Benton RSS Feed

Attracting additional online advertisers has been great for Google, which reported a 42 percent increase in paid clicks, year over year, for the second quarter of 2012. But the heightened competition has driven up the prices for keywords and made it harder for small companies.

While about 96 percent of pay-per-click advertisers spend less than $10,000 a month, according to AdGooroo, a research firm that studies the pay-per-click market, big-budget advertisers spend hundreds of times more. In the first half of 2012, Amazon reportedly spent $54 million, and the University of Phoenix $37.9 million. “AdWords can bleed many a small business dry,” said Sharon Geltner, an analyst at the Small Business Development Center at Palm Beach State College in Boca Raton (FL).

Europe’s top competition authority is to fire a shot across the bows of telecoms executives desperate for consolidation by taking a robust stance in an important merger test case in Austria.

In a move that will dismay industry executives openly critical of EU competition policy, Joaquín Almunia, the bloc’s antitrust enforcer, is pressing Hutchison to selloff spectrum as a condition for clearing its proposed £1.3bn takeover of France Telecom’s Orange Austria. The negotiations over the long-stalled deal, which have reached a critical point, have assumed an unexpected – and, for the companies, unwelcome – significance as a test of whether consolidation will be allowed within national telecoms markets.

Iranian hackers renewed a campaign of cyberattacks against U.S. banks this week, targeting Capital One Financial and BB&T Corp. and openly defying U.S. warnings to halt, U.S. officials and others involved in the investigation into the attacks said.

The attacks, which disrupted the banks' websites, showed the ability of the Iranian group to sustain its cyberassault on the nation's largest banks for a fifth week, even as it announced its plans to attack in advance. U.S. officials said the attacks against banks, and others against Middle Eastern energy companies, were sponsored by the Iranian government and approved at high levels as part of a low-grade cyberwar that officials warned could lead to retaliation.

"IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China," CNN’s Candy Crowley said. "One of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?" Here’s how Apple’s Steve Jobs would have answered.

It is easy to build a factory in China and it is almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs. The US needs to train more American engineers. A s Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs reports: "Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, [Jobs] said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. 'You can't find that many in America to hire,' he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them. 'If you could educate these engineers,' he said, 'we could move more manufacturing plants here.' The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, 'We've got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.'"