miércoles, 20 de agosto de 2008

EBay Is Planning to Emphasize Fixed-Price Sales Format Over Its Auction Model

SAN FRANCISCO — Acknowledging that most online shoppers cannot be bothered with auctions, eBay plans Wednesday to announce changes to its fee structure that emphasize fixed prices over bidding. The move is intended to help eBay compete more effectively with Amazon .com and other big online retailers.

The announcement, timed to increase sales during the holiday shopping season, is just one of the changes eBay has made in the last few months aimed at reducing its dependence on its auction business, which is growing more slowly than fixed-price sales. It provides yet more evidence that consumers are losing interest in auctions now that online shopping sites have become more affordable and easier to use.

“Buying online has changed,” said Scot Wingo, chief executive of the market research firm ChannelAdvisor. “Retail sites no longer make customers choose between convenience and price.”

Lower upfront fees will enable sellers to offer a bigger selection, helping eBay better compete with fixed-price retailers, Mr. Wingo said. “The current system puts eBay at a disadvantage.”

Among the changes being announced Wednesday is a new pricing plan for sellers who offer fixed-price items in eBay’s “Buy It Now” format. Starting in mid-September, sellers will pay only 35 cents to list an item for 30 days, a reduction of about 70 percent in upfront fees. EBay also announced that it would no longer allow most customers to pay by check or cash, a change aimed at curbing fraud. Users will need to pay with a credit card or through eBay’s PayPal online payment service.

John Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, has vowed to make eBay a better place for buyers and return the company to more solid growth. Last month eBay said that gross merchandise volume, the sum of all transactions on the eBay marketplace, grew only 8 percent in its most recent quarter, a sharp reduction from the double-digit growth of previous quarters. While revenue was up 20 percent to $2.2 billion, the rise was fueled mostly by growth in advertising, global classifieds and PayPal.

The company’s auctions business generated 57 percent of the company’s revenue in the most recent quarter, but growth has slowed.

“Clearly there’s a strong buyer preference for fixed price,” said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplace, which includes the eBay site.

Rhonda Shrader, who sells women’s clothing on eBay from her home in South San Francisco, said she had already moved most of her sales to a fixed-price format. She was pleased that eBay was reducing the fees sellers pay to list items. That way, she said, she could offer a bigger selection. Most of her customers are professional women who know exactly what they need and are looking for a reliable, convenient source, she said.

These days, Ms. Shrader says, only about 10 percent of her sales are from auctions. “I think the auction was a novelty at the beginning, but now people want what they want, when they want it,” she said.

The new approach is likely to win praise from many sellers who prefer the lower upfront costs, but will certainly anger many of eBay’s longtime customers, most of them small-time collectors who depend on auction pricing to move one-of-a-kind inventory. Others simply think that many of the changes Mr. Donahoe has pushed through unfairly favor larger sellers.

“The previous management tried to fight it,” Mr. Wingo said, referring to the growing preference for fixed pricing. “This management is more willing to ride along with it.”

Last month, the company announced a deal with the e-commerce site Buy.com that allowed it to sell its items on eBay without paying the same fees charged to smaller sellers. That deal provoked accusations of betrayal from many of eBay’s loyal independent sellers. Some sellers who are frustrated with the changes have organized boycotts, and some even tried to disrupt eBay Live, a company event for top sellers that was held in June.

Yet even as it shifts away from the model that made it unique in the first place, the company insists the auction model is still viable, and that it intends to offer sellers and buyers a choice of formats. Auctions are often a better approach for sellers when items are in high demand, the company says, or when the seller is uncertain of an item’s value.

“We love the auction model,” Ms. Norrington said. “It’s still a great model for certain types of sales.”

Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — If anyone knows how best to survive a corporate near-death experience, it is Jon Rubinstein.

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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Ed Colligan, left, Palm’s chief executive, and Jon Rubinstein, the executive chairman, who was hired to revive the company.

In 1997 the former Hewlett-Packard engineer was asked by Apple’s founder, Steven P. Jobs, to lead the hardware engineering division at the company, which was then struggling. Apple was wallowing in financial losses and the Mac’s appeal was waning. Mr. Rubinstein agreed, and over the next nine years he and his team of engineers breathed new life into the company by helping develop the iMac and the iPod.

Those experiences should serve him well as he seeks to resuscitate Palm, whose roots in Silicon Valley go back to the PalmPilot, the revolutionary handheld computer, and the Treo, which turned heads as one of the first smartphones.

In recent years Palm lost its way. Its share of the smartphone market has been halved to about 16.9 percent over the last two years. First, Research in Motion found the sweet spot of business users with its BlackBerry. More recently, Apple grabbed consumers’ fancy with the iPhone.

Palm has tried to innovate beyond the five-year-old Treo with little effect. It announced with great fanfare last year that it would build the Foleo, a cross between a smartphone and notebook computer, only to cancel the project three months later. While cellphone makers like Samsung, LG and R.I.M. brought out products to compete with the iPhone, Palm has told Treo loyalists and investors to be patient. They will need to be. Palm’s stock price is down 90 percent since its high in March 2000.

Mr. Rubinstein, the executive chairman, said he is convinced he can bring Palm back. “Everyone is trying to make an iPhone killer,” he said. “We are trying to make a killer Palm product.”

Roger McNamee, a partner in the venture capital firm Elevation Partners, brought Mr. Rubinstein into the company in June 2007 as part of Elevation’s deal to invest $325 million in Palm. (Elevation now owns a 25 percent stake.) Mr. McNamee gave him a mission: shore up product design and software. Mr. Rubinstein scrapped existing product plans. He has been recruiting top executives from Apple and Microsoft. And he is focused on redesigning Palm’s out-of-fashion operating system.

On Wednesday, he and Ed Colligan, Palm’s chief executive, will announce the debut of a new smartphone primarily for business customers — the Treo Pro.

Slimmer and more elegant than current models, the new Treo will not solve Palm’s troubles, but its larger keyboard and screen that is flush with the phone’s chassis make it more user-friendly than Palm’s old calculator-like design.

The real test of the new team’s leadership will come in the first half of next year. That is when Palm plans to announce a next generation of software — and a new device — which it hopes will make it easier for consumers to surf the Web and network with friends and colleagues.

Wall Street remains skeptical. “It’s a binary outcome; it can go one way or another,” said Jonathan Goldberg, a senior analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities in San Francisco. “They already have an aging product. If these new devices are great, the stock price will go up. If they are late, it will go lower.”

Mr. Rubinstein is putting the onus on Palm’s employees to revolutionize the company from within. “I’m not going to save this company,” he said in an interview at Palm’s offices. “They are going to save the company.”

Stephane Maes, vice president of smartphone product marketing, likes to tell a story about his first meeting with Mr. Rubinstein. It was July 2007 and he and a team from Palm were summoned to Mr. Rubinstein’s beachside home outside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to discuss coming products.

Mr. Maes had loaded his backpack with about 30 different devices to show Mr. Rubinstein. And for three days, Mr. Maes said, Mr. Rubinstein questioned the team on the devices. After listening to their explanations, Mr. Rubinstein canceled several Treos in development. It was a tough session because Mr. Rubinstein thought there were too many products. He demanded design changes in phones only months from release.

One was the Centro. He saw some hope for the device, which Palm was readying for a fall 2007 debut. But the Palm engineers had not got that quite right either. Mr. Rubinstein dispatched a team of executives to Taiwan and China to oversee production more closely. He made them redesign the battery panel on the back so it didn’t squeak. And he asked for fixes to the software so it would lock up less frequently.

One thing he wanted to fix was the fit of the phone’s plastic pieces. When he went around the room and asked who was in charge of that, no one spoke up. Mr. Rubinstein did not relent. “I asked until I found out,” Mr. Rubinstein recalled saying. “Then I said, ‘O.K., what do we have to do to get it done?’ ”

“In the past that might have slipped by,” said Brodie C. Keast, a senior vice president for marketing at Palm.

To ensure accountability, Mr. Rubinstein has regular status reviews where each product is pored over and discussed.

Even the Treo Pro’s packaging was modernized. It looks surprisingly (or maybe not so) like the jewel-box-size package Apple used for the iPhon

Obama’s Ads in Key States Go on Attack

Obama’s Ads in Key States Go on Attack

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Senator Barack Obama arrived Tuesday at the Sheraton hotel in Raleigh, N.C., creating a camera-worthy moment for onlookers.

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Published: August 19, 2008

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama has started a sustained and hard-hitting advertising campaign against Senator John McCain in states that will be vital this fall, painting Mr. McCain in a series of commercials as disconnected from the economic struggles of the middle class.

Mr. Obama has begun the drive with little fanfare, often eschewing the modern campaign technique of unveiling new spots for the news media before they run in an effort to win added (free) attention. Mr. Obama, whose candidacy has been built in part on a promise to transcend traditional politics, is running the negative commercials on local stations even as he runs generally positive spots nationally, during prime-time coverage of the Olympics.

The negative spots reflect the sharper tone Mr. Obama has struck in recent days on the stump as he heads into his party’s nominating convention in Denver next week, and seem to address the anxiety among some Democrats that Mr. Obama has not answered a volley of attacks by Mr. McCain with enough force.

“If you can go quietly negative, that’s what he’s done; I think the perception is that he’s still running the positive campaign,” said Evan Tracey, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media Intelligence, which monitors political advertising. “It’s a pretty smart, high-low, good cop/bad cop strategy.”

In Philadelphia; East Lansing, Mich.; Green Bay, Wis.; and at least five other major cities, Mr. Obama is heavily showing an advertisement contrasting a statement by Mr. McCain that “we have had a pretty good, prosperous time with low unemployment,” with appearances by people making statements like, “The prices of gas are up; the prices of milk are up.”

Mr. McCain’s statement was from a debate in January, before the economy took several turns for the worse, and did not include the senator’s acknowledgment of “a rough patch.” Mr. McCain has since run an advertisement going so far as to say, “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.”

In Des Moines; Tampa, Fla.; Paducah, Ky., and at least 10 other cities, Mr. Obama is running a spot for a mock book, “Economics” by John McCain: “Support George Bush 95 percent of the time; keep spending $10 billion a month for the war in Iraq.”

On Sunday alone, Mr. Obama’s campaign spent nearly $400,000 to run those two spots more than 600 times, accounting for roughly two thirds of the commercials he ran that day, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Nearly 85 percent of Mr. McCain’s 650 spots that day featured attacks against Mr. Obama, according to the service, which reports that Mr. Obama has spent $48 million on advertisements in the last two months and that Mr. McCain has spent $34 million, with the Republican National Committee spending another $3 million.

Until recently Mr. Obama had primarily run positive commercials promoting his vision, and his latest offensive is his first major volley of spots against Mr. McCain that was not in response to an attack from him or the Republican Party.

All told, Mr. Obama’s campaign has released at least six television commercials and two radio spots against Mr. McCain in the past two weeks, all of them with an overwhelmingly economic message and some tailored to issues in specific states.

The strategy is in keeping with predictions from strategists in both parties this summer that Mr. Obama would eventually press his financial advantage over Mr. McCain by running a more positive set of commercials on national broadcast television and a concurrent, harder-hitting set of spots in the states.

“It’s ‘game on, the money’s in the bank, we’re going to have a huge financial advantage, let the McCain campaign chase us around the country, if they can find us,’ ” said Steve McMahon, a Democratic advertising strategist.

Mr. Obama has complemented his advertising this week with a newly aggressive tone on the stump. Campaigning in California and Florida in the last few days, he has criticized Mr. McCain as challenging his patriotism, for saying Iraqis would greet Americans as “liberators” in 2003, and as embracing a negative brand of politics in general.

But Mr. Obama’s advertising has increasingly included spots that, like those from Mr. McCain, have been called negative and misleading by independent media analysts like FactCheck.org, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Until last week, the organization had mostly focused on misleading claims by Mr. McCain. He has consistently misrepresented the particulars of Mr. Obama’s tax and energy policies, claiming, for instance, that he will raise taxes on families making $42,000 a year — a nonbinding resolution he voted for would amount to a $15 increase on individuals with such income — and that Mr. Obama opposes nuclear energy (he does not).

jueves, 14 de agosto de 2008

Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software

Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software

The federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.

Advertising
Woman to Woman, Online

The rapid growth in advertising and traffic to Web sites aimed primarily at women has attracted the attention of major media companies.

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AT&T Mulls Watching You Surf

In a letter to a congressional committee, AT&T defends the practice of monitoring Internet customers in order to target advertising. (It doesn’t do that yet, but it is considering doing so.)

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Samsung Puts a Little Corn Into Its Cellphones

The E200 Eco is the third phone Samsung has introduced this year with parts made from bioplastics — materials extracted from corn.

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EBay in Talks to Buy Share of Korean Auction Site GMarket

EBay is set to gobble up a large chunk of the Korean auction site and Internet retailer Gmarket.

Bits
Is NBC's Tight Leash on Olympics Webcasts a Mistake?

NBC is Webcasting much of the Olympics except for the most popular events. But new research by the network hints that its fear that Webcasting could reduce its television audience may be unfounded.

Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks

Weeks before physical bombs fell on Georgia, a security researcher was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Bits
Best Buy's Break-Even iPhone Deal

Best Buy will soon start selling Apple’s iPhone, but one analyst said it may not make any profit on the phones themselves and will have to earn money from accessories.

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Google Now Allows You to Pick Your Friends in Reader

Responding to Web critics, Google has modified its Reader service to allow users to choose the people who have access to their list of favorite blog items.

TV Networks Rewrite the Definition of a News Bureau

CNN, which will assign to 10 cities journalists who will borrow office space and use laptops, is hardly alone in its approach.

Video Game Review
Thrusts, Feints and Slashes, via Controller

Soul Calibur IV offers some of the most kinetic, balletic, gorgeously rendered over-the-top fighting experience on the market today.

Advertising
A Film on the Trucking Life Also Promotes a Big Rig

A documentary film about truck drivers is being underwritten by a division of the Navistar International Corporation to help promote a new long-haul truck.

Russia Backs Separatists in Challenge to Bush Demands

Russia Backs Separatists in Challenge to Bush Demands

President Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia would protect the enclaves, defying President Bush as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed to the region.


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Inflation Hits Annual Pace Not Seen Since 1991

Consumer prices were 5.6 percent higher in July than a year ago, all but assuring that the Fed will keep interest rates on hold.


More Economic News
In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

Census Bureau projections show that changes in racial distribution are occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

Insurgency’s Scars Line Main Afghan Road
Moises Saman for The New York Times
Insurgency’s Scars Line Main Afghan Road

A highway that was once the showpiece of the American reconstruction effort is now a dangerous gantlet.

2008 Beijing Olympics
Blake Ends Federer’s Bid for Olympic Medal

With the sort of lackluster performance that was once unthinkable for him, Roger Federer was eliminated.

A ‘Relaxing’ Ride Not for the Faint of Heart

PhotoAn Olympian on a rented bike does battle on the streets of Beijing.

2008 Summer Olympics Special Section »
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miércoles, 13 de agosto de 2008

Georgia Says Russian Troops Still Fighting Despite Accord

Georgia Says Russian Troops Still Fighting Despite Accord

An agreement was reached on Wednesday on a framework to end the war, but President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia said later that Russian tanks were still on the attack.

Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks

Weeks before physical bombs fell on Georgia, a security researcher was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands

Complaints of inadequate care have drawn scrutiny to the network of jails where the government holds people while deciding whether to deport them.

Book on Obama Hopes to Repeat Anti-Kerry Feat

A conservative gadfly who attacked John Kerry’s war record has released a book painting Barack Obama as a stealth radical liberal.

On the Blogs

Russian military convoy heads deeper into Georgia

Russian military convoy heads deeper into Georgia

An Associated Press reporter has seen a convoy of several dozen Russian military trucks and armored vehicles heading out of a key city deeper into Georgia. Audio Available Video Available

U.S. MILITARY

CANDACE WEST/MIAMI HERALD STAFF


Love is a battlefield

For military couples, overseas wartime duty can make the vow more like 'until death or deployment do us part.'

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lunes, 11 de agosto de 2008

Business News

Business News

Oil rises on Russia-Georgia conflict

A civil defence worker stands next to a damaged house at the site of a suicide car bomb attack in the coastal town of Zemmouri el Bahri, 45km (28 miles) east of the Algerian capital Algiers August 10, 2008. A suicide car bomb attack on security forces killed at least six civilians east of Algiers late on Saturday, the second such blast this month, authorities in OPEC member Algeria said on Sunday.  REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra  (ALGERIA)
Enlarge Photo
Reuters
AP - 1 hour, 18 minutes ago

VIENNA, Austria - Oil prices rebounded Monday on concerns a widening conflict between Russia and Georgia over a the breakaway province of South Ossetia could disrupt supplies in the region.

Economy News

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Stock Markets News

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  • Traders work works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 8, 2008. (Joshua Lott/Reuters)
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