As submitted by NewRulesofInvesting

This is a side to side comparison of two of the best online financial sites: Yahoo Finance and Google Finance.  Yahoo is still the largest and most popular finance site by far but Google is serious about finance.  Let’s see how the two financial portals stack up against each other.

Speed

Google Finance: Typical fast-loading Google pages.  Google’s site is broad and doesn’t go deep.  Pages for individual stocks are only 1 page deep (Google links out for things like option chains, major holder, etc.)

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is fast.  As opposed to Google, Yahoo content resides primarily on Yahoo pages and Yahoo is responsible for page load speed throughout the site.  This can fluctuate as any large website can throughout the day.

Charting

Google Finance: Google primarily uses a simple javascript-loaded chart without any bling.  It loads fast and allows easy to manipulate x-axis (time period).  When you’re figuring out what a particular stocks has done over the past 17 days, the chart also calculates the return for a given time frame beyond the standard 1-day, 5-day, 3 month, etc. time period.  Google also plots news events onto their charts which is kind of cool (not necessarily tradeable).

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance charts are much more robust.  Advanced charts have incorporated a similar charting function like Google’s and provides an overlay of numerous technical indicators (MACD, RSI).  Because these charts are so powerful, they also tend to be bulky and seize up.

Real Time Quotes

Google Finance: Google provides real time quotes both during market hours and pre- and post- market.  Google’s quotes on market indices tend to skew erratically during the transition to an open market as well as trails when the market makes large moves to the upside or downside.

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo also provides real time quotes both during market hours and off.  Yahoo’s premarket quotes are not as reliable as Google’s.  Yahoo occasionally doesn’t have a price premarket for a wide array of stocks.  Yahoo has a scrolling ticker as well for stocks that is personalized to the behavior of the user.

Breadth

Google Finance: Google gives basic info all on one page.  Anything more a user needs to link off.  News, financial info, blogs all included.  Very shallow, quick and dirty use.  Google does a good job bringing in blog content but lacks good, standardized PR content, still necessary in the research process.

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo provides an entire research environment.  All the content and data is supplied by Yahoo.  From major holders to options chains to blogs and PR, Yahoo is a virtual poor man’s Bloomberg.

Innovation

Google Finance: Google allows users to download data, making the site more portable than we’ve traditionally seen.  Google portrays the data environment well around a stock.  Beyond that, nothing particularly innovative about what Google’s done so far.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is the 800lb gorilla and essentially helped to democratize financial information.  Yahoo has done a good job bringing in financial blogs in a controlled environment, using SeekingAlpha to help filter.  Charts are very powerful.  Not too much current innovation going on either on the surface.

With blogs popping up all over the web like weeds, the question is how does one build a successful blog. I guess the first question is how to define success? For arguments sake let’s define success as heavily trafficked and commented on.

I cam accross a very informatove post from mominisrael. She gives a list of tips that have helped her become successful.  Among her tips she writes: ” I started by commenting on other blogs that address similar topics. If a blogger begins posting here, I usually add that blog to my reader. (A reader is a web page that lets you know when the blogs you like have been updated. I use Netvibes, but Bloglines and Google Reader are more popular.) Lately I comment less (I hope temporarily), but I still read. ”

Doshdosh asks, ” So what’s the secret to building a large blog readership? Content dissemination and the development of a supportive core audience. And that’s really the key. It’s not just about the quality of your content. It’s about having broad distribution channels.

Once again, readership growth doesn’t only depend on the merit of your blog posts, but rather their circulation reach. It’s about how much attention your content receives.”

Finally, Positivityblog has a long list of tips to help you be a better blogger. Here is just one of the tips: ” Learn from more experienced people. This is so key - in any area of life really - and can really help you to improve quickly and avoid wasting time. I recommend not only subscribing to the two excellent resources called Problogger (about blogging) and Copyblogger (about communicating better and more persuasively). I also recommend delving into the archives of these two blogs. When I started blogging I spent two or three weeks reading lots and lots from the massive archives of Problogger. I learned a lot about blogging, marketing, monetization and what you should and should not do. Before I started this blog I knew very little about blogging. After those weeks I at least had a basic education that was very helpful. If you are thinking about creating your own blog or have just started one I recommend reading the big series Blogging Tips for Beginnersover at Problogger.”

Happy blogging.

I’m a believer in credibility. I am credible. My abilities, experience, work history, testimonials and awards make me so; but my membership at VACOC proves it. The VACOC can show a business that a virtual assistant has an administrative strength and knowledge within the field.

I was recently told, “So what. A business isn’t going to know that or care.”

Why wouldn’t a business care about credibility or competency?

The biggest selling and marketing point for me regarding the VACOC is the fact that members must meet and pass the criteria for membership. It demonstrates professionalism and ability.

Again, someone might throw out that phrase, “So what”?

Let’s say a business owner finds a virtual assistant and believes what they see at face value. Can they feel completely confident that they have partnered with someone competent? I don’t think so unless they have found this VA through word of mouth or a peer referral.

“The VACOC is the association for the virtual assistant who:

• Has at least 5 years upper level administrative experience (e.g., secretary, administrative assistant, executive assistant, etc.).
  
• Is highly skilled before entering the profession.
  
• Offers support that is primarily administrative in nature.
  
• Operates a committed, legitimate business (not freelancing on the side).
  
• Operates a solo practice (we do not represent telecommuters, secretarial services, virtual teams or virtual staffing agencies).
  
• Believes in ethics, honesty and integrity in business.
  
• Is serious about the profession, and committed to building a successful business.”*
  

So, as a business owner, wouldn’t you feel better about working with a virtual assistant that has established themselves, has the experience, and has passed certain criteria that proves the VA is competent? My answer is, “Yes”.

There are certain niche fields that virtual assistants market too. The underlying experience and abilities remain administrative. So, if you are searching for a credible virtual assistant, my experience has taught me that the place to find the best is at the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce.

This blog post has been graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by Colleen M. Johnson.  She is the owner of CMJ Office, a virtual administrative and genealogical research business.   CMJ Office provides top quality virtual administrative assistance for business owners and individuals.

She offers many services including proofreading, blogging, MS Office applications, admin support, database maintenance, mail services, internet research, and genealogy research.  She holds several memberships including VACOC, IVAA, VANetworking, NEHGS, and DCWW.  If you need assistance, please contact her or view her website information at http://www.cmjoffice.com.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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This post is one in a series of three about the phenomenon we call Twitter. Many people in The Mom Entrepreneur Support Group I run, and clients, have been asking about this form of micro-blogging. What is it? Why should I care? How do I use it? My goal is to answer these questions and more.

“New to Twitter - not quite sure how this works but I am sure I can figure it out. Love this social networking stuff.”

“I am here, now what?”

Start by posting some practice tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. My second tweet was:

“Working on my blogging clinic, which will be offered for four sessions in April in Barrington, NH.”

When the blogging clinic write up was ready on my website, I tweeted again about it and included a link to the page on my site. Now remember, you are limited to 140 characters. This can easily be used up with one URL; especially a blog URL. Visit http://www.tinyurl.com/ and turn your long URL into a short URL. You can even customize your URL so it is easy to remember.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend. As a mom entrepreneur however, my best friend is Garmin Nuvi.

On Friday, I really put my friend to the test. I was traveling to Dedham, MA to meet with a client. As I made the 1.5 hour drive down, I saw miles of traffic on the North side of the highway due to construction. I knew I would have to leave my client’s office by 1:00pm in order to pick my son up at school on time. The back up of traffic was a concern.

When the meeting was over and I was heading towards home, I noticed that the traffic was now backed up to the exit I entered. That meant sitting in seven or more miles of construction traffic with cars creeping along at a turtle’s pace.

My options: call the school and see how long they could watch my son once school ended, call my husband and have him leave work two hours early to pick him up, or put my friend to the test.

I decided to test my friendship with Garmin Nuvi. I pressed “detour” on the GPS navigation system. It told me to turn around and head South. Just great, without a map, I was at the mercy of my friend. I had no idea how close the other major highways were to me. And I was concerned I would not make it to my son’s school on time.

Garmin detoured me to I93, took up me Route 1 and back to I95 above the construction traffic. The detour only took me 14 minutes out of my way and I made it to my son’s school with three minutes to spare. I was still a hero…and I am in love with my friend Garmin Nuvi. (Don’t tell my husband:))

Traci Bisson has been a mom since February 2000 and an entrepreneur since August 2000. Eight weeks after she returned from maternity leave, the company where she had been employed for five years went out of business. She decided to try doing her own thing and failed miserably. After another year of working for two different companies (the first laid off the department she worked in and the other was showing signs of going under), she decided to try entrepreneurship again. Raising her two children and growing her company, Bisson Barcelona, has been both challenging and rewarding. Her story has been told in dozens of publications, including the Associated Press, National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB.com), Plan Ahead Get Ahead (cover story), Union Leader, The Portsmouth Herald, Our Times and Seacoast Ventures

Trust.

A big word when you’re dealing with a small business.

So, how do you trust a small business that provides a service?

Here are some of my tips:

1. Communicate. Whether it’s through email or phone conversations, you need to communicate. Discover through these communications if your styles/personalities mesh.
2. Research. Do your homework and research the background of the business and the owner. Learn if the company and owner are qualified to provide the service(s) you’re requiring.
3. Testimonials. See if the testimonials that the company provides are factual. If you’re on a web site or social network group, follow the link provided. Request phone numbers to contact past clients if testimonials are not provided or get the customer base from the company.
4. Organizations and Affiliations. See if the company is associated with any organizations and affiliations. If they are, check them out.
5. Credentials. Investigate the credentials thoroughly. Is the business certified properly to provide the services they are offering and at what level?
6. Insurance and License. Make sure the business is licensed and insured. This is to make sure that your business is covered.

These are just some tips to help you trust a small business that is service based. You can trust them if they pass the test.

Does that mean you will be happy with the service they provide to you? No, but maybe you will be. There are never any guarantees.

If you follow my tips, you can be sure that you can trust the small business.

This blog post has been graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by Colleen M. Johnson.  She is the owner of CMJ Office, a virtual administrative and genealogical research business.   CMJ Office provides top quality virtual administrative assistance for business owners and individuals.

She offers many services including proofreading, blogging, MS Office applications, admin support, database maintenance, mail services, internet research, and genealogy research.  She holds several memberships including VACOC, IVAA, VANetworking, NEHGS, and DCWW.  If you need assistance, please contact her or view her website information at http://www.cmjoffice.com.

Video technologies such as chat, telephony and conferencing are increasingly making their way into both the home and office work places and are playing a more important role in how business gets done. More websites are including video functions and some sites, such as YouTube, have added video response options for viewers. Computer manufacturers have taken notice and today it’s nearly impossible to purchase a laptop without a built-in webcam.

Riding the wave of these changes are several new video technology companies that have made headlines in recent months with their free services offerings geared towards enhancing video communication in the workplace and at home. Though most of them offer similar abilities, each one focuses on a specific feature geared towards a certain audience. Whether or not you are already using a video communication technology, there are 3 services that deserve a closer look: ooVoo, VuYou and TokBox.

I first covered ooVoo on my Israel Innovation 2.0 blog in November 2007. The company caught my attention at the time for a project that it was funding related to content in Israeli broadcast sites. ooVoo is a free video service that you download (like Skype) and then gives you the ability to have a live video chat with one to 6 friends, family members or business partners. If you have something to say but the people who you want to share it with are not available, you can leave a video message for them.

Another company offering free video streaming and messaging, is VuYou. According to a recent news release though, VuYou is emphasizing video emails, creating video blogs and podcasts and adding video content to their own websites. The advertising-supported site provides unique security by creating film strips from 5 stages of a recording process of a sent in th recipent’s inbox so that they can check the video content first without having to play or download it. In addition, VuYou has plans to offer a business service with video conferencing and other features later this year.

While both VuYou and ooVoo require users to download something, TokBox is offering free browser-based video chat and conferencing along with the ability to leave recorded messages. All that’s required is that at least one person has an account and then, according to Venture Beat, “as many as eight other people can join a video conversation simply by visiting a url.”

Although there has been speculation that there is not enough critical mass to make these companies very successful, a lot of it has to do with the area still being novel to most people. It’s likely that webcams will become standard in almost all computers in the future and it still offers mass appeal to business travelers, home businesses and anyone who is away from their family and friends over an extended amount of time. For those who already have a webcam and are looking to enhance the way they do business or keep in touch with loved ones, any of these services can serve your current online video communication needs.

If you are already using one of these services or a different one. Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Techcrunch had good coverage of Wikinvest’s launch of embeddable, annotate-able, wiki-able charts.  Wikinvest, which like it sounds, is a wiki focused on building out user-generated company and stock information.  Now, the site has developed charts that can be annotated and embedded into websites and blogs.

If you check out Apple’s chart (sorry wordpress.com doesn’t allow posting of javascript) and click on ‘B’, you’ll see that on June 10th, Apple reported a new iPhone with GPS and 3G capabilities, better battery life and improved audio quality.

Or, on Amgen’s chart, you can click on ‘L’ and see someone’s explanation for a continued slide in the stock price (which he/she attributed to a potential safety risk for Aranesp)

Google Finance has charts that attempt to pair up news events with movements in the stock price.  While it’s a really interesting cause-effect, Google Finance unfortunately doesn’t capture the news or information that is affecting stock price movement.  I attribute this to 2 reasons: 1) Sometimes it’s just impossible to explain price movement (sorry, financial commentators) 2) Google’s news set is in some cases unexplicable weird and picks up stories that seemingly have little impact.

Anyway, these charts powered by wikinvest are interesting for financial bloggers and may ultimately do a good job of providing numerous opinions as to what’s affecting individualk stocks at any given moment.  It would be very interesting for someone to look into the accuracy of wikinvest’s annotated charts and provide some metrics at some point (if this is possible to track).  If anything, these charts improve on Google’s charts (which I happen to like) by overlaying wiki-like UGC on top of stock charts.

Remember the 80’s smash, Vacation, from the Go-Go’s? As we are in the last half of August, most people I know are actually on vacation. The real question is with today’s email connectivity, whether they really are on vacation?

According to the Go-Go’s the point of a vacation is ” Vacation Had to get away Vacation Meant to be spent alone..” Unfortunately with email and mobile devices, we are virtually unable to be ‘left alone’.

I came across a great  blog by Rebecca Coggan where she quotes from a new AOL email usage study. She says, “ More than 50% said they check their email while on vacation. It’s even higher among mobile users. 78% of those who have a mobile device check email while on vacation.” She also writes, ” 28% said they feel obligated to check work email while on vacation, and 19% choose vacation spots with email access.”

That just sounds sick to me. I once had a job with a prominent Wall-Street bank and my boss told me that he was flying to the Himalayas for a 2 week vacation. I thought to myself, that this would mean that I’d get a bit of downtime at work and be able to spend some quality time with my family. Well much to my surprise within an hour of landing he sent me an email from his Blackberry. C’mon.

People need to understand that it’s okay not to be connected 24/7 as well as that the world will go on if you don’t answer an email.  If you are a business owner or a manager, you need to trust the employees that you hired, to be able to do the job while you are out of the office.

But maybe all is not lost. Ronda Muir writes on her lawpeopleblog that a law firm is urging employees to disconnect while on vacation. ” Linklaters is reported having decreed, in a fit of concern for work/life balance, that lawyers leave their Blackberrys at home while on holiday (vacation to us).The order is designed to insulate associates, in particular, from the relentless rat race for a few sweet weeks a year, according to management.”

Good for them Let’s hope that this becomes a trend.

Aaron Katsman is Managing Editor of the Israel Opportunity Investor newsletter. He is lead portfolio manager for the Israel Growth Portfolio and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. For more information, go to www.israelnewsletter.com or call 1-888-327-6179, or email aaron@profile-financial.com.

Your cell phone bills may start to get cheaper. Why? Well just like traditional fixed land-line prices dropped to virtually nothing due to new technology, most notably Voice Over IP (VOIP), the same thing may very well happen to your cell phone as well. An Israeli hi-tech start-up, Spikko ltd. is set to launch a free cellular telephone service for handsets with at least 3G capabilities.

According to a report in Globes: “Each subscriber receives the company’s SpikkoPhone software and an Israeli telephone number, which is used to make calls and accumulate airtime, allowing for the placing of calls for free anywhere in the world. The service also offers video and chat services, and will soon also offer e-mail and instant messaging.”

Currently it’s available in Israel only, but the company is working on making the service available internationally. The company estimates that customers will save between 40-80% off existing bills.

It will take time for cellular prices to drop down to levels that we pay with our landlines. It’s not something that will happen overnight, but with companies like Spikko, and others trying to do similar things, I have a hunch that cellphone companies better figure out other revenue streams, like content and other value added services, because it does stand to reason that we will continue to see price erosion on airtime charges.

 Aaron Katsman is Managing Editor of the Israel Opportunity Investor newsletter. He is lead portfolio manager for the Israel Growth Portfolio and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. For more information, go to www.israelnewsletter.com or call 1-888-327-6179, or email aaron@profile-financial.com.