FOX Translator
No data currently available.
No data currently available.
Whether you're walking a tightrope or scribbling in your checkbook, balance is a good thing. And, one of the best ways to evaluate a company is to glance at its balance sheet to see what it owns with what it owes.
The balance sheet is a paragon of simplicity and is made up of three components: assets (the stuff it owns), liabilities (the money it owes), and shareholders' equity (the company's value to its shareholders).
Assets take two forms: short-term (or current) assets and long-term assets. Under short-term, there¿s good ol' hard cash. Then, there¿s something called "cash equivalents," which are assets like short-term bonds that can be sold so quickly, they might as well be cash. There you factor in inventory, which (if you're a reasonably competent business owner) you can sell to customers in return for--you guessed it--cash. (The raw materials a company owns to make that inventory also falls under this category.)
Long-term assets are things that are harder to convert into cash. (Think real estate and equipment.) Long-term assets depreciate, meaning they lose some value over time. Also under the long-term category are what's called intangible assets: things like patents and brands, that are important, but hard to quantify. Accountants earn their stripes figuring out the real overall value of these assets.
Once you know your assets, it's time for liabilities. As with assets, liabilities are separated into short-term or current, and long-term. Current liabilities are what a company owes in that year: Things like payments to employees or accounts payable to suppliers. Long-term liabilities are debts paid over several years.
Shareholders' equity is determined by subtracting the liabilities from the assets. That number represents the value of the company after all its bills are paid.
Obviously, investors should pay close attention to balance sheets. Spikes in the amount of debt carried, or a reduction in shareholders' equity, are usually red flags.
Home
Monday, May 05, 2008
Scribd Wants to Find Out Who Has The Most Interesting Hard Drive
Comtex
SAN FRANCISCO, May 5, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX News Network/ ----Scribd, the online document publishing and sharing site, began a quest today to find the most interesting new unpublished content out there. Scribd's "Most Interesting Hard Drive" contest will tap its nearly 20 million monthly unique visitors, and is offering great prizes, such as a MacBook Air to the first place winner.
Everyone has hundreds if not thousands of documents sitting on their hard drives, and Scribd's mission is to unlock this information by making it really easy for anyone to publish it online. This contest turns this mission into a game, and judges whose hard drive is the "most interesting" by keeping track of whose content accumulates the most total views in a specified period of time.
Users can upload all kinds of content, such as old school work from high school or college, business and legal documents sitting on their hard drives, cool out-of-copyright texts that have been collected over the years, funny and entertaining content, and any other quality documents that Scribd's community will appreciate. Most of the viewers of content will come from search engines like Google, but users can also promote their own work by submitting it to Digg or embedding it in their blog.
"Scribd's success has been driven by and depends on the contributions of our users," said Trip Adler, CEO and Co-founder of Scribd. "We decided to run this contest for two reasons -- we want to encourage our community to continue uploading great content and we also want to reward our users for the tremendous library of documents they've helped us build."
To enter the contest, users must upload new and original documents that they have rights to distribute, and start by signing up at http://www.scribd.com/contest. Once the documents are up on the site, Scribd will track the number of page views each document receives and award prizes to the three contestants whose material garners the most views.
The grand prize winner will receive a MacBook Air. The second place finisher will win a Kindle from Amazon. Finally, the third place winner will receive an Apple iPod Nano.
Scribd's rapidly-growing community of readers and publishers attracts more than 17 million visitors monthly. Scribd users publish all kinds of content, ranging from school work and eBooks to creative writing and slideshows. In less than a year since its launch, the Scribd web site has grown to hold the largest collection of user-generated text on the Internet, with more than 14 billion words.
For more information on the contest or to learn more about Scribd, please visit http://www.scribd.com/contest.
About Scribd
Scribd is the leader in online document sharing and publishing. It was founded in 2006 by then-Harvard students Trip Adler and Jared Friedman, and their friend Tikhon Bernstam, when they couldn't find a way to publish the documents they wrote for school on the Web. Scribd has since grown to service over 17 million unique visitors per month and has the largest document-sharing community on the Internet. Documents hosted on the site are being viewed and embedded across the Internet in every corner of the globe. Scribd is funded by Y Combinator, The Kinsey Hills Group and Redpoint Ventures. For more information about Scribd, visit http://www.scribd.com.
SOURCE Scribd
http://www.scribd.com
Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved
Market Snapshot
| Symbol | Last Price | Netchange | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
