Be the Millionaire Next Door

No matter the size of your initial investment, if you put it to work in the common stock of high-quality but low-profile small companies, add to your investments regularly, and stick with the best of them through thick and thin, like so many investment masters throughout time, you too can be a millionaire.

By Tom Gardner and Rich Smith
December 13, 2005

We don't advocate greed at Motley Fool Hidden Gems. But we also know you're not averse to becoming financially independent, and this article will show you a road map to becoming a millionaire.

1 million iFarts

Comm said Apple's decision to allow farting apps has led to more than a million downloads of the 99-cent iFart, allowing it to achieve what Comm calls "flatulence superiority" over the more than 100 other farting apps. He said while Apple shouldn't allow porn, there is a place and a demand for bathroom humor apps.

"We've had bathroom humor since Shakespeare," he said. "It's always funny."

And they're big sellers, often upstaging more serious apps. Oscar Martin, the president of a Miami IT company, said though he's worked hard to make serious iPhone business apps and some entertaining games, his most successful app has been iFlush, which allows you to flush down pictures of things and people you don't like.

"We had high hopes for our first game we developed, but it's not even close to the iFlush application," Martin said.

San Jose still the safest big city in U.S.

FOURTH YEAR IN A ROW

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News

For the fourth year in a row, San Jose is the safest large city in the United States.

There was one of the worst alleged serial molesters in the country and that chili finger case, but San Jose is still safer than Honolulu (No. 3) or Austin (No. 5) or Louisville, KY. (No. 7).

Detroit ranked as the most dangerous city with a population over 500,000, Baltimore, the second most dangerous city and Washington, D.C. was the third most dangerous.

The safest and most dangerous cities lists are compiled by Morgan Quitno Press, a private research company in Lawrence, KS that began ranking cities and metropolitan areas in terms of crime in 1995.

Only one local city, Sunnyvale, made the top 25 of the safest U.S. cities, regardless of size, with a rank of 17 out of 369 cities. Richmond, in Alameda County, ranked the 11th most dangerous out of the 369 cities and Oakland ranked 21st most dangerous.

Researchers looked at six basic crime categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicles and used a formula to determine how a particular city compared to the national average.

Scott Morgan, president of Morgan Quito Press, said perceptions of crime can sometimes be harder to change the crime rate. ``The classic example is New York City,'' Morgan said, noting that Gotham ranks as the fourth safest city with a population of 500,000 or more.

Remote home health monitoring to generate $255M in 2011