Despite the gaudy numbers, momentum behind SMS is only beginning to gain steam. Emmet likes to point to surveys that show 80% of American mobile phone users have yet to send their first SMS message.I thought I heard a giggle when he told me.But hold the phone . . .It seems as though Italian researchers are trying to rain on the SMS parade. According to a study from an Italian children's rights organization, about a third of that country's youngsters are "cell phone addicts." One 13-year-old girl was said to have received treatment from an orthopedist - anti-inflammatories, ordered rest - after typing 100 or more SMS missives per day.Irritability and mood swings also were attributed to excessive cell phone use, the researchers found, although how they identified a control group of teens who do not exhibit such traits is beyond me.Moreover, it seems that these researchers might have missed a bright side of overdosing on SMS: All that furious typing is most likely the most exercise many of these teenagers get.
The stroke of midnight on Dec. 31 ushered in more than just another New cheap tiffany pendants for the Sierra Nevada Region. It also marked the transition to the new Power Marketing Plan and operations as a sub-control area in the Sacramento Municipal Utility District Control Area.As the New Year rolled in, numerous SN employees, including staff from Operations, Information Technology and Power Marketing, were frantically working to make sure that systems and business processes were ready to ensure a smooth transition to the new operating environment.
"To carry out the transition to the new marketing and operating cheap tiffany rings, we had to implement 11 new major computer systems," said SN Regional Manager Jim Keselburg. "Each of these would have been a major project on its own. But on top of that, we also had to negotiate a series of new agreements with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and other parties, invent new business processes and systems and install new metering and communications equipment."Finally, to assure that Western would recover its costs, SN staff conducted a public process to implement a new rate design for post-2004 operations," continued Keselburg. "The fact that we were able to do all this simultaneously is a credit to Western staff and others who worked on the transition.
Many people, organizations and customers--too numerous to name--were responsible for the success. "I want to especially thank Kirk Rodgers and his technical staff in the water operations, supervisory control and data acquisition, and power operations group at the Mid-Pacific Region of the Bureau of Reclamation. We met continuously with Reclamation during the past three years as part of this effort, and we would not have successfully cheap tiffany accessories to our new operating environment without them," he said.
Other organizations including SMUD, the Transmission Agency of Northern California, Northern California Power Agency, Bonneville Power Administration and the California Independent System Operator helped in the transition. "Western is especially indebted to the advice and support provided by Jim Feider and Bryan Griess of TANC, Jim Pope and Vicken Kasarjian of NCPA, and Jim Shetler, Eddy Lim, Keith Hartley, Bruce Oliver and Mitzie Gutherie of SMUD," Keselburg added.
Once Western formalized the decision to join SMUD's control area, the ISO graciously assisted Western in implementing the necessary agreements and physical arrangements to ensure the continued reliable operation of the electric transmission system. "I want to especially thank Jim Detmers, Jim McIntosh, Deanne Lyons, Debi Le Vine and many others at the ISO who assisted in our implementation efforts," he said. "BPA's Transmission Business cheap tiffany 1837 staff, especially Vickie Van Zandt and Bart McManus, helped to ensure the continued reliable delivery of power from the Northwest."
As a sub-control area, Western schedules power deliveries for Project Use loads and customers directly tiffany bangles sale to its transmission system, as well as deliveries from and through its sub-control area facilities and the SMUD control area to entities on the ISO-controlled grid. Western's sub-control area duties include matching generation and load, providing reserves and frequency support to meet reliability criteria and submitting generation schedules to the host control area. Western also manages net power flows at the sub-control area interconnection points.
Her company believes its service and $10.99 commission charge offer "the best value in the industry," Ms. Hillyer said. But, she conceded, "pricing is something that we always look at."An analyst who did not want to be named said that "this puts a little more pressure on pricing" but added, "I don't think price drives trading volume." Customers appear to have reacted favorably to Schwab's cuts. They executed 48% more daily revenue trades in December than in June, when the cuts began. In cheap tiffany necklaces December daily revenue trades were up 11% from a year earlier, though down 2% from November.
Schwab's new pricing attitude shows just how much the company has changed. In July, David S. Pottruck was fired as chief executive and the title reclaimed by chairman and founder Mr. Schwab, who was dissatisfied with the direction in which Mr. Pottruck had taken the company.
In the fall Schwab sold its institutional unit, less than a year after expanding it. cheap tiffany cufflinks had criticized that deal, engineered by Mr. Pottruck, as too pricey. By the time he left, Schwab had weathered many rounds of layoffs and cost cuts, struggling to find its identity after the tech bubble burst in 2000. The company continues to trim expenses -- savings that are now helping it shave commissions, Mr. Mathison said. "For a year we've been aggressively attacking our operation costs. Last year we removed $650 million on an annualized basis, which has given us incredible flexibility to tackle our pricing," he said. "The focus on expense control is also an ongoing discipline." The cuts have not been painless. On Friday, Schwab said that the latest round could reduce consolidated revenues by about 1% over the next 12 months.
Mobile phone users worldwide are expected to spend more than $3 billion this year on ring tones . . . and I cannot help but giggle when I type those words.Ring tones, $3 billion, kid you not.And it wouldn't surprise me if Jay Emmet, president of mBlox-Americas, also lets out a giggle now and then when he reads such predictions. The difference is that his would be giddiness born not of astonishment but the unbridled joy that comes with knowing your company is cheap tiffany key rings those hearing ka-ching whenever phones burst into song.MBlox doesn't actually sell ring tones - more than 100 companies in North America and Europe do - but it helps make the music happen, among other things.
"Mblox is an aggregator in the [Short Message Service] space," Emmet says. "If you're a ring-tone company or a ring-tone provider and you want to sell ring tones to the public, you can do it, but you'll have a problem connecting to all the networks. You have two choices: You can pursue individual contracts and connections dealing with the AT&Ts, T-Mobiles, etc. by yourself, or you can come to a single aggregator that has already established those commercial cheap tiffany earrings technical relationships. You basically send all your traffic through the front door; you don't have to maintain the high fixed costs of the connectivity."Ring tones typically cost a buck or two per pop. And while not as well established here as in Europe, those buck or twos will add up to more than $300 million in U.S. sales this year, a twofold increase over 2004.
"What's particularly interesting to me is that people are paying more for ring tones than they will to buy the song itself to download to an iPod," Emmet says.Interesting is one word for it, although not my first choice.Ring tones are not the only product fueling rapid growth in so-called premium SMS. News, various alerts, games, interactively and micropayments for products as mundane as a can of soda are but a handful of the other drivers. Marketing and entertainment companies are gorging themselves on schemes designed to exploit SMS."I don't want to make it seem as though SMSing is the next great, huge thing that's going to displace everything else - it's not," Emmet says. "The carriers see it as a high-margin, high-growth segment of their business. The people with content and products see it as a way to move them to the mobile phone. And I cheap tiffany money clips act in the middle as an aggregator both in terms of traffic flow and the billing payout."
The rescue remained secret for half a century until Henri invited "800 of the most famous names in boxing" to a gala dinner in Schmeling's honor in 1989. The 84-year-old bruiser shared the spotlight with Mike Tyson, the reigning world champion."I'm going to tell you what kind of champion Max Schmeling is," Lewin announced. "He risked everything for us. If we had been found in his room, I would not be here this evening and neither would Max."
When I interviewed Lewin for a book I was writing ("The Book of the Just: The Unsung cheap tiffany bangles Who Rescued Jews from Hitler"), he explained that his father had already bought tickets for China. If the family had been picked up on Kristallnacht, they might well have missed their last chance to escape. Uncles, aunts and cousins were arrested about that time and were never heard from again."There is no question that Schmeling would have been in tiffany somerset sale danger if we had been discovered," he said. "The Nazis could not afford to let a national hero be a Jew-lover. He would have disgraced the Fuehrer. He also took a tremendous risk by driving us in his own car. But we were his friends and he would do anything for us"
Lewin had kept the story under wraps at Schmeling's request. Even when the old warrior agreed to attend the Las Vegas dinner, he asked his host not to glorify him. "He told me that what he had done for me and my brother was doing his duty as a man."In 1980 when Joe Louis died still trying to clear his debts to the Internal Revenue Service, Schmeling asked Henri Lewin to represent him at the funeral and sent him a large check for Louis's widow. Whether or not he met Yad Vashem's criteria for a Righteous Gentile, he remained a mensch.
When Charles R. Schwab took back the helm of his namesake company in July and said he wanted to reconnect with retail investors, he wasn't joking. Charles Schwab Corp. said Friday that it will cut online trading commissions Tuesday for the third time in tiffany 1837 sale months -- and may cut deeper if market forces demand. Tuesday's cut will be 35%, to $12.95, for customers with $50,000 to $1 million of assets. That would make the San Francisco company among the cheapest of the discount brokers. In early June, just before the first cut took effect, Schwab was among the highest-priced discounters, cheap tiffany jewelry nearly $30 a trade. On Friday it said it would continue to review commissions.
"We are looking at pricing as an ongoing discipline, not a one- time event," said a spokesman, Glen Mathison. "It's not our intent to be the lowest-priced company. But could the price go lower? The market will decide."The market has in fact taken prices lower in the recent past and will do so again. Last week, Fidelity Investments in Boston cut its trading commissions by more than 25% for some customers, to $10.95. To qualify they must trade at least 36 times a year and have $30,000 of assets. Fidelity still charges a standard $19.95 per trade for customers who make up to 35 trades a year, with no asset minimum.
Other companies have indicated that they are examining their fees for retail customers who trade online.E-Trade Financial Group said this month that it planned to evaluate its pricing levels. But in an e-mailed statement Friday, the New York company said that pricing alone does not bring customers. "We believe the overall customer value proposition and the company reputation within the industry drive retail investors to an online broker," E-Trade said. Other companies, including TD Waterhouse Group, which is Toronto-Dominion Bank's discount broker, and Ameritrade Holding Corp. of Omaha said they regularly review pricing. But they agreed that attracting customers takes more than low prices. "We regularly review our offering to ensure that we continue to deliver the best overall combination of products, price, and services to our customers," said Janet Hawkins, TD Waterhouse USA's chief marketing officer, in an e-mailed statement Friday. "We feel confident that our customers recognize that we cheap tiffany bracelets the best value in the industry." Kim Hillyer, a spokeswoman for Ameritrade, said, "It's more than pricing -- it's pricing coupled with the technology and products we offer customers."
There are challenges. Some ads have fallen flat. Consumers complained that the reality in one TV spot ruined the fantasy of romantic love. It showed a man giving his girlfriend a diamond ring. It then flashed ahead to show the couple, years later, strolling along the beach with their son. It bombed. "'Don't show the child when I'm thinking about love,'" Hudson recalls hearing from consumers.Another time De Beers organized a splashy traveling exhibition of famous diamonds, including one of Elizabeth Taylor's rings, for Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. But it made only two stops because customs officials in Guangzhou refused entry.
There's some risk diamond sales will slow this year because superstitious cushion jewelry sale will pause from the wedding rush during the Year of the Rooster, considered an unlucky time for such unions. But De Beers is undaunted. Its latest TV commercial shows a groom leading his bride through a maze by pulling a red string. When she finds him, a diamond slides down the string onto her finger.
Yad Vashem never honored Max Schmeling, who died on February 2 at age 99, among its Righteous Gentiles. No one, say researchers, ever nominated him. More's the pity. The one-time world heavyweight champion stuck his neck out for a Jewish friend in 1938 when more obscure Germans were paying a heavy price for less.
The Nazi press trumpeted Schmeling's 12th-round knockout over Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium in 1936 as "a victory for the white race." Back in Berlin, Hitler invited him for lunch. "I had to go," he said apologetically. The two watched a film of the fight. Every elsa peretti sale the German boxer landed a blow, Hitler slapped his leg with delight.
Yet Schmeling never bought the Fuehrer's racist ideology. He refused to sack his American Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs (the man who coined the immortal phrase "We wuz robbed," after one of his fights). Schmeling said he was relieved when the "Brown Bomber" won the rematch two years later, though he can hardly have relished being knocked out in the first round and shipped home on a stretcher. The defeat made it easier for him to refuse to act as a Nazi paloma picasso sale. Conscripted, he did serve as a paratrooper during World War II and made his fortune afterwards marketing Coca-Cola in his native land.
One of his Jewish buddies was David Lewin, a flamboyant Berlin businessman with a passion for sports and for the cabaret world of the sickly Weimar Republic. Lewin owned a hotel in the Potsdam suburb, where Schmeling trained for his big bouts. The two men shared a frank gehry sale nightspot, the Zigeunerkeller, the Gypsy Cellar, where they drank and sang together.
On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, when anti-Semitic mobs were sacking Jewish property throughout the Reich, Lewin turned to his fighter friend. Schmeling was in Berlin on a business trip. Lewin asked him to shelter his two sons, Heinz and Werner, aged 14 and 15 respectively. Schmeling took them to his room in the downtown Excelsior Hotel and kept them there for three days. He told the desk clerk that he was ill and must not be disturbed. When the riots abated, Schmeling drove them to his home in his Mercedes convertible. After waiting another two days, he delivered them to their father.
Soon afterwards the family sailed to Shanghai, where Lewin went return to tiffany sale into the hotel business. They moved to the U.S. in 1946. Heinz, now Henri, followed in his father's footsteps and eventually became president of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
Once again, not so. Consumers have become sophisticated and confident enough to understand technical specifications and did not need to see the picture, says Dell's Mr George. Many also put their trust in Dell's brand: if the Texas company could build good computers, it would probably make decent TVs too. This reveals another important change in attitude. "Consumers just don't have these historical brand affinities in the way they used to have them," adds Mr George. But he is aware that brand value carries risks too: "We know it could be taken away from us at any moment."
An important part of Dell's success has been that along with its direct-tiffany necklaces sale model it offers a customisation service. If a customer orders a PC online, he or she can ask for it to be configured in all sorts of ways. Yet when the order is placed, none of the components are in the factory. Within a day or so they have arrived from suppliers, been assembled into a PC according to the customer's specification and sent off to the delivery address. Carmakers may never be able to build a business as lean and as flexible as this, but they are working on similar lines to keep their customers happy.
Last year retail sales of diamonds in China climbed 12% to $1.4 billion. That outlay comes to a mere dollar tiffany accessories sale capita--versus $100 in the U.S.--but it has the potential to grow, given the rising affluence of the Chinese and their predisposition to save money. It is possible to convince oneself that a jewelry purchase is a form of saving. De Beers' target buyer has an annual household income of $2,900, the bottom reaches of the middle class in China.
Images in showy ads created for De Beers by ad agency JWT resonate among consumers who are just starting to discover and crave the trappings of middle-class life. They feature well-dressed couples enjoying other luxuries. At least one tiffany pendants sale a well-to-do couple frolicking on the beach, suggesting they can afford a vacation, another treat in China.
De Beers is also convincing TV producers to weave diamonds into the plots of their programs. China's state-run network CCTV last year borrowed the storyline of a De Beers ad for an episode of its popular drama Pink Lady. In it, a woman checks out her reflection in a restaurant window and admires the glittering diamond pendant around her neck. A man sitting with his girlfriend in the restaurant also notices the bauble and is so captivated by it that his date storms off.
De Beers has been able to accomplish a lot with little money. It tiffany rings sale in 11 eastern Chinese cities for several years, taking its pitch last year to smaller cities on the mainland. This year it plans to spend $9 million on TV, magazine and newspaper ads for diamond rings in big cities and in 17 additional cities and towns, including remote outposts such as Hefei and Tibet's Lhasa."This has happened much more quickly than we ever thought it would," says Christina Hudson, De Beers' marketing director for Greater China.
De Beers has helped change wedding ceremonies, inspiring brides, for instance, to dispense with the traditional red dress in favor of white. Diamond Trading Co., the company's sales and marketing arm, even plays a role in some nuptials. Several times a year in Beijing and Shanghai it cosponsors mass weddings on days the Chinese consider auspicious, such as New Year's Day (Jan. 1) and National Day (Oct. 1). When 150 couples were wed at a mass wedding in atlas jewelry sale last fall, they walked under a 9-foot-high diamond solitaire ring as each groom gave his bride a ring. A diamond-themed float was part of a parade in another ceremony. De Beers' marketing company ponies up $13,000 to sponsor a mass wedding. Jewelry stores chip in $87,000.
Another hurdle is the perception that Lord of the Rings is targeted at men since Jackson focused heavily on the battle sequences. In contrast, the stage production will focus on the relationship of the main characters, Sam, Froclo, Merry and Pippin. There is "a tendency among some sections of the market to say this could be for the guys," says Wallace, "but it is actually for women."
It's a smart positioning statement since, as Wallace notes, the average decision maker for theatre is a woman between 35 and 55 years old. With the deep blue colours and root imagery used in the creative, "We wanted to recognize the fact that this is a cerebral experience, that it is a complex experience, that it is not simply an action-packed aggressive story."While women may decide on the family entertainment, Wallace points out "we're targeting everyone," including teenagers, who likely recall being dragged to live theatre as kids and being bored to tears. To reach this group, the company will hire a couple of teens "who have great Tiffany Key Ring about theatre and who are fans of Lord of the Rings" to be spokespeople for the production. On radio and TV, the teens will report on what's happening with the production from autumn to the opening in March. "And we won't impose editorial control on them, so if they think we're all crazy we'll allow them to say that, and if they like their experience they can say so," says Wallace.
On the web, the production is promoted on LOTR.com, which contains interviews with the international Tiffany Ring team, including director Matthew Warchus. The company also communicates directly with Tolkien fans through websites like with banner ads and press releases.
Theatre-lovers can sign up to E-stage, a monthly newsletter with advance notice of upcoming shows, feature articles, contests and special offers. There are currently 30,000 subscribers to E-Stage, which is managed by Toronto-based ThinData.While Mirvish is targeting the world with Lord of the Rings, a key part of his company's success is its subscription base, which now numbers 40,000. "We start with our core audience, our subscribers...because they're going to be here six or seven times a year," says Mirvish. "We know this is a major event for them and that gives us a core base to launch more Tiffany Money Clip, untried shows within the protection of some well-known shows." For example, Mirvish often looks to Canadian writing. In March/April, The Innocent Eye Test by Canadian playwright Michael Healy will be performed at the Mirvish-ownecl Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto.
Mirvish is optimistic about the new subscription season and believes Lord of the Rings could run for many years. That is, if they can find enough hobbits. "The problem in Canada is we have too many vitamins, everybody is tall," he quips. "We need hobbits. We need people who are five foot five or shorter."Joking aside, Mirvish is philosophical about Tolkien's work, calling it motivating. "It's very timely, it's a message of relationships... And the hero Tiffany Necklace the story is not the person you expect. It's not the big warrior, it's the hobbit in the shire."
So, it's Saturday afternoon, and you're cruising down the street when you hear the silent cry of ice cream calling out to you from the Irving convenience store just ahead, on your right, and you answer by pulling in to pick up a carton of milk, blueberry muffins for breakfast, and a double scoop of strawberry ice cream on a waffle cone. The cashier passes you a scratch and win card. You win. Instantly. A free bag of salt and vinegar chips. Sweet.A week or two passes, and the phone rings. There's someone named Kathy on the line, enquiring how your life has changed since winning the big prize."Some people say that the first two weeks after a big win are the toughest, Colin. Is your family being a little over protective?"What the..."I don't know.. .what... " you stumble, your mind racing, synapses firing a mile a minute."Does the word 'Irving' or 'Salt and Vinegar' ring a bell, Colin?""It was.. .just a...bag of chips," you offer up lamely."Just a bag of chips, Colin? Sounds like you're still in shock. Perhaps we should give you a little Tiffany Pendant for the whole thing to sink in."A few days pass. Driving downtown, you hear Kathy on the radio asking Morris if he planned to share his big win-a bag of cheesies.