MoneySmart

Consumers hate price increases, but what is a company to do when material costs skyrocket? One answer: Think small. Professor John Gourville considers the alternative in this Q&A.

When product companies see the cost of materials rise, the result for consumers is often a price increase (gasoline) or, less often, a smaller amount of product at the same price (potato chips).

Which option is more likely to turn off your customers? For many products, it's better to reduce quantity than raise prices, conclude Harvard Business School marketing professor John Gourville and University of Texas professor Jonathan Koehler. They recently published their findings in a working paper, "Downsizing Price Increases: A Greater Sensitivity to Price than Quantity in Consumer Markets."

Gourville discusses the price-versus-quantity dilemma more..

PeopleSoft on Wednesday released a handful of new products and certifications, introducing new applications for small businesses and integration tools designed for "power users."

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company's latest package of applications for small businesses, which it defines as companies with annual revenue of between $20 million and $100 million, features scaled-down versions of all its flagship enterprise applications. These incude tools for automating operations such as financials, distribution, manufacturing, human resources and project management. The package is dubbed PeopleSoft World Express. more..

The Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates by one-quarter point to 1.25 percent Wednesday, marking the first time it has hiked the overnight interest rate in four years.

The increase was largely expected, given previous comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who has indicated that inflationary pressures were not expected to be a problem. The interest-rate hike is intended to keep inflation at bay and prevent the economy from overheating. more..

PC-TVs set to take off!

Watching TV on a PC could become big business, according to a new report from research company In-Stat/MDR. Sales of terrestrial set-top boxes and TV tuners that let a PC double as a television set could hit $3.8 billion in 2008, the company said Monday. The market for PC-TV tuners will see a technological change too, moving from add-in cards to built-in tuners in devices such as PCs, the report's authors said. PC manufacturers and chipmakers will lead this change, paving the way for both analog and digital television reception via the motherboards of computers, In-Stat/MDR said.

The market is expected to evolve to include an expanded range of devices, researchers said. The term "E-PC," or entertainment PC, will come to cover home computers with multiple PC-TV tuners or with different types of tune--analog, digital, cable TV and satellite. These machines could also have massive disk storage, DVD-recording capabilities, high-definition video outputs and recording, surround-sound audio outputs, home-networking features and external networking over broadband connections.

Computer makers are preparing to launch entertainment PCs designed to cater to all the digital-entertainment needs of consumers. These PCs act as home stereos and DVD players, record TV programs and display slide shows on a TV set, for example--all operated with a click of a remote.

eBay is to buy one of India's leading online auction sites as part of a continued expansion across Asia. The US firm is paying £27m for Baazee.com, a Bombay business with over one million registered users.

Baazee, like eBay, allows users to buy and sell goods online such as computers, jewellery, music and books. The deal will give eBay access to one of the world's most currently underdeveloped e-commerce markets but one with huge growth potential. Internet usage in India is relatively low and is largely restricted to urban areas. However, user numbers are forecast to rise rapidly over the next two years from their current level of 17 million to 30 million. eBay has been steadily expanding across Asia.

Last year it paid £88m to acquire EachNet, the most popular online auction site in China. eBays current Asian Markets include South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. more..

NetSuite has expanded its combined CRM and ERP application suite so that small companies can provide their customers with a rich e-commerce experience.

Small companies can now automatically provide customers with rich online sales information that was previously only viable for large enterprises, according to application service provider NetSuite. more..

Hotmail is boosting the amount of storage space for users of both its free and paid e-mail service.
From July the basic Hotmail allowance will be boosted to 250MB and paying customers will get two gigabytes.

The move is widely seen as a response to Google's GMail service which gives all users a gigabyte of storage to keep all their messages.

With the announcement, Hotmail becomes one of a growing pool of e-mail firms offering users huge amounts of storage. more..

For a decade, "surfing" has come to mean browsing the net rather than riding ocean waves on a plank. But a surfboard has now been developed that lets surfers surf while surfing. The prototype board has been built by Devon "shaper" Jools Matthews.

It houses a laptop, solar panels, and video camera, and is to launch at the Intel GoldCoast Oceanfest on 18 June.

The world's first wi-fi board uses a high-speed net connection point - hotspot - positioned on the beach. more..

EarthLink and Webroot Software released a report Wednesday, revealing nearly one of every three computers scanned in April for Trojan horses or system monitor spyware was infected.

Internet access provider EarthLink and security software maker Webroot scanned nearly 421,000 computers for their April SpyAudit Report. Trojan horses and system monitors accounted for 133,715 pieces of the spyware found on those computers--representing almost one in three machines.

System monitors track users' computer activity, capturing virtually everything they do online. Trojan horses appear as software programs a user has requested, but instead these applications aid hackers in stealing computer data. That information is then used to gain unrestricted access to users' computers while they are online.

"Consumers should be aware of the applications and files residing and running on their machines," Matt Cobb, Earthlink's core applications vice president, said in a statement. "While certain types of spyware are malicious, other programs can be used to improve their Internet experience."

Security experts note the damage from Trojan horses or system monitors can sometimes be more severe than adware and adware cookies typically found on PCs.

When adding all four types of spyware found on the scanned computers during April, the SpyAudit Report found 11.3 million instances of spyware on the computers. That averaged 26.9 pieces of spyware per machine.

In March, 237,200 PCs were scanned, with 7.1 million pieces of spyware found on the computers. That averaged 30 pieces of spyware per PC, according to the report.

See how many "SpyWare" infections your PC has! FREE spyware scanning of your computer here

There are now so many schools churning out graduates, but demand for MBAs has stayed constant or fallen. Naturally, then, the laws of supply and demand come into play. Even more significant, it seems that most of what people learn in B-schools can now be learned just as well, if not better, in other settings. Consider: The supercompetitive job market of the late '90s led top consulting firms like McKinsey and Booz Allen to hire people who lacked MBAs. Those folks (most of whom had only undergraduate liberal arts degrees) got, on average, three weeks of on-the-job training—after which, according to extensive research by the firms themselves, they did their jobs just as well as or even better than their MBA peers.
Read the full article here..

When Thomas Stanley's and William Danko's book The Millionaire Next Door was published eight years ago, people were shocked. Shocked! Millionaires who bought used cars, lived in modest homes, and stuck to budgets? Now Stanley is back with a new tome about how the other half—the female millionaire—lives. And Millionaire Women Next Door shows that rich women are even thriftier than their male counterparts. more..

Click here to check other become a millionaire books.

Slowly but surely the mutual fund masses from Main Street are mixing with the hedge fund set on Wall Street.

Hedge funds were once reserved for well-heeled investors looking for alternative investments wherein they could safely pass on their wealth to the next generation. Staggeringly high minimum requirements and exotic-sounding investment strategies kept the average retail investor on the outside looking in.

That's changed over the past few years. The mutual fund industry has gradually been rolling out new offerings that use sophisticated hedge fund strategies, but are tailored to meet the needs of the growing number of savvy retail investors. more..

Policy makers in Britain often like to look to Australia for inspiration for new wheezes on welfare payments, public pension provision and so on.

The Australians have a similar economy to Britain's, the argument goes, so innovative policies that work there may be transferable to here. There is one aspect of its economy that the Treasury, for one, would like to ignore, and that is the housing market. more..