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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."