transactions

Wall Street's under attack. Riots are erupting. And in startup land, the good news keeps on coming.

SecondMarket, a market for stocks in private companies, today reported its best third quarter to date, with $167 million in private stock transactions.

Year-to-date, SecondMarket, has completed $435 million in transactions, a 75 percent jump compared with last year.

The chart above shows completed transactions by industry. Consumer Web and social media dominated with 62 percent of the transactions. The newest category of transactions, financial services companies, represented nearly a quarter of transactions. Retailing and commerce had more than 11 percent.

SecondMarket … Read more

USB money...now that's what we call a peripheral! While USBMoney is free software, not free money, using this personal finance manager might make you think you're finding free money if it helps you keep more of what you earn. USBMoney is a portable personal finance manager that is designed to keep all your financial details in one place, such as a USB drive, memory chip, or other devices or media. Since it's completely portable, it can run on any Windows machine. It imports and exports data as CSV/QIF files, so it's completely compatible with … Read more

We've reviewed quite a few inventory management systems, and most of them are complex programs that have numerous features. After all, inventory management is no simple task, and any piece of software that's designed to handle it has to be pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately, Stocks Inventory 2 does not fit the bill. This bare-bones program doesn't even begin to offer the features typical of software in this genre.

The program's interface is plain and not too terribly difficult to figure out, but that's largely a function of the fact that there aren't that many features. … Read more

Phishing attacks are on the rise: the Anti-Phishing Work Group's April 2011 Global Phishing Survey (pdf) reports 67,677 phishing attempts in the second half of 2010, up from 48,244 in the first half of 2010, but down significantly from the 126,697 attacks recorded in the year-earlier period due to the Avalanche botnet.

Phishing attempts lasted an average of 73 hours in the last six months of 2010, up from 58 hours on average in the first half of the year, and from just under 32 hours in the second half of 2009.

When it comes to … Read more

iBank is a full-featured financial management app that can help you track bank and credit card accounts, keep an eye on your investment portfolio, generate a variety of reports, and help with budgeting and planning.

iBank's interface has a very Mac-like feel: a toolbar sits over two panes, one for sources on the left and one for a transaction register on the right. Unlike the previous version of iBank, transaction editing happens right in the register view, with drop-down tools for categories, splits, and memos, and you can perform calculations when entering amounts. The right pane is also where … Read more

POS stands for point of sale, but small-business owners who have struggled to implement PC-based POS systems sometimes use a more colorful phrase. Retail Man POS from Ezisolutions aims to answer the many shortcomings of other POS suites, chief among them the confusion they cause in the owner who sets them up and the employees who use them. Retail Main POS features descriptive icon images and pop-up labels that help clarify just what each icon does, be it sales, inventory, payments, or contacts. It's a full-featured POS system, too, with invoices, inventories, balance sheets, reporting, and even barcode printing.… Read more

There are plenty of free tools available for making budgets and tracking spending habits that are intuitive and attractive. Simple Home Budget Lite is neither. Despite its free price tag, we're not sure why anyone would want to use it.

The program's interface is simple in appearance yet gives little direction on how to get started. The main window contains a calendar and input fields for entering each transaction's date, category, and related notes. Four tabs for managing transactions reside on the right-hand side. We quickly noticed that something was a little off with the interface, though. … Read more

The White House is hoping to come up with a comprehensive strategy to better protect people in cyberspace and is asking the public for help.

Releasing a draft of the potential new National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (PDF) last Friday, the government is aiming to set up a system that would let people voluntarily create trusted identities to use in online transactions.

The goal, as described in a blog post by White House cybersecurity chief Howard Schmidt, is to secure and protect transactions in cyberspace through use of a special ID--a smart card or digital certificate--that would prove … Read more

Visa, one of the world's largest credit card companies, is taking aim at "scam" marketing practices that were quietly used by some of the Internet's largest retailers in recent years.

Retailers will no longer be able to allow third parties to charge a customer's card without the card owner re-entering credit card information, Visa said Tuesday. This is Visa's response to one of the biggest scandals to rock online retailing in years.

Last year, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation launched an investigation after learning that thousands of consumers had … Read more