apps, Koku imports Quicken files and can directly pull transactions from many banks. Koku provides a "smart tagging technology" to label your spending and income with phrases that are familiar to you.

PocketMoney

To say that longtime developer Hardy Macia of Catamount Software is an Apple fan is putting it lightly -- he developed apps for the Newton platform for many years, including the first iterations of PocketMoney ($19.99). Now the app is available for Mac and PC, but the emphasis is on the iOS version of the app. Mac users may find the Mac flavor lacking in some features, and Macia admits that the current version is primarily for syncing the iOS app to the desktop. Still, the app has most of the features that users will want in a personal finance app, including one that I found fascinating -- the ability to affix photos of receipts and checks to transactions.

Budget

An interesting take on personal finance and budgeting is Budget ($39.99) from Snowmint Creative Solutions. This app does away with the traditional ledger format of most accounting applications and replaces it with envelopes. Envelopes represent different accounts, and you move money between envelopes to show where money is coming from and going to. It imports OFX and QIF files, but does not support direct bank connections.

iCompta

Yet another ledger-like Mac app for keeping those dollars, pounds, francs, or euros in line, iCompta ($18.99) also features a $4.99 iOS companion named iCompta 2. Import of existing Quicken data is a given with most of these apps, and iCompta is no exception. It'll also grab your transactions from many banks.

Squirrel

The winner in the cute logo competition has to go to Squirrel ($24.99), which features a squirrel stashing gold coins in a safe. The app imports existing transactions with ease, lets you define scheduled transactions and budgets, and even brings the Apple concept of Smart Folders to Mac finance for filtering transactions. Squirrel also has an iPhone companion that is highly rated and appears to be very easy to use.

iCash SE

At the end of the list is a powerful accounting app that has been localized for a number of different languages, including Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and English. Like many of the other apps listed here, iCash SE ($49.99) doesn't use double-entry bookkeeping so it's fairly easy to use. While it doesn't appear that iCash SE supports import of bank transactions, you can definitely get your Quicken data into the app.

Conclusion

Well, that's it for our roundup of Lion-compatible apps, all of which are available today in the Mac App Store. Don't let anyone tell you that there's no personal accounting solution except for Quicken. I'd love to hear from Mac users who are fans of these or other finance apps, as I'm sure you have good feedback on what the high and low points are for many of these applications.

One thing is for sure -- if you're considering making the move to Lion in the very near future, taking care of your personal accounting software needs should be foremost in your mind.

I, like millions of others, have health insurance, but ask me if I understand it, what I’m paying for and where my expenses are going to, and I don’t have much of an answer. But just as software is helping organize personal finance, travel, banking and billing, we’re starting to see some cool solutions that tackle the problem of health care information.

Simplee, a Palo Alto, Calif.-startup, is looking to bring a Mint.com-like approach to health care expense management, with a free service that lets people understand their plans, what they’re paying for and how they can optimize their coverage. The service, which has been in private beta for the last month, is now available to the public today.

The website works by connecting to a user’s healthcare accounts and bringing in the data, so health, vision and dental records can all be aggregated in one place. Simplee said it has 65 percent of the market supported with many big insurance plans on board such as Aetna, Anthem, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Cigna, Delta Dental, United Healthcare and Vision Service Plan with 80 percent of the market expected to be covered by the end of this year.

Now you have to feel comfortable letting Simplee have access to your records, but if you do, there’s a pretty good tradeoff. Simplee keeps track of your medical expenses and how much a user has paid in deductibles. For families, it helps a user understand when a family member has hit their deductible and how much their insurance plan is covering. Users can manage their ongoing bills and track specific bills by service, subscriber and medical provider. It all comes in a clean dashboard that helps users see where there money is going. It also alerts users to what kind of benefits they receive under their current plans, so they can take advantage of services they didn’t realize they were covered for.

Simplee co-founder and CEO Tomer Shoval, who used to lead the north American business of Shopping.com, came up with the idea after racking up family medical expenses on vacation. He said the service is increasingly important as families pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket. He said Simplee will start by aggregating data and giving users good management tools. But he said the next phase, which he hopes can be monetized, will involve arming people with data on how to select their health care plans. And over the next year, he is looking at creating a shopping engine for health procedures based on Simplee’s database of health care bills, so users can compare prices between doctors and find a professional that fits their budget.

Simplee, which has raised $1.5 million from Greylock Israel and some angels, is part of a growing group of health care startups that are tapping into available data and building tools that help make sense of the health care mess. Cake Health and Medify are two others that are trying to tackle this issue. But Simplee is also part of a larger movement in software management tools that use clean user interfaces and user experiences to help simplify more complicated tasks. Mint.com has helped with personal finance and we’re seeing some of those lessons pop up in other startups like BankSimple, Manilla and Project Slice. The real power is in easily organizing data in one place and making it easy to manage, which helps users make better and more informed decisions.

It’s good to see this come to health care, which has been more of a black box than other areas. But as information becomes increasingly available online, it makes more sense to have these kinds of tools available. I know I don’t spend much time understanding my health care and that might work right now. But I’m not getting any younger and as my health care needs grow, along with my family, I’m going to want something like Simplee.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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TechCrunched: News In 90 Seconds | TechCrunch

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President Obama's Approval Hits All-Time Low - FoxNews.com

President Obama's job approval rating has dropped to a new low of 40 percent, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll. The White House has worked double-time to get Americans to agree with their assertion that ...

President Obama's Approval Hits All-Time Low - FoxNews.com