With the economy in continuing decline, keeping tight control over your money is no longer just for obsessives. These financial apps for Google Android help you count every penny.

Personal Budget Droid is a simple budget- and bills-tracker that lets you create multiple monthly budgets for groceries, housing costs, and so on. You enter every budget name and transaction by hand, but the app keeps a transaction history and calculates how much you have left for each category.

The more sophisticated FireWallet works with budgets inside various accounts and protects your information behind a four-digit pin you change from the all-zero default. It's a bit trickier to navigate, but also shoehorns in more options. In addition to a more refined interface, FireWallet has graphs and charts to help visualize your spending, and a rudimentary tool to alert you of upcoming bills. Both it and Personal Budget Droid are missing templates and more powerful features to optionally suck in real-time data from your checking, savings, and stock portfolios. Time for a mobile version of Mint?

Flick to either side for a calc that rounds up; up or down gets you a breakdown of numbers to pass around.

(Credit: TouchTip)

TouchTip is our current favorite tip calculator for Google Android. Flick a finger left or right to slide between a simple tip calculator that rounds up to the nearest dollar or ten dollars, and one featuring a ten-digit keypad. Both views use the bill total, tax, and number of diners to calculate your total payment. Flicking up or down produces a breakdown of what you owe that you can pass around the table to friends.

Personal Tip Jar hails from the same developer as Personal Budget Droid, and shares a few visual characteristics, including a useless "news" tab. Yet Tip Jar is a great niche nod to those whose incomes are built substantially on tips. While a fuller budgeting app could easily accommodate gains from tipping, this application provides a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly summary at a glance.

Stock apps on Android are extremely mediocre, but the simply named Stock App is better than other skeletal tickers. This one opens with Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Yahoo, and Google presets. You can add your own by pressing the menu key, and can browse frequently traded stocks. Stock App displays the value and percentage change up front; double-tap an entry to see more stats. While it's functional, Android is sorely missing the completeness of a stock-tracker like Bloomberg for iPhone. Get to it, developers.

Although much is said about the economic conditions in the US, it seems that UK might be even worst off as British media companies could cut tens of thousands of jobs in the coming years due to economic turmoil. According to a Reuters report half of all UK media jobs will become history by 2013:

Claire Enders, founder of independent consultancy group Enders Analysis, told Reuters she expected about half of all UK media jobs to go by 2013 under current economic conditions.

“We calculated the total jobs in the media in the UK at about 400,000, that includes newspapers, radio, TV, production companies, advertising and so on, at the end of 2007.

“Between the beginning of 2008 and 2013 we’re expecting half of those jobs to go. The big employers are the regional press, magazines, local advertising sales. Real numbers are in print.”

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Traffic on various retail sites (Online-stores) took a plunge this Thanksgiving and Black Friday and out of the five hundred sites under survey Walmart remained top visited on Thanksgiving Day while Amazon registered most traffic on Black Friday. The stats provided showed Walmart received 13.72% of U.S visitors while Amazon followed with 9.56% on Thanksgiving Day. There was change on Black Friday as Amazon took the lead with 11.06% of total visitors followed by Walmart with 9.88%. Given the economic downturn and with online shopping seeing a drop, Walmart and Amazon appear to have sailed clear of the storm (for the present at least).

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

Bloomberg: Dell Inc., the world's second-largest personal-computer maker, lost the Black Friday retail battle against Hewlett-Packard Co. in Best Buy Co. stores, Thomas Weisel Partners said in a report.

Customers preferred Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) PCs 5-to-1 over Dell's during the three-day weekend, according to a survey of 35 stores conducted by Doug Reid, an analyst at Thomas Weisel. Best Buy is the largest U.S. electronics retailer.

Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell ditched the company's direct-sales-only model in an attempt to win back the PC sales lead held by Hewlett-Packard for more than two years. He put Dell products in 20,000 stores worldwide, starting with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Best Buy in the U.S.

``Dell has significant work to do,'' New York-based Reid wrote today in the report. ``The only negative comments in our survey with respect to brand were aimed at Dell, with survey respondents noting potential quality issues.''

The survey focused on the U.S. consumer market, which Reid estimated accounts for 13 percent of Dell's revenue. Consumer sales represent about 20 percent of total revenue worldwide.

See Also:
Dell: We Told You Things Were Lousy, And They Are. Look Out Below
Dell Sales Miss By A Billion, Profit Good, No Guidance
Sorry State Of PC Industry Getting Worse

Photo: phil_g

Extra Antivir 2.8 cannot deliver your PC from viruses and comprises viruses itself. This program has been concocted to make money from the air; well-studied though very popular trickery is used by people promoting Extra Antivir. Essential part of this trickery is a trialware. Saying that one needs to remove Extra Antivir experts usually have in mind to remove Extra Antivir trialware.
It does not mean, however, that there is no danger that comes from registered version and it is at least safe to let full version of Extra Antivir run free at your PC. Viruses included into Extra Antivir are just blocked by dll files which user receives after registration of Extra Antivir trialware, but such disabling is usually ineffective as it leads to system freezes and finally disorders hosting computer.
The trailware acts as adware, i.e. in practice it means that Extra Antivir is configured to start each time when user logs on to Windows and asks through scans and alerts to resister this copy as it is necessary to remove the threats exposed by  Extra Antivir. In reality, all so called threats emanate from the strong desire of hackers to possess several bucks from each user while the real challenge to your computer safety and privacy is Extra Antivir. Click here to start scanning computer free of charge and get rid of Extra Antivir.

Extra Antivir Technical Details

• Full name: Extra Antivir 2.8, ExtraAntivir 2.8
• Version: 2,8
• Type: Rogue anti-spyware
• Origin: Russian Federation

Extra Antivir Screenshot (click to enlarge):

Signs of being infected with Extra Antivir:

Extra Antivir, as a rule, starts to run simultaneously with Windows and shows you a pop-up with various active objects; the most important of them are free scan and registration options. It is thus hard to pay no attention to the presence of Extra Antivir when such pop-up is entitled “ExtraAntivir 2.8”. It may happen that pop-up fails to appear due to some circumstances, especially in case of shadowed installation and especially when it was a trojan that serves many malware that in this case installed Extra Antivir, because short version of Extra Antivir might be installed in such a case. If you have not seen any window entitled Extra Antivir, but there have been pop-ups and alerts invoking to resolve all your problems with security by installing certain software from Internet, or if your PC simply behaves in a strange manner, this could also be a reason to remove Extra Antivir; click here to identify malware and viruses at your PC and get rid of Extra Antivir and/or other dangerous residents found.

Automatic Removal of Extra Antivir from your PC:

Extra Antivir is not an orphan as there are RapidAntivirus and related malware items (all fake virus remover), which, speaking metaphorically, gave birth to   ExtraAntivir, still active. They share same trojans and webs-sites with malicious scripts, also may be installed together at one PC. It is hard to predict whether Extra Antivir removal is the only one malware removal operation needed for total system cleanup. When you remove Extra Antivir in automatic mode, there is a warranty that other rogues detected and removed. Follow the link below to get rid of Extra Antivir in a way that provides total system cleanup.

Download Extra Antivir Removal Tool

Manual Removal of Extra Antivir:

Be attentive removing Extra Antivir manually, especially when deleting Registry values. Any mistyping usually results in failure to remove Extra Antivir. Reboot PC before and after Extra Antivir manual removal. The right way to get rid of Extra Antivir would include reboot of operating system to ensure every problem is not active while Extra Antivir removal is in progress.

Remove Extra Antivir files and dll’s

install_511_MHwzNnwxMDAwMDAwMDAwfHx8fHx8fHw_
Extra Antivir.ini
base.dat
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spline.dat

Unregister Extra Antivir registry values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Extra Antivir

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Planning a banquet? Got royals coming to dinner? Or just hosting your daughter’s wedding? TablePlan is the app you had no idea even existed, and turns the nightmare that is making-sure-Aunt-Clara-doesn’t-sit-next-to-any-vegetarians into a delight!

Drag-and-drop re-seating on the fly. Built-in RSVP management. Faster than Excel. (Let’s face it, almost anything on Earth is faster than Excel.) And only 20 bucks.

When I got married, we didn’t bother with a table plan. We just stood up and said: “Sit wherever you like!” It was almost not a total disaster.

Palm places the blame on its "maturing" product line and "unprecedented dynamics in the global markets" given the current economic meltdown. The company vows to reign in costs even further and goes on to detail some of its latest cost-savings initiatives in the accompanying press release.

Guess not all that offline ad money will be moving online.

The bulletpoint-version:

• Pontiac, Saab and Saturn account for 20.7% of GM's total measured-media spending and 16.5% of its sales.
• The three brands together had $286 million in measured spending through August and $400 million for full-year 2007.
• Pontiac -- handled by Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett -- had measured spending of about $90 million through August.
• Saab's agency is Interpublic's McCann Erickson, Birmingham, Mich. According to TNS Media Intelligence, measured spending was $22 million through August.
• Saturn is handled by Interpublics's Deutsch and spent $174 million through August.

See Also:
NBC Still Can't Sell Super Bowl Ads (GE)

CheapenGadget (cheapengadget.com) is a new site from MechaWorks, publisher of PhoneNews.com. It's a blog style "Deal" site that's updated several times a day with the best deals on consumer electronics, computers, mobile phones and accessories both on the web and in stores.

Christopher Price and his team at MechaWorks did a great job of leaking the Black Friday ads of the major retailers days and even weeks ahead of time, now they are doing the same thing for CyberMonday which is tomorrow.

The mobile version of CheapenGadget uses the same template as PhoneNews. It does a decent job of making the site easier to use with most phone browsers.  The front page has summaries of the last 20 posts, a search box and a list of categories. It's 30 KB of text, which is too large to load on some feature phones and takes a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom.  Cutting the number of posts per page in half would make the site easier to use and compatible with more phones.  Individual posts are smaller but watch out for the links to the source of each deal.  They go directly to sites like BestBuy.com, most of which are not mobile friendly.

Ratings: Content:  Usability: 

Mobile Link: cheapengadget.com

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GottaDeal (gottadeal.mobi) is the new mobile edition of GottaDeal.com, a five year old online deal and coupon site. It's similar in concept to CheapenGadget but covers deals on pretty much anything rather than focusing on electronics and gadgets. The mobile version has three tabs:

• Deals, which has headline links to the most recent deals posted on the full site, 20 to a page. The links lead to a mobile formatted detail page describing the deal. Although there are the same number of deals per page as CheapenGadget, the listings are just links and the total page weight is a mobile friendly 9 KB. Like, Cheapengadget,  links to source of each deal tend to point to non mobile pages.

• Coupons, a huge single page list of over 100 coupons offering discounts on online merchandise.

• Forum which links to GottaDeal's very active (over a million posts) vBulletin user forum where members discuss the merits of deals, post tips on using products and suggest alternative sources for bargains.

GottaDeal.com is a useful site, but the mobile edition is less so. It could be much better with a few simple changes:

• The Coupons page is huge,  118 KB.  You will need a full-web or smartphone browser to even open it.  It needs to be paginated like the Deals page.

• Gottadeal.com on the full web has topic areas like Shoes, Jewelry and Cell phones plus a search box to help you find what you are looking for.  The .mobi has none of these, it's just a list of deals and coupons sorted by date added. It's fun to browse for a few minutes but good luck finding anything specific. Navigational aids like search and categories are even more important on the mobile web because scrolling and browsing much slower on a phone than a PC.

• The forum works pretty well in mobile format although some pages are a little on the large side. A bigger issue is that once you drill down into the discussions there is no way to get back to the deals and coupons pages except by pressing "Back" multiple times.  The forum pages need links to the other parts of the site for easy navigation.

Source Mobility.mobi

Ratings: Content:  Usability: 

Mobile Link: gotadeal.mobi

For more sites like these visit the Shopping Category of the WapReview Mobile Web Directory which has 27 more mobile shopping sites including Amazon, Ebay, PriceGrabber, Yahoo Shopping and Overstock.com.

(Credit: 148Apps)

Apple watchers this weekend have been ruminating on the overall tally and on the counting methods following a report on 148Apps, a site that keeps tabs on iPhone applications, seen here in its entirety:

In just 142 days, the iPhone OS app store has added over 10,000 apps! An amazing feat for any platform. To commemorate this we've put up a special page. More on this after the weekend.

10,000 apps!

(We'll hazard a guess that there are actually on the order of 10K mini icons on that "10,000 apps!" special page. A listing to the right side of all those icons gives the total number of apps as 10,091.)

MacRumors.com, meanwhile, quibbles with the overall number, even as it says the actual 10,000 active app mark should be reached "in the next few days":

While several sites have reported that 10,000 iPhone Apps have been released into the App Store, the actual number of active iPhone apps that can be downloaded is about 9,676 as of today's count. The discrepancy comes from the fact that many apps have been removed from the App Store for various reasons (trademark infringement, discontinued apps, pulled and released).

The biggest category of iPhone apps, according to 148Apps, is games (2,333), followed by entertainment (1,122), utilities (1,015), education (737), and productivity (517). The average cost of the apps is listed at $3.12; about one-quarter are free of charge, while one is listed at $899.99.