In order to attract more sellers who occasionally auction off items, the online marketplace, eBay is eliminating some upfront fees.

EBay Inc. said on Tuesday that users will soon be able to offer up to five items for auction every 30 days without paying the fees that eBay usually charges to list goods. Those listing fees usually run 10 cents to $4, depending on the item.

EBay users will still have to pay fees for items sold. Under a new fee schedule that applies to no-listing-fee items, sellers pay a flat 8.75 percent of the sale price, with a cap of $20 per item. Usually, sellers pay different rates depending on the sale price, with no cap.

EBay spokesman Usher Lieberman said the change, which takes effect from June 16, is meant to make it simpler for consumers to list items on the site.

A U.S. bankruptcy judge approved bidding procedures for the rapid sale of most of Chrysler’s assets, over objections from a group of lenders who called the accelerated timetable an “absurdity”.

Judge Arthur Gonzalez, who is overseeing Chrysler’s bankruptcy case in Manhattan, said late on Tuesday, the proposed procedures were “appropriate and necessary” given that there is evidence that “there is an urgent need for the deal to be consummated.”

The U.S. automaker, which filed for bankruptcy in New York on April 30, had asked for permission for a quick sale of most of its assets to a new company held by Italy’s Fiat SpA, a United Auto Workers union-aligned healthcare trust and the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Chrysler rushed to clinch deals with Fiat and a fractious group of lenders on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy ahead of a government-imposed April 30 restructuring deadline.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter, those efforts hit a major roadblock late in the day as talks between the U.S. Treasury Department and lenders collapsed.

This meant bankruptcy for Chrysler was “all but certain”, the report said, citing those sources.

Earlier in the evening, U.S. President Barack Obama said concessions by Chrysler’s unions and its major bank lenders had made him more hopeful than a month ago that the struggling automaker could be made viable.

But he added it was still not clear if Chrysler would need to seek bankruptcy protection to cement concessions from its lenders and move ahead with a planned alliance with Italy’s Fiat.

“The details have not yet been finalized so I don’t want to jump the gun, but I’m feeling more optimistic than I was about the possibilities about that getting done,” Obama said at a news conference.

The White House has set a series of aggressive targets for Chrysler in order to justify another $6 billion (4 billion pounds) in investment on top of $4 billion in emergency loans the government has extended since the start of the year.

The No. 3 U.S. automaker has won cost-cutting concessions from its unions in the United States and Canada and is on the brink of closing its deal with Fiat, a person involved in those negotiations told.

Chrysler LLC is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as next week, whether or not it reaches a deal with its lenders or forges an alliance with Fiat SpA, said several people familiar with the matter.

If an agreement with the car maker’s lenders can be reached, Chrysler would file for bankruptcy protection to rid itself of some liabilities. That would let Fiat pick and choose which operations it wants, these people said. The U.S. government would provide bankruptcy financing while the reorganization plays out.

The United Auto Workers union is on board with the plan and likely would end up owning a sizable stake in the restructured car maker, said these people.

A relatively orderly bankruptcy filing along these lines would represent a measure of success for the Obama administration. But if a deal with Chrysler’s banks and Fiat cannot be reached, the company would begin the process of liquidation, with assets potentially sold to many buyers or shut down, said these people. Chrysler has shrunk radically in recent years but still employs 66,000 people in the U.S.

Meantime, Fiat has begun talks with General Motors Corp. about joining forces in Europe and Latin America, people familiar with the matters said, a surprise move that could have profound implications for the restructuring of GM and Chrysler. GM and Fiat have begun discussions about the Italian company buying a majority stake in Opel, the heart of GM’s European unit, these people said.

But no GM deal would go forward until Fiat’s plans with Chrysler are settled. Fiat has said it wants to take an initial 20% stake in Chrysler.

In a move Mahindra Group Vice-Chairman Anand Mahindra termed a “game changer”, Tech Mahindra emerged the highest bidder for Satyam.

If it goes through, the deal will give Tech Mahindra a seat at the high table of the Indian IT services business. It will also mark the end of the uncertainty surrounding Satyam, though the firm’s legal and financial troubles are far from over.

Tech Mahindra, which provides telecom software services, made the bid through subsidiary Venturbay Consultants Pvt. Ltd and will likely spend a total of Rs2,889 crore to acquire a 51% stake in the fraud-hit Satyam. Analysts say that the company may have to immediately invest Rs1,000 crore in Satyam for operating expenses. The deal needs to be approved by the Company Law Board (CLB), the government arm that oversees the functioning of companies.

A Mahindra Group executive said money wouldn’t be a problem. “Tech Mahindra has Rs700 crore of cash available and then we have hard under-writing for the remaining amount. So, we can arrange it,” said Bharat Doshi, the group’s chief financial officer.

World’s sixth largest steel producer Tata Steel said it will begin production at Sedibang mine in South Africa from next year.

“A small iron ore mine at Sedibang in South Africa will begin production next year. We would get two million tonnes per annum,” Tata Steel managing director B Muthuraman said.

The company is currently focussing on South Africa and Canada and looking at coal blocks in Mozambique, Muthuraman said.

The Sedibang mine has a reserve of 50 million tonnes of iron ore, while the Canadian iron ore mines are likely to have a reserve of 100 million tonne.

“The strategy is to focus at small mines where the investment would be low and large mines where no investment would be needed in next few years,” Muthuraman said.

The coal block in Mozambique, in which Tata Steel has 35% stake, is under exploratory stage and the reserve is pegged at 2.1 billion tonne.

Meanwhile, Tata Steel MD said the company is in discussion with Tata Motors to supply flat steel products for the world’s cheapest car ‘Nano’.

Asian shares rose on Friday, with South Korean stocks hitting a 6-month high after the country averted recession in the first quarter, as a Wall Street rally boosted risk demand around the region and dented the yen.

Many financial centers in the region were closed for a long weekend, making investors nervous that gains made now may not be sustained next week when many major U.S. companies report quarterly earnings.

The Nikkei hit a three-month closing high for the second day in a row, though off the day’s peak reached above the psychologically key 9,000 level, as banks tumbled after Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group warned of a net loss for the financial year just ended, reviving fears for other megabanks.

Bookings for Tata Motors’ much-waited car, ‘Nano’ started across the country on Thursday and will continue till April 25.

“Bookings (for the Nano) began today morning and we hope the response will be encouraging,” a Tata Motors spokesperson said.

The sale of application forms for the Nano started on April 1 and the response has been “very encouraging”, the company said in a statement.

The Tata Nano website has recorded over five crore hits, including over two crore hits in the fortnight since the Nano’s launch on March 23, the statement said.

The application forms were sold through over 30,000 locations in about 1,000 cities pan-India through Tata Motors’ passenger-car dealerships, State Bank of India branches as also through those of its subsidiaries and associates and other preferred financiers.

The forms were also sold through Tata group companies such as Westside, Croma, World of Titan and Tata Indicom.

Within 60 days of closure of bookings on April 25, Tata Motors will process and announce the allotment of 1,00,000 cars in the first phase of deliveries, through a computerised random selection procedure.

Xerox Corp will pay $100 million over six years to outsource data-center services to HCL Technologies Ltd, one India’s largest information technology service providers, a Xerox spokesman said on Sunday.

As part of the deal, HCL will manage disaster-recovery preparation and consolidate Xerox’s data centers in North America and Europe, spokesman Bill McKee said.

Last year Norwalk, Connecticut-based Xerox cut about 3,000 jobs.

In November, the two companies announced a partnership, which called for HCL to help companies integrate Xerox’s manage print services into their systems.

Last month, Xerox chopped its first-quarter earnings forecast by as much as 85 percent, as the slowdown in office equipment spending badly hurt revenue and thwarted its cost-cutting efforts.

Verizon Wireless plans to launch the new 4G Wireless in 2010 which is targetted at rural America. But extending the network to every nook and crack in the U.S. will likely take years.

Tony Melone, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Verizon Wireless, said during an interview at the CTIA Wireless 2009 tradeshow that the new 4G network that the company is building will blanket the entire continental United States, including the far corners of rural America.

“The licenses we bought in the 700MHz auction cover the whole U.S.,” Melone said. “And we plan to roll out LTE throughout the entire country, including places where we don’t offer our CDMA cell phone service today.”

If Verizon makes good on this promise, it will be helping to bridge a widening gap between broadband haves and have-nots in this country. While Verizon Wireless’ parent company Verizon Communications and other broadband providers have concentrated on building wireline broadband infrastructure in densely populated areas, such as cities and sprawling suburbs, they have not done a good job of extending that infrastructure to rural America.

About 250-300 employees from Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services are joining Bank of America, the Business Standard newspaper said on Wednesday.

The employees were working on a Satyam project for Merrill Lynch, which was taken over by the U.S. bank after it was hit by the subprime crisis last year, it said.

The project was not renewed by Merrill Lynch after Satyam was caught in India’s biggest corporate scandal and the work of managing its database and providing infrastructure support would now be done in house, the paper said.

The first of these employees will join Bank of America between April 2 and 8, it said, adding they have been given salary increases of around 10 percent and joining bonuses.

A spokeswoman for Satyam said: “The report is speculative.” An official at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in India said she could not immediately comment.

Satyam, whose market value has slid to $505.6 million from $7 billion last May, is in the midst of a bidding process to find a new buyer. It plunged into a crisis in January after its founder quit as chairman revealing profits had been falsified for years.

Indian engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro and mid-sized outsourcer Tech Mahindra are among the suitors, and local media have said U.S. private equity WL Ross & Co was also among the bidders.

Larsen & Toubro has said it has received an order worth Rs 345 crore from the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) for manufacturing and supplying steam generators.

In a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange, L&T said it has bagged an order valued at Rs 345 crore from NPCIL for design, manufacture and supply of four steam generators for 700 MegaWatt electric (MWe) pressurised heavy water reactors.

The steam generators would be supplied to the Kakrapar Atomic Power project, the filing added.

These would be one of the largest steam generators built in India so far, and would increase the size of the nuclear power project to 700 MWe from 540 MWe, the filing said.

According to the findings of a total tax contribution (TTC) survey, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry(FICCI) has demanded reduction in the corporate tax rate.

The TTC Survey 2008 has provided a comprehensive picture of the taxes borne and collected by 41 participating companies, out of the 100 companies constituting the S&P CNX Nifty and CNX Nifty junior indices as on April 30, 2008.

“The corporate tax rate has to be brought down. It is clearly evident from the results of the survey that the tax borne by the corporate sector is high. They are also discharging onerous responsibility of tax collections,” Dr Amit Mitra, Secretary General of FICCI, told a press conference here to announce the results of the survey.

FICCI had also made a case for reduction in corporate tax rate (to 28 per cent) at the interaction that captains of industry had with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on Saturday.

The TTC survey, claimed to be the first of its kind in India, is a partnership effort between PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and FICCI.

The total taxes borne and collected by the survey participants by March 31, 2008 was Rs 84,902 crore, which represented 9.7 per cent of the total government tax receipts.

Leading Tata group firms, including Tata Motors and Tata Steel, outperformed Sensex in March by surging more than twice of what the benchmark index has gained in the month so far.

According to a comparative analysis of their performance, the 30-share Sensex, which regained the 10,000-level last week, surged 13 per cent in the one-month period till Friday last week. On other hand, the four Tata group firms — Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Motors, Tata Communications and Tata Steel– on an average gained over 26 per cent in the period.

“Tata group stocks had been oversold and are now bouncing back. Further, the expectations of launch of Nano had fuelled the Tata Motors shares,” a leading analyst from a domestic brokerage said.

Tata Communications, which provides communication solutions, led the Tata group firms by posting gains of 33 per cent in one month period ended March 27.

India will need to introduce further measures to stimulate growth, said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the nation’s Planning Commission, ahead of a Group of 20 meeting on the global economic crisis.

The new government that takes over in May after general elections will need to take steps to try and maintain the current year’s economic growth, Ahluwalia said at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s annual conference in New Delhi today.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is heading to London next week to attend a meeting where leaders of the 20 major economies will discuss ways of spurring global growth. The International Monetary Fund has urged countries to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on stimulus, estimating that only Saudi Arabia, Australia, China, Spain and the U.S. will introduce budget boosts worth that much this year.

The government has injected about 4.3 trillion rupees ($85 billion) into the economy since September, India’s cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, said at the same meeting today. The impact of the global financial crisis was first felt in India in that month with a freeze in the credit market.

The new government must spend as much as 1 percent of GDP as extra stimulus, Ahluwalia said earlier.

Spice Group on Wednesday alleged that there was no openness and transparency in the bidding for Satyam Computer and said it would soon decide on whether to go ahead with the bidding process.

“We feel there is no openness and transparency… The Satyam board is now talking about another short listing of bidders. We do not even know who are the bidders in the first short-listing,” Spice Group chairman B K Modi said.

“Our board will meet shortly to take a call on whether to go ahead or not,” Modi said, adding that the Spice Group was not satisfied with these kinds of developments. The board will take a call on this issue within a day.

He added that the Spice board will take a full view of the situation in the wake of the new shortlisting terms and conditions and other related problems that may crop up when the company goes ahead with the bidding process.

Along with Spice, Larsen and Toubro and Tech Mahindra are among the other shortlisted bidders for Satyam.

The Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, will hit Indian roads in July, with expectations that demand from millions of aspiring car owners will far outstrip supply.

Launching six months behind schedule in a subdued market, with production in the first year severely constrained, and the threat of further ratings downgrades hanging over the company, it will take over a year to deliver the first 100,000 cars.

Owners will be randomly selected from bookings made between April 9 and 25, and their prices will be protected, said Chairman Ratan Tata, who had promised a 100,000 rupee ($1,980) dealer price at a glitzy unveiling more than a year ago.

“We are at the gates offering a new form of transportation to the people of India, and later I hope other markets as well,” Tata told a news conference.

A European variant will be launched by 2011, and the company is also looking at the United States, as the current economic situation has made low-cost cars even more attractive, even though that had not been the original intention.

“I think, driven mainly by the change in demand that we see elsewhere in the world, we suddenly felt we had a product that could be of considerable interest as a low-cost product in western Europe, eastern Europe, the UK and even the U.S.,” Tata said ahead of the launch where the retail price will be revealed.

The Nano can be booked at more than 30,000 locations in 1,000 cities across India, including Tata-owned department and electronics stores, with booking forms costing 300 rupees each.

When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. opened a Supercenter in suburban Country Club Hills in 2006, Karen Talchik changed her shopping routine. With a Wal-Mart supermarket near her house, the Oak Forest teacher abandoned her old grocery standby.

She said the service sometimes isn’t as good at Wal-Mart—the lines at the deli and checkout counters can be longer than she was used to—but the prices can’t be beat.

“I stopped going to Jewel,” Talchik said

Wal-Mart’s market share is still small compared to Chicagoland’s grocery leaders, Jewel and Dominick’s. But with several new stores, Wal-Mart gained share last year, seemingly at the expense of Jewel and Dominick’s, data from market researcher Nielsen Co. indicate.

And more Wal-Mart Supercenters are coming to the area: six this year, including one that opened this past week in Orland Park, which gives it 19 now open. Six more are planned for 2010.

The Chicago area “in our mind is a priority because it is a market where we have an underserved customer,” said Michael Lewis, president of Wal-Mart’s Midwest division. “I see no reason why our share in [metro] Chicago should be different than in our developed markets elsewhere in the U.S.,” he said.

“Large metro areas represent a tremendous growth opportunity for Wal-Mart,” said Mark Miller, a stock analyst at William Blair & Co. “Chicago and New York, I would say, are the two priorities for the company.”

Arkansas-based Wal-Mart is the country’s largest food retailer, and its main pitch has long been value. Its prices are routinely 13 percent to 18 percent less than its competitors in any given market, said Jim Hertel, a managing partner with food retailing consultant Willard Bishop.

A recent report by Credit Suisse analyst Edward Kelly indicates that gap is wider in the Chicago area. In Kelly’s January survey, Jewel’s prices were 23 percent higher than Wal-Mart’s; Dominick’s, 26 percent greater. Still, analysts say both traditional chains compete on price through promotions and private-label items.

With the economy imploding, Wal-Mart’s low-price approach should help it grab market share across the country, analysts say. Indeed, the strength of its grocery business helped Wal-Mart post better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter financial results in February.