Business Markets

Turley told the firm’s worldwide partners in a November 10 communication that he would retire at age 58, on June 30, 2013, Ernst & Young said in a statement. A replacement will be named by April 2012, it added.

“He’s gotten them through some ugly litigation,” Jonathan Hamilton, editor of the Accounting News Report, said. Many feared that the lawsuits stemming from the firm’s audits of hospital operator HealthSouth Corp would cripple Ernst & Young, he added.

Turley headed the firm during some of its stormiest times, beginning as chairman just before the Enron and Worldcom accounting scandals sparked congressional hearings on the profession and led to tough oversight under a new watchdog.

More recently, it has faced a lawsuit by the New York attorney general alleging it helped Lehman Brothers engage in a massive fraud before its 2008 bankruptcy.

Read full post…

The Farmington Hills resident, who took a buyout from Ford in 2007, has a master’s degree from the University of California-Berkley and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara. But he currently only has a part-time job and needs to find full-time work because he has two daughters in college.

When he heard about the Michigan Collegiate Job Fair with more than 120 employers, he had to attend.

“The automotive market is just terrible. My value has diminished, and I’ve gotta take a lower rung on the ladder to get on board some place,” Robinson said. “I am being somewhat hard-headed about trying like heck to stay in the automotive business, but I’m having to open my eyes to the potential that I won’t be able to stay in the automotive business because of the condition it’s in.”

Robinson joined hundreds of students, recent college graduates and unemployed Michiganians at the job fair Friday at Burton Manor in Livonia from 9 a.m.

Read full post…

The euro crisis has now claimed a centre-left Prime Minister in Greece and a centre-right one in Italy. Leftist Spain is keeping a low profile, trying very hard not to be noticed – almost certainly in vain.

Yet it would be a mistake to write off the Mediterranean economies as “all the same”. Greece is a true basket case, a welfare state in the literal sense – a state dependant on welfare – underwritten mainly by the Germans. Italy, however, is in many ways a strong economy, at least in parts, with lots of viable businesses and an understanding of the need for international marketing. The present crisis is all about past deficits rather than future prospects.

Italy’s underlying problems go back a long way: weak governments since the beginning of the Republic encouraged structural inefficiencies. As a result, public sector debt has grown out of control under governments of both left and right. This could

Read full post…

Despite claims that “mobile” is the new dot com boom, many companies have yet to get the message.  Even though industry behemoths (like Google) are chiming in and pushing advertisers and retailers to “build for mobile,” droves of popular ecommerce sites are still serving Flash-laden, image-intensive, generally cluttered websites to their smart phone and mobile Web users.  Some of them have “Buy” buttons so small that touch screen users can barely even click on them.

As for the companies that have responded to the mobile craze, their implementation of mobile optimized pages often falls short.  To wit, a 2011 survey of mobile Web users and websites found that a full 77% of large companies’ mobile “optimized” sites take more than 5 seconds to load.  Five seconds?  That’s a near-eternity in cyberspace.  Consider the lost advertising revenue alone, let alone missed sales, as impatient mobile users ignore ads in their hurry to find real content.

So what’s an ecommerce company to do that’s hoping to give their mobile site a much needed refresh?  While individual companies’ needs vary depending on their particular industry and niche, nearly every mobile e-commerce site can benefit from this list of tips:

• Focus on—and predict—what’s most important. Prioritization can be hard, e

Read full post…

A journalist at the British tabloid The Sun was arrested Friday in connection with alleged payments to police as part of the investigation into illegal phone hacking by London-based employees of media giant News Corp. , according to a report by Reuters.

News Corp. owns The Sun and is also the parent company of FOX Business.

A spokesman for News International, which runs News Corp.’s British newspapers, confirmed to Reuters that an arrest had been made, adding “the company is cooperating fully with the investigation.”

The spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment by FOX Business.

Scotland Yard initially announced the arrest, according to Reuters. Scotland Yard has been investigating whether journalists bribed police officials in an effort to obtain stories on British celebrities and politicians.

News Corp. shut down its weekly tabloid News of the World in July after the phone hacking scandal erupted.

Dear readers,

Occasionally I like to comment on social media marketing lessons we can learn from other industries.  I wrote about lessons we can learn from television shows like the Voice or Major League Baseball teams.

This weekend is the largest poker event of the year, the World Series of Poker main event final table.  I thought in homage to this major poker event we’d talk about social media marketing lessons we can learn from looking at professional poker players.

We can learn a lot by looking at the Twitter accounts of some professional poker players. 

The most popular poker pro on Twitter, is probably also one of the most popular in the world. Texas Dolly, Doyle Brunson. The godfather of modern poker has done a great job developing a following on Twitter.  Doyle has over 382,000 followers on Twitter.  This

Read full post…

Airlines often will roll back a fare increase if a major competitor refuses to match it. That’s because the competitor’s cheaper price will show up first when consumers go online to search flights by price.

DALLAS — The latest attempt by airlines to take advantage of full flights and boost their prices appears to have failed.

Most airlines decided not to go along with the higher fares, and those that had raised prices began rolling them back on Friday.

Analysts and industry insiders have been expecting that the weak economy will hurt travel demand, but the signs are mixed so far. Airlines say demand appears to be slipping among vacationers who are trying to save money, but corporate travel is holding up well.

US Airways Group Inc. raised fares Wednesday by up to $10 per round trip on higher-priced tickets usually favored by business travelers.

Delta Air Lines Inc.

Read full post…