Written by Bob Meyer, Editor of BarterNews

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Arbinet Speeds Bandwidth Barter

Bandwidth trading firm Arbinet-thexchange has launched a high-speed settlement service in which it uses its own bank balance to pay sellers of bandwidth more quickly. The service, RapidClear, has caught the interest of half a dozen major carriers.

(Ordinarily it takes up to 75 days for carriers selling excess capacity to get paid, but with RapidClear the time is reduced to seven days.)

Arbinet believes that by making its customers stronger it should in turn enhance the liquidity of the exchange. Interestingly, the concept of buying and selling telecom capacity, like the trading of coffee or oil, supposedly disappeared with the collapse of the telecom market.

But bandwidth and voice capacity trading seems to be alive and well, according to Arbinet and IDT Corp. IDT trades 80 destinations a month, which equates to about 60 million minutes.

Arbinet credits its success to owning its intellectual property (17 patents) in the area of bandwidth trading for voice and data—and having the business sense and tenacity to keep going when everyone else thought bandwidth trading was dead-in-the-water.

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"Sacrificing a competitive advantage for a cosmetic change in accounting rules may appeal to some today, but it will prove to be horribly shortsighted in the years to come."

—Wick Simmons,
Nasdaq Stock Market former chairman and CEO

According to Simmons, in most of the world the most skilled engineers, marketers, and software developers stay put. (Why leave an established firm to take a chance on a new venture?)

But in the U.S., aspiring companies use stock options to attract the best and the brightest. The process has made the U.S. a magnet for human capital and helped perpetuate the cycle of risk-taking, job creation, and economic growth.

The new stock option accounting will cost American jobs. A recent study suggests that eliminating stock options would cut 3.5% off GDP over the next decade—a staggering $2.3 trillion loss of economic output.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has a daunting mandate—to help restore confidence in American business. But it must fix what is broken without harming what is not.

Stock options are not the problem, and expensing them is not a solution. The key to the nation's unprecedented economic prosperity is a system that recognizes the best talent and ensures that it is always available to the most promising ventures.

Sacrificing that competitive advantage for a cosmetic change in accounting rules may appeal to some today, but it may well prove to be horribly shortsighted in the years to come.

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"Hotels must rethink their tendency to simply want to place heads in beds."

—Judy Siguaw, professor,
Cornell University School of Hotel Administration

The Cornell University School of Hotel Administration has announced that the trend of discount hotel-room booking on the Internet is likely to continue growing. Furthermore, an increasing amount of hotel inventory will be sold online by third parties, instead of the hotel companies themselves,
creating more potential for deep discounting.

Out of an estimated one in five hotel bookings to be made online by 2005—up from one in 12 last year—hotel chains will control only half, with intermediaries capturing the other half.

By relinquishing control of their product, and therefore allowing companies such as Priceline or Travelocity to make hotel rooms dirt-cheap, hotel companies are hurting themselves in the long term by focusing on short-term gains.

Check Out The 29 Informative Articles Listed In Our "Trade Exchange" Section

Learn how to use barter to reward and motivate your employees, or to assist your most valued customers. See why your company's team of professional advisors should include a barter expert. And check out the ten ways barter can help you build greater assets, plus much, much more!

To read any one or all of these interesting articles see "Barter Categories" listed on the horizontal navigational bar at the top of our web site, and then click "Trade Exchange" on the drop-down menu.

Barter Plays Role In Rush Limbaugh Show

Many radio stations trade for tapes of Rush Limbaugh's show. In a radio barter deal no cash changes hands, and the program arrives with national commercials built in. (Think of Gold Bond Medicated Power.)

It's a good deal for owners of small-and-medium market radio stations, because it costs them zero dollars for the air time. In exchange they get a national show that has a few spots to fill with local ads. Plus there's no need to hire air staff.

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Every barter company in the world is listed on our web site, click through to our Global List of Barter Companies.

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You can obtain useful, informative ideas and contacts in every available back-issue of BarterNews.

Here & There...

• Gary Ballard, 55, passed away on December 10 after a year of fighting health problems. He was the co-owner of Business Trade Exchange, located in Saginaw (MI), often providing his expertise on media (radio) to members of NATE at the national conventions. Ballard was a valued contributor to the barter industry, and will be missed by all who knew him.

• PricewaterhouseCoopers projects a 2.7% rise in U.S. hotel occupancy in 2004, which translates to 48,000 fewer empty rooms each day.

• Don Mardak, CEO of the International Monetary Systems (OTCBB:INLM), was recently interviewed on nationally syndicated MoneyTV where he spoke of his company's progress in the barter industry. The program can be viewed online at www.moneytv.net.

• Have you signed up to receive a summary via e-mail of the Tuesday Report every week? If not, go to the top of this issue (right hand corner) and sign up!

• A U.S. Trust Co. annual survey of high net-worth people showed a disarmingly negative attitude by wealthy Americans toward corporations. Not much has changed since the 2002 survey...
  
  Of those polled, 67% don't trust corporate management of publicly traded companies (up from 66% last year), and 65% don't trust independent auditors (up from 58% last year).
  
  Seventy-four percent see a need for tighter regulation regarding financial disclosure by publicly traded companies (down from 85% a year ago), and 79% percent question the reliability of corporate financial statements (up from 76% a year ago).
  
  
• John Castoro of ITEX Toronto has signed a 5-year lease with the Indian Motorcycle Club...entirely payable in trade dollars. The 3,500 square-foot piece of prime real estate, in the heart of the city, will become the new headquarters for ITEX Toronto. A mixer will be held on January 15 with 300 attendees expected.
  
  
• U.S. businesses spent about $482 billion for online transactions with other businesses last year, up 242% from $141 billion two years earlier, according to market-research firm eMarketer. (By comparison, consumers spent $71 billion on goods and services online in 2002.)
  
  
• Las Vegas is #1 for incentive and business meeting travel destinations, according to a survey by Maritz Travel. The other top nine destinations, in order, are: Orlando, San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Chicago,Miami, Phoenix/Scottsdale, Maui, and New Orleans.

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