Cash Deposit Boxes

I’ve been looking for a good cash deposit box lately. I’ve gone to the usual stores like Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, etc, but I’m not seeing exactly what I’m looking for. They have these plastic looking things with more slots for change than for bills. I’ve also seen some heavy duty fire proof ones from Brinks Security.

It’s just that I’m not really looking for a cash register, I just want a box with some slots for bills, to facilitate keeping track of my savings. Of course something with a bit of security would be nice. Maybe something with a security code in it, something fireproof, something heavy, and small enough to fit in a wall or something.
Perhaps the problem is I’m not sure I myself know what I want. What I do know is that I’ll know it when I see it.

Buying Low, Selling High, It’s an Art Form sure!

When I’m looking for some sort of electronic goodie, I want to get the best price for it. But I’m not just thinking about getting a good deal so I can save a few books. I always sell my “toys” when I don’t want them anymore. So I always try to buy low and sell high. I’ve done it so much that I’ve almost perfected the art.

Here’s an example of one of my most recent transactions. I purchased a digital video camera about a year ago. It’s a very nice camcorder, worked great. As time goes by, of course technologies improve, and now they have HD camcorders instead of using MiniDV tapes. Well I wanted to upgrade, so first I have to sell my old camcorder.

When I first bought it I remember it got it brand new from some store, got a mail-in rebate for it. The item wasn’t the latest greatest item. In fact it wasn’t even available at major stores like Circuit City or Sears. It wasn’t hte latest model but it was fairly new. Prices drop drastically on items when they’re no longer “new”. The big stores end up selling these items at a discounted price to smaller electronic shops, who then pass on the savings to consumers like me.

Now that I want to upgrade it’s time to sell it. A few of the things I’ve done is take very good care of the camera. It literally had no scratches on it, no wear and tear, so it can be considered as “like new” even though I’ve used it sparingly for a whole year. I also kept the original box, making sure not to tear any of the packaging. If I wasn’t going to use an accessory I made sure to leave it the original bag. For example this camcorder came with a remote control and a shoulder strap that I never used.

I logged into my ebay account and took literally 20+ pictures of the item in every possible angle and was very up front about the history of the item. People seemed to like the honesty of the auction and within 12 hours I already had a few questions about it and somebody used Buy It Now and nabbed it.

The way I see it, I only “rented” this camcorder, I bought it at a low price, sold it at a high price. So if I bought it at $400 and sold it for $350, I paid $50 for a whole years worth of a camcorder. That’s only about $1 a week, can’t beat that price.

savings gimmick

Isn’t the $10 the best looking bill out there? It’s new, the new $10 bills have a reddish tint to them. They’re pretty rare too. I see 1s, 5s, 20s and 100s all the time. But the 10s and 50s are becoming a rarity. It’s common to pay with a $20 bill and if the change is $11+ you’ll get two 5’s and a 1, not a 10 and a 1.

For the last 2 years I’ve saved each and every 10 dollar bill I’ve had the luck of coming across. It started as an idea to save money. I’ll save my 10 dollar bills and spend everything else. Now it’s a hobby more than a savings gimmick.

U2 iPod

Apple Computer on Tuesday upgraded its U2 Special Edition iPod music player, allowing fans an additonal 10 more gigabytes of space for a slightly lower price.

Introduced in October 2004, the original U2 iPod held 20GB, enough for about 5,000 songs, had a 12-hour battery life, and did not have video functionality. It was priced at 349 U.S. dollars.

The new 30GB U2 iPod is based on Apple's fifth-generation design. It comes with an all-black stainless-steel enclosure, a red click-wheel, and custom engraving of U2 band-member signatures. It holds up to 7,500 songs, 25,000 photos or up to 75 hours of video, has a 14-hour battery life, and will cost 329 dollars, Apple said.

U2 fans will also receive about 30 minutes of exclusive video from the iTunes Music Store through a coupon code that can be redeemed electronically.

Like other recent versions of iPods, the newest U2 Special Edition will sync computers to automatically download video, podcasts and photo content as well as digital music.

Web-based Office

Google's test release Tuesday of an online spreadsheet application is the highest-profile challenge yet to Microsoft's dominant Office software franchise. But it's hardly the first.

While higher-profile Web players such as Yahoo, Ask.com and even Microsoft sit on the sidelines, a wave of mostly US West-Coast-based startup companies are feverishly putting out Webified counterparts to Microsoft Word, Excel and others.

For word processing, upstarts include AjaxWrite from Ajax13; gOffice from SilverOffice, Zoho Writer from AdventNet; iNetWord from iNetOffice; and Google's own offering, which arose from its acquisition of Writely in March.

For spreadsheets, Office alternatives include WikiCalc, created by spreadsheet pioneer and VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin; EditGrid from a Hong Kong-based company Teams and Concepts; iRows from irows.com; AjaxXLS from Ajax13; and Dabble DB, from Smallthought Systems.

There are even online equivalents to PowerPoint, such as Thumbstacks.com, and an alternative to Microsoft's project management software: Project-On-Demand from Projity.

Not only are the applications mostly free, but they let users easily collaborate and edit documents simultaneously, a key feature that historically has eluded Microsoft.

For instance, Google Spreadsheets, can read and write files in Excel format and handle many basic calculations, though it can't understand advanced Excel commands such as macros. But the software can let up to 10 users simultaneously edit a spreadsheet, while chatting via an adjacent instant-messaging window.

That trumps the back-and-forth e-mail exchange of documents -- with changed areas highlighted in red -- that most Office users are forced to do today.

"I believe Web-based applications from a variety of providers, like Google's new Spreadsheets, will represent a significant challenge to Microsoft Office 2007," said Jeff Kaplan, an analyst at ThinkStrategies. "Rather than invest in a new software suite, many users may choose to take advantage of software-as-a-service alternatives."

Microsoft is making collaboration features a prominent part of its upcoming Office 2007, due out by year's end. Many of those features, however, will require companies to deploy and support additional back-end software, such as SharePoint 2007.

Microsoft has said it will make some collaboration features available via its Office Live, though it has stopped short of replicating any of the features in its Office software for fear of cannibalizing sales.

"I think they'll want to offer something to MSN and Office Live users, but they'll want to make sure they leverage their strengths -- and tie whatever they offer into their desktop products," said Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC.

"Microsoft is not going to lose its Office software franchise anytime soon," said Dustin Rector, an analyst at Tier 1 Research. But "if Microsoft chooses to sit this one out, they will begin to lose out long-term."

Marc O'Brien, founder and president of Projity, said Microsoft already is losing ground. In the three months since his firm released its Project-On-Demand application, it has gained 100 user companies, a combination of paying and trial customers. "Today's project teams are much more likely to be geographically dispersed. That's a good thing for us," he said.

Project-On-Demand is part of Salesforce.com's AppExchange network; as a result, it is tightly integrated with Salesforce.com's CRM application and its hosted user data and is available to Salesforce.com's 450,000 users.

O'Brien said customers include smaller firms as well as some Fortune 500 companies. But Webster believes that early adopters will tend to be consumers and small companies.

Using Google for enterprise documents such as proposals, contracts and budgets "is a stretch -- at least in the next several years," said Webster, because Google hasn't created a software-as-a-service business yet, and therefore doesn't have any protections in place for enterprise data and doesn't have guarantees of service levels and the like.

Some startups, such as iNetOffice, are hoping to sell word processing applications to larger software-as-a-service vendors for bundling within their own applications, according to iNetOffice President Tom Snyder.

But with a market that analysts say is ripe for consolidation, most startups are taking the usual route of frantically building up their technology and wooing end users to make themselves attractive to potential buyers.

In addition to buying up companies, Webster believes larger Web players will also build connectors between search engines and Web applications for an enriched experience. "For example, I can see Google Spreadsheets being very useful in the context of a search like 'find me the best rates for my ZIP code and my loan amount for a 30-year fixed mortgage,' then being able to do some 'What ifs?' using a prepopulated spreadsheet.

Bernanke took office in February

Bernanke took office in February promising to make central bank policy more transparent. Four months later, a number of economists and traders say the Fed chairman and other central bank officials have stumbled by making too many contradictory statements, muddying the outlook and spooking markets.

The complaints got louder Monday after Bernanke told a banking group inflation was at an "unwelcome" level, raising the specter of further Fed interest rate increases. That appeared counter to April congressional testimony in which Bernanke suggested the central bank could pause from its two-year campaign of interest rate increases, even if inflation was a risk.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell nearly 200 points Monday and another 47 points Tuesday.

"Give us a break, please. Can we have just one week, or at least one day, without some Fed official obsessing publicly about containing inflation?" says Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist at Oak Associates. "They are giving us more information than we need."

The issue goes beyond language, however. There are a number of reasons the Fed is taking flak as it tries to wind up a drive that has pushed short-term interest rates to 5% from a historic low of 1% in mid-2004:

• The economy is changing. Minutes of the March 27-28 meeting of the Fed's policymaking Open Market Committee show members believed the end of the tightening cycle was near, with some expressing concern the Fed could push rates too high. Bernanke's April testimony echoed those comments. The markets, however, interpreted Bernanke's "pause" statement as soft on inflation. Further, in recent weeks core inflation, which doesn't include food and energy, has been running above the Fed's 2% projection.

As the Fed responded to market concerns and altered conditions, its message necessarily changed.

"The end of tightening cycles are often controversial. We see more disagreement on the Fed committee about what the stopping point is; we see more skittishness in the markets," says Brian Sack of Macroeconomic Advisers, a former Fed economist. "This was a tricky time to have a transition to a new chair."

• There are disagreements on policy. While some analysts applaud Bernanke's emphasis on inflation, others say the central bank is not paying enough attention to economic cooling. They fear the Fed will push rates too high, choking growth. "The Fed is overly concerned with inflationary pressures and less concerned with the slowing of economic activity ... the consumer is getting whacked" by rising rates and energy prices, says David Lereah, National Association of Realtors' chief economist.

• There are too many voices. Bernanke doesn't yet have the same control that former chairman Alan Greenspan had over the Open Market Committee. Traders and economists are paying more attention to sometimes conflicting statements of Fed governors and regional bank presidents to try to figure out policy.

"They should really leave it to one spokesman, and that should be the Fed chairman," Yardeni says.

• Bernanke doesn't have Greenspan's inflation-fighting credentials and reputation.

"He needs to quickly realize that the markets around the world care very much about every word that comes out of his mouth," says Gary Kaltbaum, a money manager at Kaltbaum & Associates. "Potentially, it could be a longer-term positive that he is going to stand up to inflation if it is occurring ... (it's) better than doing nothing and letting things get out of hand.

Airport Operator and $19 Billion

the operator of some of the world's busiest airports, said today that it had accepted a new takeover offer from the Spanish construction group Ferrovial, ending a nearly four-month fight to remain independent.

Grupo Ferrovial's latest bid values BAA at about £10.2 billion, or $19 billion. "The board believes that an offer at this level represents an attractive price," BAA said in a statement.

Ferrovial's move appeared to frustrate a possible 11th-hour rival bid from the investment bank Goldman Sachs. During negotiations with BAA on Monday night, Goldman said it had proposed a nonbinding cash offer that would value BAA at £10.3 billion.

BAA acquiesced to Ferrovial's advances late Monday after a consortium led by the Spanish group succeeded in acquiring around 14 percent of BAA's shares on the open market.

The Ferrovial bid valued BAA at 950.24 pence a share, compared with Goldman's proposed offer of 955.25 pence.

A BAA spokesman said the company, which operates Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports, had chosen the bid from Ferrovial over the one from Goldman because it offered the greatest certainty for shareholders in the near term.

"Under Ferrovial's offer, shareholders will get their money sooner," said Duncan Bonfield, a BAA spokesman. "Goldman's has made a proposal. But as long as it is just a proposal, then there are clear risks involved."

Ferrovial's bid, which includes a 15.25-pence-a-share dividend, has already received approval from European Union and British antitrust authorities. The offer from Goldman would likely need two to three months to complete due diligence procedures and secure regulatory approval, according to BAA.

BAA controls two-thirds of Britain's airports, and its dominant position has long been a source of concern for airlines, which complain that the company has the power to set arbitrarily high fees for landing rights and other airport services.

Last month, the British Office of Fair Trading said it was considering an investigation into whether the company has abused its market position to the detriment of consumers.

Robert Milton, chairman of the board of the International Air Transport Association, worried that airlines could be charged even more to use BAA's airports in the near term as the airport operator seeks to recoup its financing costs.

"It's hard to paint a happy picture at this time," Mr. Milton, who is also chief executive of Air Canada, said at an industry conference in Paris.

BAA's decision to accept Ferrovial's offer followed a series of overtures by the Spanish group that began in March, with a hostile takeover offer valued at 810 pence a share.

BAA's board swiftly rejected that approach, arguing that it significantly undervalued BAA's assets, which include airport stakes in Budapest and Naples, as well as restaurant and retail services concessions at several American airports, including Logan International in Boston. Ferrovial sweetened its bid to 900 pence last week, but BAA insisted that the company was worth at least 940 pence a share.

In a statement, Goldman Sachs urged BAA shareholders to take no action on Ferrovial's offer and said it would make a further announcement in the coming days. British market regulators have given the Goldman Sachs consortium until June 16 to make a firm offer for BAA, extending an earlier deadline by a week.

Mr. Bonfield, the BAA spokesman, said the company would not rule out negotiations with Goldman Sachs if it were to submit a formal bid. "We know our duty to shareholders," he said. "If there were an offer, then we definitely would have to look at it."

Ferrovial has until June 19 to revise its offer, while BAA shareholders have until June 26 to accept or reject the new Ferrovial bid.

BAA has said it plans to spend more than £9.5 billion over the next 10 years upgrading facilities at its three London airports. Major projects include a fifth terminal at Heathrow as well as modifications to runways and terminals to accommodate the new Airbus A380 "superjumbo" jet, which is scheduled to enter commercial service next year.

Given such large investments, combined with the added debt that BAA is expected to take on as a result of the Ferrovial deal, Standard & Poor's cut its credit ratings on the company to BBB+ from A and said it may cut them again.

BAA had £5.34 billion of debt on its books as of March 31, up from £3 billion at the end of 2005.

Power Working

Today I may have very well coined a new phrase: “power-working”. I’m not sure if I’ve heard it somewhere else before. It’s sort of like power walking. Working, on steroids, per se. Here are the keys to power working.

Be motivated, have a dream or a goal in mind, whether short-term or long term.

Be extremely well rested and ready to put in a good 3-4 hours of non-stop work.

Sit comfortably in an air conditioned room, put some music on, limit your distractions.

Have a drink with you, preferrably something with sugar, like an Arizona Iced Tea, something that gives you energy.