marketing

You have a new version of an old product, and it’s great: better functionality for most users and lower production costs than previous models. You’ve hit a technological home run. But how do you price it?

This is a nice problem to have, but it’s definitely a problem. Set your price low and you earn moderate profit margins on large volume—if the low price doesn’t spook buyers into thinking it’s a low-quality product. Price high and you earn high profit margins on low volume, as most users are slow to adopt new technology.

NEW YORK (AP) — Investors thinking of buying a piece of Facebook after it goes public are hoping it will perform like Google, whose stock has risen 500 percent since its debut seven and a half years ago.

But they may want to spare a thought for companies slightly less exciting — a truck leasing company, perhaps, or a manufacturer of ball bearings.

Stocks of those two have left Google, and the investors who didn't get into it early, in the dust in the past several years. So have more than half the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

Two thousand years before smartphones, Plato suggested that excessive democracy would lead directly to tyranny, because sooner or later the majority will choose to trample the rights of the minority.

There’s no set formula for startup success. Some companies focus on design, mastering industry research or one-upping competitors to make it to the top. In the case of Internet startup Klout, though, the focus is on users.

From day one, Klout Founder and CEO Joe Fernandez’s goal has been to “help people understand their influence and to [help them] leverage that influence.”

Sure, having a website for your business serves a practical need: to draw net-surfing users to your product or service. However, it’s also much more than slapping on a run of the mill two-column template and calling it a day. Nothing kills an online buzz like a poorly designed or drastically outdated website. Dry and boring default templates, broken assets, confusing pages and invasive widgets do nothing but harm a page’s style, which in turn reflects poorly on the company.