Amazon’s Android Appstore app Pricing Strategy Revealed

With Amazon’s Android Appstore expected to launch later this month, the internet retailer is busy organising its store to soon offer applications to run on the devices it sells.

Today, a number of Android applications and their prices have leaked out after AndroidNews.de stumbled upon a placeholder page on the Amazon website. Whilst the retail giant will require Android users to download a third-party application to download the apps, Amazon will showcase apps on its product pages, listing them as recommended items as they would any other item.

The page was available at amazon.com/apps but has since been removed. Luckily, a number of screenshots were captured, showing what apps are likely to be available at launch and how much they will cost:

Amazon has already secured the exclusive launch of the next game from the incredibly popular Angry Birds franchise, Angry Birds Rio. With 48 other applications listed on the website, AndroidNews.de compared them and their Android Market counterparts, finding that Amazon has secured four other exclusive titles, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Force Recon.

The retailer has also priced 14 apps lower than the prices developers are charging for the same apps on Google’s marketplace. The strategy demonstrates how Amazon hopes to compete with Google – requiring developers to state the recommended retail price of their apps, changing its pricing should it see fit. Developers don’t miss out – if Amazon lowers the price of an app below the recommended price, they will still receive a share of the price they originally set.

Amazon has declined to comment on when its Appstore will launch – we think it won’t be too long until it does.

Source: The Next Web, Matt Brian

Buffett Says Pricing Power More Important Than Good Management

Warren Buffett, the billionaire chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said he rates businesses on their ability to raise prices and sometimes doesn’t even consider the people in charge.

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” Buffett told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in an interview released by the panel last week. “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”

Buffett, 80, accumulated the world’s third-largest personal fortune through a career of stock picks and takeovers. He has bought companies such as railroads and electricity producers, whose pricing power stems from a dearth of competitive options available to clients. Buffett has also built stakes in firms like Coca-Cola Co. and Kraft Foods Inc., which rely on the appeal of their brands to attract and keep customers.

“The extraordinary business does not require good management,” Buffett said in the interview, which was conducted on May 26 in Omaha, Nebraska.

The FCIC investigators focused on Buffett’s investment in Moody’s Corp., the bond-ratings firm blamed by lawmakers for handing out inflated credit grades during the housing boom. Buffett said he held stock in Moody’s because the company’s leading market share, along with that of rival Standard & Poor’s, a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos., gave the two firms flexibility in setting prices.

Pricing Power

“I knew nothing about the management of Moody’s,” said Buffett. “If you own the only newspaper in town, up until the last five years or so, you had pricing power and you didn’t have to go to the office.”

A dominant position can’t prevent a bad manager from destroying a company over time, said Benjamin E. Hermalin, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

“If you have a really dominant position you can survive for quite a long time with bad management but eventually it will catch up to you,” said Hermalin. “In the short run I would agree with Buffett but in the longer-run perspective there is something to be said for having a good manager.”

Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the railroad Buffett bought last year for $26.5 billion, owns more than 30,000 miles of track across the U.S. West connecting producers and distributors of coal, grain and consumer goods. Omaha-based Berkshire’s power company, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., sells electricity to homes in the Great Plains and transports natural gas from Wyoming to California.

Praise From Buffett

Buffett routinely singles out and praises managers from Berkshire’s more than 70 operating companies. MidAmerican Chairman David Sokol and Gregory Abel, the unit’s CEO, are “two terrific managers,” Buffett said last year in his letter to shareholders. The acquisition of Burlington Northern had the “additional virtue” of bringing the railroad’s CEO, Matthew Rose, to Berkshire, Buffett said.

Buffett criticized Kraft Chief Executive Officer Irene Rosenfeld last year for her takeover of Cadbury Plc and the sale of the foodmaker’s pizza brands. “Both deals were dumb,” Buffett told Berkshire investors in May. Berkshire is the biggest shareholder of Kraft with a stake valued at $3.3 billion at the end of December.

“In the short run, good management can make a stock pop but I follow what Warren’s saying, especially because his point of view looks at the fundamentals,” said Terry Connelly, dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a former managing director at Salomon Brothers. “Good management can’t do anything with a bad case.”
 
Source: By Andrew Frye and Dakin Campbell

Tarmac Selects PROS Software to Help Achieve Strategic Pricing and Profitability Goals

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PROS (NYSE: PRO), the world leader in enterprise business-to-business pricing and margin optimization software, today announced that UK-based Tarmac selected PROS during the fourth quarter of 2010 as the key enabler of a new pricing strategy designed to simplify pricing processes, grow profitability of special products, increase sales with growth customers and provide offers tailored to the unique needs of their customers.

Tarmac is a cement and aggregates process manufacturer with operations throughout the United Kingdom. Tarmac produces aggregates such as crushed rock, sand and gravel used in construction, asphalt for roads, and cement, concrete and mortar. Tarmac is part of Anglo American, a UK-based global mining company.

"Choosing PROS was ultimately an easy decision,” according to Chris Mabbott, team lead for vendor evaluation at Tarmac. “PROS invested time in learning our business and clearly demonstrated how its solution would drive value across all our pricing objectives. PROS also proved it wanted our business by being the only vendor to visit our sales people in the regions. PROS references were also substantially better than any competitor -- the biggest differentiator for Tarmac

Tarmac will leverage the value of prescriptive pricing embedded in all three advanced pricing modules of the PROS Pricing Solution Suite, including Scientific Analytics, Price Optimizer, and Deal Optimizer. The three modules work seamlessly together to support the entire pricing lifecycle, from identifying pricing opportunities, to setting pricing strategies, to executing optimized prices.

“We’re honored to have been selected by Tarmac, PROS first customer in the quarrying and construction industry,” said PROS general manager for Europe, Wagner Williams. “Bringing Tarmac on board as a PROS customer is a sign that more companies are focusing on the power of advanced pricing technology to fuel both top- and bottom-line growth, and that PROS can deliver on the promise of pricing.”

The PROS solution will enable Tarmac, like many other B2B manufacturers and distributors, to realize significant benefits:

•Improve the accuracy and effectiveness of price setting to drive revenue and margins, and prevent price erosion

•Develop greater insight into customer profitability and enable pricing strategies tailored to specific sales channels and segments

•Improve agility and customer satisfaction through simplified and more effective pricing processes

•Gain greater clarity into sales performance management and empower sales teams to increase sales with growth customers

“One of the biggest challenges for manufacturers in commodity industries is making accurate, timely pricing decisions in a climate of increasing competition and complexity,” explained Andres Reiner, president and CEO of PROS. “We look forward to working with Tarmac to increase their ability to make smart pricing decisions that support their corporate goals and help make pricing a strategic competitive advantage for Tarmac in their industry.”

About Tarmac

Tarmac is the UK's largest quarrying company and the supplier of materials to the construction industry, and is a market leader for aggregates, ready mixed concrete and asphalt. Other parts of the business include; Tarmac National Contracting (the UK’s largest road maintenance and contracting firm) and Tarmac Buxton Lime and Cement. The company has been involved in some of the UK's biggest construction projects including Wembley Stadium, Emirates Stadium, the M1 widening and M25 resurfacing.

http://www.tarmac.co.uk/

About PROS

PROS Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: PRO) is a leading provider of prescriptive enterprise pricing and margin optimization software products, specializing in price analytics, price execution, and price optimization. By using PROS' software products, companies gain insight into their pricing strategies, identify pricing-based profit leaks, optimize their pricing decision making and improve their business processes and financial performance. PROS' software products implement advanced pricing science, which includes operations research, forecasting and statistics. PROS high performance software architecture supports real-time high volume transaction processing and allows PROS to handle the processing and database requirements of the most sophisticated and largest customers, including customers with 100's of simultaneous users and sub-second electronic transactions.

PROS provides professional services to configure its software products to meet the specific pricing needs of each customer. Founded in 1985, PROS has implemented over 500 solutions across a range of industries in 50 countries. PROS is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has over 350 employees, more than 100 with advanced degrees and over 25 with Ph.D.s. To learn more about PROS, please visit www.prospricing.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements about the functionality of the PROS products and their ability to manage and forecast across an enterprise. The forward-looking statement contained in this press release are based upon PROS historical performance and its current plans, estimates and expectations and are not a representation that such plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described herein include PROS ability to develop new products and product enhancements with the required functionality desired and PROS ability to implement and support successfully its products to the expectations of its customers. Additional information relating to the uncertainty affecting the PROS business are contained in PROS filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements represent PROS expectations as of the date of this press release. Subsequent events may cause these expectations to change, and PROS disclaims any obligations to update or alter these forward-looking statements in the future, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Digital Media Require New Pricing Methods - How to take advantage from better pricing -

 The emergence and rapid growth of internet has made it an important media for distributing digital products including: news, books, journals, music, and videos, searching and online services. computer software, stock quotes and financial information. However, the distinctive characteristics of digital products, such as a significant investment cost to produce the first copy, low marginal production cost, low distribution cost, indestructibility, transmutability, and easy to reproduce, suggest that the traditional pricing policies may not apply. Yet, little has been written on pricing for digital products distributed over the internet, and so far few businesses offering digital products have made money on the internet.

The emergence of the internet offers great business opportunities. Many commercial enterprises (especially those based on information-intensive products and services), therefore, are rushing into the online world and new businesses are emerging to provide brand new digital products (services included) to both consumers and organisations. But most businesses ignore that the nature of the electronic marketplace is fundamentally different from that of the physical marketplace and treat commerce on the internet as only an extension of existing business or as an alternative distribution channel. They try to apply old business rules and traditional pricing policies to this brand new environment, and this explains why so far few of them have made money there. This phenomenon implies that traditional business and pricing rules are not applicable, and we need to use fundamentally different models in decision making.

These developments are creating new opportunities for repackaging products or using more efficient pricing strategies through bundling, site licensing, subscriptions, rentals, differential pricing, usage-based pricing, micropayment and various other mechanisms. In addition to this, transmutability of digital products makes them highly customizable and detailed and personal data of consumers are more abundant and easy to gather in computerized market environment. As a result, consumers obtain a higher degree of satisfaction from customized products than average-quality products, and prices can efficiently reflect costs and consumer preferences. Yet, little has been written on pricing for digital products distributed over a digital network. Therefore get inspired by peers on the European Pricing Platform and hear how they manage those challenges.

Practical Information

Workshop: Pricing of Digital Information

Speakers: Deloitte & Elsevier

Venue: Landgoed de Horst - De Horst 1, 3971 KR Driebergen, The Netherlands.

Date: 01 February 2011 van 13.30u until 18.00u

Price: € 330,00 - free for ePP participants

For further information of registration: Call Britt Dejager: +32 (0) 51 320 372 /britt.dejager@pricingplatform.eu

Website for information : http://www.pricingplatform.eu/site/public/workshops_detail.asp?id=76

The European Pricing Platform (ePP) is a ‘Not-for-Profit’ knowledge sharing place focused to support business management, pricing professionals and CxO-level executives in Europe over a variety of industries and sectors. Our target is to update the pricing know-how of the business manager.

Source : European Pricing Platform (ePP) (www.pricingplatform.eu)

Author: Britt Dejager - project manager at European Pricing Platform

Winner Pricing Thesis Award 2009-2010 !

December 2010- The European Pricing Platform announces with great pleasure the new winner of the Best European Pricing Master Thesis Award 2009-2010.

With his thesis “Barriers to Value Based Pricing Strategies within Irish Small to Medium Sized Enterprises: A Quantitative Survey Analysis”, Eoin Healy – Dublin City University Business School – convinced our jury that he had the most complete pricing thesis of the other 6 theses that were selected. Eoin won a € 500,00- cash reward, a bundle of books worth € 75,00- a free ePP training of his choice valued at € 1.500,00- and free ePP participation for 12 months worth € 395,00- .

The jury motivated their choice as following: “Very professional thesis with clear steps in study design that is straight in our core business. The methods and objectives are well formulated and the thesis has a really scientific methodology. In general the thesis gives a valuable empirical contribution to the value of pricing research.”

The motivation of Eoin to dedicate his thesis to pricing topic came from the lack of time contributed to pricing during his masters in Marketing, as opposed to branding, distribution strategies or buyer behaviour. Eoin says: “ I found this odd as I had read about the power of pricing in terms of the profitability of a firm. So I begun researching the topic of pricing within academic databases and of course on the web. This is how I came to find the ePP and its pricing thesis award.” By knowing that there was a competition to enter Eoin made his definite choice to devote his thesis to pricing.

The reason why Eoin choose to provide a piece of literature for Small and Medium Sized business within Ireland, was because they make up the majority of business types within the Irish market. His study highlighted both the importance of value based pricing to them while at the same time pointed to reasons, or barriers, why they might not yet be using value based pricing strategies. Therefore Eoin says: “I felt it would be most appropriate to analyse them in the interest of the larger Irish economic context. Through research, value based pricing was picked as my strategy of choice due to the fact that it is said to result in greater profitability to the firm and it can ultimately result in a sustainable competitive advantage!”

At the finish of his thesis Eoin concluded that there is still so much to learn on pricing in the whole marketing community, but particularly also amongst the academics. They should revisit how important pricing actually is as an element of the marketing mix and spend much more time on sharing information and knowledge about it.

Eoin finishes with an important conclusion: “Pricing I believe is one of the most frightful and misunderstood elements in most marketers toolbox and it is only through learning more about pricing that we will over come that fear. This I feel, is where organisations such as the EPP can help.”