Consumers

Julia Scott has negotiated for discounts on clothes, hotel rooms, jewelry, even photocopies and pizza slices. On Sunday, the consummate bargain hunter staged a Frugal Festival to celebrate the art of penny-pinching. By the looks of the crowd that gathered at Woodley Park in Van Nuys for the event, Scott has company these days. About 300 people showed up to snap up coupons, exchange ideas on saving money and swap free items.

Recession-fueled penny-pinching is driving consumers to rent more movies and buy fewer. New data released Thursday by the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade organization, showed that movie rental revenue rose 8% in the first half of the year -- a remarkable uptick for a business that many in Hollywood had thought peaked. At the same time, sales of DVDs have taken a shellacking, falling 13.5% for the period.

You've used the Internet to do research on your new car and to find the value of your old one, and you've visited online fan sites and notice boards to get the most out of your shiny new ride. But have you tracked a new-car launch or auto product on Twitter? Car companies are increasingly using the seemingly ubiquitous Twitter to inform and engage potential and existing customers. But will the bold new experiment in social media work?

If you're still using old-fashioned rabbit ears to watch television, you may be in luck for a few more months. The mandate to switch from old-school analog to new-school digital over-the-air TV is likely to be postponed from Feb. 17 to June 12, if a Senate bill passed Monday makes it through the House, which is scheduled to vote this morning. But it's not quite that simple.

Google Inc. on Thursday unveiled a new Web page that allows users to better see which of their data are being stored by the Internet search giant. Its Dashboard service is Google's attempt to respond to questions about how it uses consumer data and whether users have enough access to and control of information they have on programs such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs, the company's word-processing and spreadsheet software. "We think of this as a great step toward giving people transparency and control over their data, and we hope this helps shape the way the industry thinks about these issues," Alma Whitten, a Google engineer who works on privacy and security, said in a statement.

Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year. When asked what they would like to get as a gift, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%, according to the survey commissioned by Retrevo, a gadget review website. Likely buyers tend to be men under 35 years old who are living in the Northeast, where more people use public transportation, with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

Late last month, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that makers of the drug metoclopramide must put the strongest so-called black-box warning on the product's package insert. Also sold as Reglan, Octamide and Maxolon, metoclopramide is used to treat certain gastrointestinal problems. If taken chronically, it can cause a serious neurological disorder called tardive dyskinesia (TD). -- What's metoclopramide?

The transition to digital television next month has been hailed as the biggest advance in over-the-air TV since the advent of color, but it's shaping up as a black eye for the government and risks leaving millions of viewers without a picture. On Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama asked Congress to postpone the federally mandated switch to all-digital broadcast television, called DTV, scheduled to take place Feb. 17.

Gabby Ornelas, a former teller at the giant Bank of America Corp., remembers the training sessions. And she remembers her marching orders: "Sell, sell, sell." Ornelas was instructed to use her Spanish-language skills and Latino heritage to sign up customers for as many kinds of banking services as possible, she said -- services that led to lucrative fees for the bank and financial entanglement for many customers.

Max Abrams had no idea that he was being dragged into a multimillion-dollar corporate war between two media giants when he rolled into the Sherman Oaks headquarters of his father's company, Sober Vacations International, on Wednesday morning. But the first clue that he was caught in the middle of something ugly came in voicemails left overnight on the company's phone answering system. "This one person was mumbling, 'Don't take my Nickelodeon away, you dummies,' " Abrams said in an interview.