Por ANDREW DOWELL

O braço financeiro da General Electric Co. avançou rapidamente em seu plano de entrar na área de banco on-line, anunciando a intenção de comprar uma divisão bancária da seguradora americana MetLife Inc.

A aquisição, anunciada na terça-feira, dará à GE Capital US$ 7,5 bilhões em depósitos e também a plataforma da MetLife para operações bancárias on-line, o que pode acelerar os esforços da GE para atrair mais pessoas físicas para suas contas de poupança. Não foram divulgados os termos do acordo, que aumentará a base de depósitos da GE Capital nos Estados Unidos, que é de US$ 23 bilhões, em cerca de um terço.

A GE Capital havia anunciado este mês que lançaria uma plataforma bancária on-line para atrair mais depósitos de varejo. A divisão de empréstimos da GE é maior que a de todos menos sete bancos americanos, mas seu modelo de negócios, o chamado financiamento por atacado, significa que ela tem que recorrer aos mercados de capitais regularmente para captar recursos para fazer empréstimos. Esse modelo foi abalado quando os mercados congelaram durante a crise financeira, levando a GE a buscar colocar seus negócios em bases mais sólidas.

Em paralelo, a MetLife colocou suas operações bancárias à venda em julho, na esperança de não ser atingida por novas regulamentações nos EUA. A maior operadora americana de seguros de vida informou que estava preocupada com o risco de ser designada uma “instituição financeira sistemicamente importante” e ficar sob uma supervisão mais estrita da Federal Reserve, o banco central dos EUA.

A GE Capital espera que o acordo seja fechado em meados de 2012, dependendo de aprovações regulatórias.

Essa é a mais recente iniciativa da GE para reduzir o risco da GE Capital, cujos problemas durante a crise financeira levaram o conglomerado a cortar seus dividendos e perder sua classificação de crédito AAA. A GE está reduzindo os ativos da divisão, limitando a contribuição desta para seus lucros globais e focando-se nas áreas essenciais, como empréstimos a empresas de médio porte.

Ao mesmo tempo, a divisão de financiamento continua sendo uma importante fonte de lucros para o conglomerado industrial. O interesse da GE em atrair depósitos de varejo como forma de ampliar sua base de financiamento ficou clara no ano passado, quando a empresa estudou uma aquisição do banco on-line ING Direct USA.

Mas a GE não quis assumir uma grande carteira de hipotecas que viria junto com o negócio. O ING Direct — um banco on-line muito maior do que a divisão equivalente da MetLife — acabou sendo comprado pela Capital One Financial Corp. por US$ 9 bilhões.

A GE Capital vai continuar construindo sua plataforma de varejo e planeja captar recursos suficientes através da plataforma on-line para cobrir seus empréstimos comerciais e suas operações de leasing nas Américas.

By CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

New York

‘There is an old song that has thrilled through my soul. . . .” When Robert Burns wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop in December 1788, he was reminiscing with her about friendships past. “Apropos,” he mused, “is not the old Scots phrase, ‘Auld lang syne,’ exceedingly expressive.” The song he then introduced would, of course, become one of the most recognized songs in English. Well, partially in English. To the millions who sing it on the midnight passage from one year to the next, the words of “Auld Lang Syne” remain as cryptic as the melody is ubiquitous. The archaic sound of the Lowland Scots phrases—”we twa hae run about the braes/ and pu’t the gowans fine”—gives it the ring of something both ancient and familiar, just as the song itself is about distance and proximity, about the faraway friend and the one raising a glass with you now.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

An exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York traces the tangled roots of “Auld Lang Syne,” using printed books and manuscripts, including Burns’s letter to Mrs. Dunlop, to illuminate the genesis of Burns’s poem and the melody we sing it to today. In the process it throws up questions—about the extent of Burns’s authorship, and the aesthetic and political considerations behind the deliberate “intermixing” of Scots and English—that add resonance to the old song, even as they remain unanswerable.

By the time Burns wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, he had become a passionate collector of his native folk songs. He was the chief contributor to two anthologies, the workmanlike “Scots Musical Museum” by James Johnson and the much more ambitious “Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice” by George Thomson, who commissioned musical settings from composers across Europe, including Haydn, Hummel and Pleyel, “the most agreeable composer living” in Thomson’s view. (The manuscript draft of a setting he commissioned from the less agreeable Beethoven is also on show.)

In 1793, Burns sent the text of “Auld Lang Syne” to Thomson, presenting it as “the old Song of the olden times, & which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man singing.” But, as Christine Nelson, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, notes, Burns made no secret of the fact that he reshaped, amended and edited much of the material he sent in. “Did Burns really just write down what he heard an old man sing or did he entirely rewrite the song?” Ms. Nelson asks.

Among the evidence on display are two other songs sharing the opening line “should old acquaintance be forgot.” The first, cited in a songbook of 1667, “is much more in reference to a love relationship gone bad than friendship,” Ms. Nelson says. Among the verses: “Thou art the most disloyall maid that ever my eyes hath seen.” The other appears in a collection of songs, first published in 1724, by Allan Ramsay, and veers in a more military direction with a line invoking a “return with scars / [from] glorious wars.”

It is probable that Burns rewrote a fragment he had heard on his travels. The wistful remembrance of friends and lovers past maps well onto Burns’s biography: the childhood friends he left behind; the stormy relationship with a certain Clorinda, which ended with her move to Jamaica; the death of his “Highland Mary.” But to claim authorship of the poem would have lessened its authenticity in the eyes of Burns, who relished his own reputation as a “heaven-taught ploughman.”

Collecting and exalting ancestral Scottish culture was both an aesthetic and a political mission for Burns. “There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians,” he wrote of “Auld Lang Syne” in his letter to Mrs. Dunlop. And his correspondence with Thomson shows him vehemently defending the use of the vernacular, even—especially—in songbooks intended for the elegant drawing rooms of London.

There he found a receptive audience. As the exhibits regarding the origins of the “Auld Lang Syne” melody show, these kinds of strathspey dance tunes were in circulation long before this one first became associated with Burns’s poem in Thomson’s “Select Collection” —published in 1799, shortly after the poet’s death. An opera score to William Shield’s “Rosina,” first performed at Covent Garden in 1782, contains a quotation of the melody over a bagpipe-like drone of bassoons and clarinets.

Burns’s fame, already considerable during his short lifetime, became a cult after his death. The Morgan’s exhibit contains a memento of Keats’s pilgrimage to Burns’s tomb in Dumfries, Scotland; a tribute by Sir Walter Scott; and a gushing letter by Sophia Hawthorne. There’s also a modest bunch of pressed wildflowers she and Nathaniel picked on Burns’s Mossgiel Farm—the wild daisies, or gowans, of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about classical music for the Journal.

By MELIK KAYLAN

Benaki Museum, Athens

Part of an encaustic icon of Christ from between the sixth and seventh centuries.

New York

Across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 52nd Street in Manhattan stands a tall, black-glass high-rise. Enter the glitzy atrium lobby, descend a flight of stairs, and quite suddenly you are enveloped by a miniature bubble of the ancient world. You have walked into the Olympic Tower’s Onassis Cultural Center, dedicated to exhibitions about the Hellenic world. Despite having been open since 2000, the center has the air of a pleasantly well-kept secret frequented by dapper elderly scholars and New Yorkers of Greek descent. It’s an ideal lunchtime escape from the nearby Fifth Avenue shopping crowds, especially with the current show. “Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century A.D.” offers a corrective to the rampant consumerism of our day with a condign lesson in Christianity’s classical roots and intense devotions while also reminding us that a trade in objects flourished from its earliest times.

To be sure, the show’s overarching message is scarcely intended to focus on holiday shopping habits. After all, it stays open until May 14. Ancient mosaics, busts, coins, jewelry, glassware, building fragments and the like—some 170 objects in 2,500 square feet of space—have been pooled mostly (but not entirely) from Greek museums to tell us about a critical phase in our collective Western consciousness. From the Greek viewpoint (two of the three curators hail from Greece), these four centuries were not the Dark Ages, despite the Euro-centric conventional wisdom. In recent decades, scholars have used the less pejorative term “Late Antiquity” because, while Rome declined, the eastern Roman Empire known as Byzantium increasingly gathered strength. As the show’s catalog points out, “for much of this time events in Western Europe could be regarded as a sideshow. The east stood out as the more peaceful and prosperous region.”

Yet culturally it was not exactly a stable time, as the curators illustrate repeatedly with objects that are often a patchwork, an uneasy synthesis of the pagan and Christian. From a moment in history when Christians were often persecuted by pagans, the show moves through seven sections to the last gleams of the pagan consciousness as it becomes inexorably stifled under Byzantine-Christian dominance. The underlying message concerns our era: This is how it felt to phase from a stable, coherent world-view toward an unknown outcome, in a period of multicultural fusion and confusion, before the next era of coherence. As the catalog further states, “these poignant fragments of a long-lost age speak to us directly of what it was like, on the ground, to live through an era of mighty transition. . . . It is this that brings them closest to us. For we, also, live in a world of change whose horizons have opened up dramatically. We also do not know the future.”

The show’s seven thematic sections, beginning with “The End of Antiquity” and culminating in “The Genesis of Christian Art” are not strictly chronological, dwelling at times on static snapshots under such themes as “Urban Realities” or “Daily Life.” This being an argument or narrative made through objects, the displays don’t at first dazzle the eye. We have seen mosaics and marbles and coins before. Yet on closer inspection one is gripped by the cumulative effect of seeing pellucidly through a time-window into a vast cultural morphing process.

One learns that sculpture went from the three-dimensional to a kind of bas-relief because Christian doctrine disdained natural representation. As a result, busts had noses hacked off or crosses inscribed onto cheeks or foreheads. Painting, too, lost its fledgling advances in perspective and depth because images began to function as symbols rather than as realistic representations of the observed world. You didn’t need to see saints depicted in exact proportion to anything, even to other saints, because their real proportions existed in heaven.

Yet the archetypal Roman bust of the philosopher as a balding, contemplative figure served well into the Christian centuries as a boilerplate for busts of community elders or painted depictions of saints. And believers continued to hedge their bets with hybrid religious emblems, as illustrated by the extraordinary double-sided stone slab with a Medusa on one side and a cross on the other. Just as churches and basilicas often took over the sites and stones of temples, Christian relics borrowed from pagan aesthetics. The first century Egyptian funerary “Mummy Portraits,” on wood panels, so vivid and naif, inspired styles of Christian icon paintings that lasted well into the 19th century in Russia.

Byzantine authorities stamped out pagan traditions most effectively by superimposing Christian substitutes. A truly poignant object is the patinated bronze sheet with names of Olympic champions inscribed on it from the first century B.C. to A.D. 385, after which the Olympics were outlawed. Horse races in hippodromes took their place. But, as the show palpably demonstrates, the transition lasted an entire age. Pagan gods ultimately went into hiding but pagan customs in many permutations proved immortal.

Mr. Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.

By TY MCMAHAN

Four years ago, Jared Madsen started a company that makes bicycles built for five. He sold his bikes—which had two wheels and a rear bucket big enough to tote four children—wholesale to shops around the country.

But today, 90% of sales at his small business, Madsen Cycles, in Murray, Utah, come from an online store that took his Web designer half a day to embed within his company’s website.

The company’s bikes are now sold by him directly to consumers for about $1,485 apiece, at what he describes as a “way higher profit.” He declines to specify his markups.

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Mr. Madsen says he initially thought the online store would just fill in “holes” where he didn’t have distribution. But the benefit to him in the end, he adds, was that the Web store made it possible for him to dramatically reduce his reliance on third-party shops.

As a result, the online store is now his business’s main source of income.

Have a company website? If you’re not using it to sell your goods or services, then you could be losing out on an opportunity to boost your company’s bottom line.

Forrester Research says online shopping has surged in recent years and is continuing to grow. U.S. online retail sales, which rose 12.6% to $176.2 billion in 2010, are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% through 2015, the research firm reports.

Building an ecommerce platform within your company website doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. A number of new services—such as such as Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly—now make the task easy and affordable. You can use these services to design a store, upload product, create shopping carts, manage fulfillment and more, —all for as little as a few dollars a month.

Older platforms such as eBay and Etsy allow merchants to sell direct to consumers with benefits such as built-in site traffic. But these new services give merchants more control over the look and feel of their online stores.

“I wanted to have some sort of online presence or shop, but I thought it would be too much work and I couldn’t do it on my own,” says Kimberly Lash, who uses Goodsie to sell vintage clothing at ShopAmour.com. “I thought eBay felt like just selling clothes. You couldn’t build a brand or company. There’s tons of traffic and people are already going to the site, but you can’t create a brand.”

The cost to use the new Web-store services ranges from as little as $5 up to $179 a month. Both Storenvy and Weebly are “freemium” services, offering the basic platform for no charge. The services can be free because the platforms make their money selling additional features, such as more storage. Storenvy charges monthly fees of $4.99 to link a store’s own domain name and $2.99 for a discount code feature. Weebly charges $5 to link a domain name. Goodsie offers the first month for free, then a flat $15 each month for all features.

The Shopify platform is the most feature-packed and also the priciest. The company charges $29 a month and a 2% transaction fee for all e-commerce features and up to 100 products. The company says its most popular offering is $99 plus a 1% transaction fee and up to 10,000 products.

We spoke to executives at Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly, as well as Tom Davis, global head of e-commerce at footwear and apparel company Puma.

Based on their suggestions, here are our tips for using these services to create an online store:

1. Invest time, and possibly money, in taking good photos.

Photography is the “dirty little secret” of e-commerce, according to Mr. Davis. “[Customers] can’t touch and feel your wares, so your photography needs to be an important element.”

Merchants should professionally photograph as many details of a product as they can afford.

Goodsie Chief Executive Jonathan Marcus recommends shooting each product individually, as well as while it’s being worn or used by a model, in order to show how big the product is.

2. Use a voice that matches your brand.

“There’s a fine line between cute and strategic,” says Mr. Davis. For example, a flower shop may describe marigolds as “perfect for fall and a favorite for moms,” while an electronics store may provide a more technical description of products. Merchants should also consider how their descriptions might surface in search-engine results, he adds.

3. Experiment with the layout, and mix it up.

The new services, which emerged within the past five years, provide hundreds of templates for the arrangement of products on the page, as well as a wide variety of different colors and fonts. “Change things every two to three weeks over three months and see what drives the best results,” Mr. Davis says.

Goodsie’s Mr. Marcus adds that stores need to be thoughtful about what products fit together on a page. For example, an apparel company may consider arranging items that make up an entire outfit.

4. Figure out the payment gateway.

This is the trickiest part of creating an online store, according to Mr. Davis. Store owners will need to set up a merchant account with a bank to link funds from the credit card company or a third-party processor like PayPal, which lets customers use its merchant account under certain terms, usually with very little setup required. PayPal does not charge a setup fee.

Currently, Weebly stores only accept Paypal or Google Checkout to process payments. Goodsie offers those services, as well as Braintree Inc. and Authorize.net, a Visa Inc. company, to accept credit card payments. Shopify offers dozens of payment options.

PayPal accepts all major credit cards with no setup or monthly fees. The service takes a 2.9% fee per transaction on monthly sales up to $3,000. The rate reduces as monthly sales increase. Google Checkout charges the same. Authorize.net charges a $100 set-up fee, a $20 monthly fee and 10 cents per transaction. Most services charge about $10 per chargeback in the event a refund is issued.

5. Try to make online shopping feel like an experience.

“Do you have the right boxes? Do you have packing foam? How do you want merchandise to be presented when your customer opens the box? Remember, that’s the only one-on-one you’re going to have with a customer,” Mr. Davis says. He suggests offering gift wrapping and sending hand-written thank-you notes to add a more personal touch to the e-commerce experience.

Alternatively, you can outsource fulfillment. Shopify integrates with third-party fulfillment services such as Fulfillment by Amazon, Shipwire and Webgistix. The cost of this can range for tens of dollars into the thousands depending on the product and volume of shipping. Those who choose to outsource fulfillment should do several trial orders with a service before committing to a provider, Mr. Davis suggests.

6. Promote heavily.

With the growth of social media, these e-commerce platforms have baked in Facebook and Twitter integration so the store and individual products can be “Liked” and tweeted across the social networks. This requires registering for those services separately. The e-commerce platforms will ask the usernames and passwords of those separate services to sync the store. Gaining a following on services like Facebook and Twitter is a good way to alert customers to new products or specials, and to gain customer feedback, and potentially evangelism.

Goodsie and Storenvy have tools to “port” an entire store to Facebook, enabling shopping directly through the social network. They say the process is as simple as installing an application and all products are automatically imported into a Facebook store. Store owners lose some control over the look of their store on Facebook, of course, however.

Storenvy also combines all stores built on the platform into one big marketplace. It claims its stores are making almost 15% of their sales through the marketplace rather than through direct traffic. Goodsie also plans to launch a similar marketplace.

A similar version of this story appeared previously in Dow Jones VentureWire.

Write to Ty McMahan at ty.mcmahan@dowjones.com

Por EMILY GLAZER e PAUL ZIOBRO

A Procter & Gamble Co. cancelou seu acordo para vender a Pringles para a Diamond Foods Inc. e anunciou logo em seguida um novo comprador — a Kellogg Co. —, que pagará US$ 2,7 bilhões pela marca de batata frita.

A mudança acaba oficialmente com a esperança de Michael Mendes, antigo diretor-presidente da Diamond, de conseguir criar a segunda maior fabricante de salgados dos Estados Unidos, no critério de receita, um objetivo já inviabilizado por um escândalo de contabilidade que na semana passada custou o emprego de Mendes.

As manobras também significam que a P&G conseguirá concluir sua há muito buscada saída do negócio de salgadinhos, mesmo depois que o acordo para vender a Pringles à Diamond desmoronou.

A Kellogg vai comprar a Pringles em dinheiro, o que deve colaborar para encerrar rapidamente o acordo depois que as autoridades o autorizarem, disse o diretor-presidente da P&G, Bob McDonald, na sede da empresa em Cincinnati, no Estado de Ohio. O acordo com a Diamond havia sido estruturado de maneira complexa para minimizar os encargos tributários.

A P&G informou que o acordo com a Kellogg renderá de US$ 1,4 bilhão a US$ 1,5 bilhão depois de impostos, um valor próximo ao que ela esperava obter inicialmente no negócio com a Diamond. O valor do negócio subiu nos meses seguintes ao seu anúncio, mas depois caiu juntamente com a cotação da ação da Diamond.

O acordo com a Diamond se desfazia por causa de uma investigação interna que descobriu que a empresa contabilizou erroneamente pagamentos para produtores de nozes. As dúvidas já tinham aumentando no fim do ano passado, quando a ação da Diamond caiu bruscamente depois que o The Wall Street Journal questionou a contabilidade da empresa.

“Com os resultados da investigação do comitê de auditoria deles e a mudança na diretoria, [o acordo] deixou de ser possível”, disse McDonald. Nenhum das partes pagará multa.

A compra aumenta a importância dos salgados na Kellogg, elevando a categoria para quase o mesmo nível dos cereais, que respondem por pouco mais da metade do faturamento da empresa. Os executivos dizem que a aquisição dará à fabricante de marcas como Sucrilhos uma base mais forte em mercados como Ásia e Oceania.

A Kellogg vai recomprar menos ações este ano, enquanto paga os US$ 2 bilhões em títulos de dívida que deverá emitir para financiar o acordo. A empresa informou que a aquisição diminuirá de US$ 0,11 seu lucro anual por ação, para US$ 0,16. A Kellogg espera concluir a aquisição da Pringles no meio do ano.

“Sentimos que podíamos comprar o negócio se decidíssemos agir rapidamente”, disse o diretor-presidente da Kellogg, John Bryant, numa entrevista ao The Wall Street Journal.

A P&G já tinha informado que viu um interesse considerável de outras partes na Pringles à medida que o acordo com a Diamond fracassava. McDonald não quis dizer quando começou a negociar com a Kellogg.

A Pringles é a segunda marca de salgadinho mais vendida no mundo, segundo a Euromonitor International Inc., ficando atrás apenas da divisão Frito-Lay, da PepsiCo Inc., e a categoria de salgadinhos tem obtido um crescimento mais vigoroso que o resto do segmento de alimentos industrializados. A Pringles também tem uma presença internacional forte, o que a torna uma aquisição atraente, disse Bryant.

(Colaborou Matt Jarzemsky.)

By RIVA RICHMOND

In July, Matt Blalock’s mind was on massage oils, soft robes and scented candles when he got a rude awakening.

An intruder had accessed a proprietary database of luxury items that Blalock’s fledgling 13-person e-commerce company, Tickle Industries LLC, was considering selling. At that moment, Blalock realized that far too many people, including data-entry clerks and temporary workers, knew the database’s single, shared password. The not-so-secret code? “Password.”

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“It scared us. We became very conscious of what we were doing and the security of everything,” says Mr. Blalock, who immediately hired a local IT-services firm, at a cost of less than $5,000, to set up an access-control system. Now, employees must use strong passwords and change them monthly. “We thought it might happen again, but with something more important.”

Passwords are both vital and painful for small companies. A tiny firm’s data can be just as sensitive as that of a large company – and a breach of security just as damaging – but it typically has far less computer-security expertise and money to tackle the problem. Learning how to control insider and outsider access with good password practices is critical.

Doing the basics

Unfortunately, the basics aren’t easy. Employees should use passwords that are hard to guess, are long – at least seven characters – and that include numbers, capital letters and symbols. They ought to have a different password for each company application and for each Web site they use. And they should change these passwords at least every 90 days, if not every 60 or 30 days.

Employees’ lists of regularly changing passwords must not be recorded in documents in their computers, sent around in emails or jotted down on sticky notes and stuck onto their monitors. “Just think about how many people walk into an office” — clients, partners, cleaning people, says Jim Lippie, president of Staples Inc.’s Staples Network Services by Thrive, which provides IT-department services to small companies.

Shared passwords are also a no-no. Each employee needs to have their own, and the whole system needs to be controlled by an administrator. That way you not only cut off former employees, but control which current employees may access what types of data.

“You shouldn’t provide more access to an employee then they need to do their job,” Mr. Lippie says. A non-managerial employee, for instance, doesn’t need access to sensitive financial data. “These are the things that businesses have to think about,” he says.

Finding the tools

Technology can help you manage all this and enforce good habits among your employees. But to choose the right approach, you need to start by taking an in-depth look at your company.

“There is a risk-management process that every business should go through,” says Todd Chambers, an executive at Courion Corp., an access-management company that works primarily with large organizations. Do you have a lot of sensitive data, such as personal information about customers or valuable intellectual property? How badly would your business be hurt if data were stolen?

If your data aren’t sensitive, it can be enough to have a competent IT person set up basic network access controls. Many small businesses bring in a local tech firm that helps them on an as-needed basis or rely on their own tech staff. Some put it in the hands of a managed-service provider that will run their network soup to nuts.

But if you do have sensitive data and a breach could wreck your company, consider hiring experts to help you set up and maintain an appropriate security system. If you’re a retailer that stores personal information about consumers, credit-card companies may require you to meet certain security standards. Health-care and financial-services firms often face federal regulations around data security. And companies with personal data that suffer security breaches may be legally required under state law to notify affected customers.

Verity Credit Union of Seattle, which faces myriad regulatory rules, uses a password-management product from Imprivata Inc. that lets its 110 employees securely log into the corporate applications they’re authorized to use while only having to remember one very strong password. The tool reduced the headache for employees and allowed Verity to shrink its helpdesk staff, offsetting much of the product’s cost, says Jon Wu, a senior engineer at Verity.

Industry analyst Gregg Kreizmann, of Gartner Inc., says small companies are increasingly turning to such “single sign-on” tools, which are also made by TriCipher Inc. and Arcot Systems Inc., to help manage and control access to popular software-as-a-service applications such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps. These single-sign-on tools typically cost $1 to $3 per employee per month, and can make it easier for small companies to move from passwords to stronger access methods, such as one-time codes that are sent to mobile phones, which TriCipher provides using technology from VeriSign Inc.

Write to Riva Richmond at smalltalk@wsj.com