Written by S. Wade Hansen

photo: Cayusa

Too many people – particularly young ones – wait too long to start investing. Their excuse? “I don’t have enough money.” The truth is, even if you only have $1,000 to spare, becoming an investor today is the best move you can make because it puts the power of interest compounding in your favor.

Let’s say you’re 25 and you want to retire when you’re 65. If you invest your $1,000 today and earn an annual rate of return of 7%, after 40 years your $1,000 will have turned into $14,974. On the other hand, if you invest your $1,000 when you turn 30, by the time you’re 65 you’ll only have $10,677.

If that seems like small potatoes to you, consider this: instead of a one-time investment of $1,000, let’s assume you invest $1,000 every year. If you begin when you are 25, you will have $214,610 by the time you are 65. Wait until you’re 30, and you’ll only have $148,913.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s take a look at five great ways to start investing today.

Your Company’s 401(k) Plan

If you have access to a company 401(k) program that offers a company match, you should think long and hard before putting your money (whether that’s just $1,000 or more) anywhere else but in that 401(k).

A company match is free money that could instantly turn your $1,000 into $2,000. To put that in perspective, if you just put that $1,000 in a tax-deferred account earning 7% a year, it would take it just over 10 years to turn into $2,000.

Now, you may be saying to yourself: ”Well, that’s great, but I have the $1,000 in my checking account and I can’t move it from there into my 401(k).” That’s okay. All you have to do is sign up to have $100 per month automatically withheld from your future paychecks and deposited into your 401(k). Then you can use the extra $1,000 you have in your checking account to make up any budget shortfall those monthly deposits may cause.

The best part is, because 401(k) contributions are not taxed, the hit to your paycheck will be smaller than your actual contribution. Someone in the 25% tax bracket, for example, would receive just $75 less per month while contributing $100 to their 401(k).

TreasuryDirect

TreasuryDirect is your gateway to owning U.S. Treasuries. If you are looking for a conservative way to invest your $1,000, this is it. Plus, since your tax dollars fund the Treasury, you don’t have to pay any commissions or fees to buy or hold Treasuries.

Two of the most popular products individuals buy directly from the U.S. Treasury are I Savings Bonds and Treasury Inflation Protection Securities (TIPS), because both investments protect you from inflation.

You can buy I Savings Bonds in increments as low as $25, and you can buy TIPS in increments of $100. But don’t get carried away. Treasuries–especially those that protect against inflation–may be the safest way to invest, but their returns are typically lower than those you will find long-term in the stock market.  So you probably only want a portion of your portfolio tied up in Treasuries.

Direct Stock Purchase Plan (DSPP) and Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRP)

Direct Stock Purchase Plans (DSPPs) are stock purchase plans that enable you to buy shares–and fractional shares–of stock directly from the companies that issue it. Because you don’t have to open a brokerage account, there are no minimum initial investment requirements to worry about. Want to own shares of General Electric? You can buy them directly from the company. Want to own shares of Microsoft? You can buy them directly from the company.

Now, you won’t be dealing with the company per se, but rather with the transfer agent it has contracted with to handle the sale and distribution of its stock. While some transfer agents don’t charge you a dime, others do charge a small fee for every purchase you make, usually in the $1 to $2 range. Two of the major players in the transfer agent market are Computershare and BNY Mellon Shareowner Services. If you can’t find the stocks you are interested on one of these two sites, check the investor relations page on the company’s website to see if it offers a DSPP or DRP.

Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRPs) are a lot like DSPPs, but they take things one step further by actually using your dividend payments to automatically buy more shares of the stock. This is really setting your investments on autopilot. All you have to do is set up an account with the company or its transfer agent, fund your account with enough money to make your initial purchase and then sit back and let the account administrator use reinvest your dividends.

Incremental Purchase Plan

Incremental purchase plans allow you to automatically buy shares–and fractional shares–of stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) using a set amount of money each month. These plans typically have no account minimums and allow you to invest in small dollar increments.

The benefit here is that you don’t have to buy a full share of stock. You can buy a fraction of a share, which allows you to spread a smaller amount of money out across a larger pool of stocks. Of course, you can get this same benefit by buying a mutual fund or an ETF. But if you want to have more control over the specific shares you are holding, this may be the route for you.

The most popular incremental purchase plan provider is ShareBuilder.

IRA or Roth IRA at a Discount Broker

Even though you may only have $1,000 to get started with, you can still take a more traditional approach and open an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) or a Roth IRA at a discount broker.

It used to be that you couldn’t open a brokerage account unless you had $10,000 to $25,000 to invest. Those days are long gone. With the proliferation of online discount brokers like Scottrade, Trade Monster and Zecco, you have access to an incredible amount of investing tools and trading platforms.

Of course, if you put your money into an index fund, you won’t need all of these tools. But if you plan on being more aggressive with your little nest egg, you will have everything you need to analyze company fundamentals, stock charts and trade flow, right at your fingertips.

Article Provided by Learning Markets.

Learning Markets offers daily articles, videos and investing guides – for free – about everything from investing in stocks and options to trading currencies in the forex market and more.

Written by Cory Doctorow

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O’Brien does a very good job of explaining why I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad — it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn’t be worth much.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries

Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They’re apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It’s part of a multigenerational tradition in my family — my mom’s father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Infantalizing hardware

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Dale Dougherty’s piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard programmer, and it was Hypercard’s gentle and intuitive introduction to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in computers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel

And let’s look at the iStore. For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn’t be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple’s customers can’t take their “iContent” with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can’t sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a string of apologies for Apple’s abusive contractual terms for developers, but the best one was, “Did you think that access to a platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings attached?” I read it in Don Corleone’s voice and it sounded just right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a drawbridge between me and my customers!

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure

I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of “content” isn’t just that they can get it for free, though: it’s that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it rough-hewn, some of it slick as the pros, most of it targetted more narrowly than the old media ever managed. Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We’ll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we’ll hardly notice it, and we’ll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

Just like the gadget press is full of devices that gadget bloggers need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full of stories that affirm the internal media consensus. Yesterday’s empires do something sacred and vital and most of all grown up, and that other adults will eventually come along to move us all away from the kids’ playground that is the wild web, with its amateur content and lack of proprietary channels where exclusive deals can be made. We’ll move back into the walled gardens that best return shareholder value to the investors who haven’t updated their portfolios since before eTrade came online.

But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn’t going to do much to stanch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won’t bring customers back through the door.

Gadgets come and gadgets go

Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

Bonus:  8 Cruel But Completely Justified iPad Wallpaper Pranks

Source: Mark Wilson@Gizmodo

Just because you don’t have/want/like the iPad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with one anyway. Set any of these images as the background on a your friend’s iPad, and watch the chaos ensue when they turn it on.

Peruse a few childish iPad pranks in the gallery below. And to see them all on one screen, go here.

Happy pranking! (If you can do better, and we bet you can, share your best prank wallpapers

update:Flowchart to Determine if You Should Buy an Ipad

The Ipad came out on Saturday, and if you weren’t one of the 3 million people standing in line at the Apple store to get one already, then you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether you should be buying an Ipad, too. Luckily, we’ve created this flowchart to help you determine if you should buy an Ipad:

source

Written by Kawsar Ali

Chrome is the newest child added to the constantly feuding web browser family. Although Google Chrome is comparatively new, it has been producing some major buzz around web for its performance, minimalist interface, and usability.

Another useful side of Chrome is the extensions that give the user added functionality for common web browsing tasks. Many of these Chrome extensions can help you increase your productivity and enable you to perform your jobs easier and faster.

Note: Since Google Chrome for Mac OS systems is still in beta, some extensions might not work properly. However, we have tested all of the extensions in brief, and we can confirm that they function.

1. Pixlr Grabber

Taking screenshots and then sharing them is a big process. You copy the screen grab into your clipboard, open a graphics editor and save it into a web format. Then you have to upload it to a web service so that you can share it publicly. Behold Pixlr Grabber, an extension that allows you to take screenshots in Google Chrome and automatically upload it to imm.io, an image sharing service. You can take parts of the visible screen, select only parts of it, or grab the entire web page.

2. Copy Without Formatting

What do you normally do when you just want to copy some plain text without any formatting (font, color, images) from your browser to an office or email software? Copy the text, paste it into a text editor like Notepad, and then copy and paste it again into the destination? Don’t worry, you’re not alone—even the productivity bloggers at Lifehacker have this problem. With the Copy Without Formatting Chrome extension, you can easily and directly copy unformatted text from Chrome and paste it anywhere, allowing you to cut out the middleman and streamline this task.

3. Evernote Web Clipper

Do you often find something cool on the web but forget to bookmark it? And when you need the web page, do you end up spending a lot of time trying to find it again? We all do. The Evernote Web Clipper Chrome extension saves the content of your clipboard along with a link back to the original page quickly and painlessly. You can store text, images, and links into your free Evernote account so that you have ready access to them anytime and anywhere (with an Internet connection).

4. Symtica

If you find yourself using many Google web applications (seriously, nowadays, who isn’t?) and you want a quicker way to access and use them, use the Symtica Google Chrome extension. This Chrome extension can watch out for new emails, create new Google Docs documents, access your contacts list, manage your Gmail task lists, read your RSS feeds, and more.

5. Image Search

Finding images on the web can be a drag. If you’re in need of some serious web scouring to find that perfect LOLcat photo to use in your next killer PowerPoint presentation, check out Image Search, the ultimate image search Chrome extension that searches websites such as Flickr, Picasa, Zooomr, and Photobucket. There are loads of options for customizing your search options by size, type and more, saving you a fair bit of time.

6. AdBlock

This Google Chrome extension blocks any kind pop-ups and ads, enabling you to focus on the information that you are trying to obtain. Using AdBlock can improve your productivity because it can lower web page response times as well as avert you from being distracted by advertisements and pop-ups that can get you on a tangent. But do allow the sites you love to display ads because ad-blocking can affect them dearly.

7. goo.gl URL Shortener

If you are constantly sharing web pages, goo.gl URL Shortener is a must-have one-click URL shortener that makes it a snap to share links and useful resources on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The short URL is also automatically copied to your clipboard, drastically shortening this process compared to the conventional method of URL shortening. The extension utilizes Google’s own URL shortening service.

8. Web2PDFConverter

Converting a web page to a sharable PDF file is a long and arduous job. Well, not so if you use Web2PDFConverter, a Google Chrome extension that lets you create PDF files from within your web browser. The extension even allows you to preview how the PDF document looks through Google Docs, saving you even more time in having to open Adobe Acrobat (or the desktop counterpart that you are currently using) to check your work.

9. Shareaholic for Google Chrome

Are you a social media junkie? If you are, you know that this addiction can be a ruthless time drain and can place a huge damper on your otherwise productive day. Making social media sharing easier, faster, and more convenient is always a good thing. Shareaholic for Google Chrome is an extension that will convert the current web page you’re on into a short URL and allow you to share it with your friends across many social media sites.

10. Split Screen

As this Chrome extension’s name implies, Split Screen enables you to split your browser’s viewport. Not only can it reduce the number of tabs that you have open (and thus, make it easier to find the web page you need), it also enables you to effortlessly compare and contrast several web pages at the same time. It is perfect for people that are studying and cross-referencing information.

What Google Chrome extensions do you use? If we have missed any useful extensions, share it with us in the comments.