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Dashboard technologies allow businesses to take in large amounts of data and rearrange the points in many different ways to help them get a clearer overall picture. Data related to your business is all around you, and using dashboard technology will allow you to take advantage of a relatively unknown resource that many of your competitors most likely don’t know about nor know how to utilize.

Alexander Chiang, the Research Director at Dashboard Insight, was kind enough to let us ask him some questions on the future of the business intelligence and dashboard industry, and how we can further take advantage of such an early industry that will be exponentially useful the sooner small businesses begin using it ahead of their competitors…

CreditCardProcessing.net: What sort of progress has dashboard software made in the past couple of years?

Alexander: Vendors that provide dashboard software are able to handle larger sets of data now.

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Average mortgage rates jumped significantly higher week-over-week, Freddie Mac revealed in its latest weekly mortgage report at the end of last week.

According to Freddie Macs Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending March 22, 2012, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to an average above 4.00 percent for the first time since October 27, 2011.

Mortgage rates are catching up with increases in U.S. Treasury bond yields placing the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate above 4 percent for the first time since the end of October 2011, Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist at Freddie Mac, said in a statement.

Average rates for 30-year fixed mortgages rose to 4.08 percent in this most recent data after averaging 3.92 percent the previous week. One year ago at this time, 30-year fixed mortgages averaged 4.81 percent. The 30-year fixed averaged 4.10 percent back in late October 2011 the last time it was above 4 percent.

Shorter-term 15-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to an average of 3.30 percent from 3.16 percent one week earlier.

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With the masses descending on Omaha this weekend to hear Warren Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, it is a good time to take a look at the stock. Investors are expected to ask why the stock has been lagging the Standard & Poor’s 500, among other issues.

But one look at the chart tells us that lagging performance depends on the time frame examined. Over the past 10 months, a time span chosen for the reason discussed below, then yes, Berkshire Hathaway only gained 1.9% vs. the S&P 500′s gain of 26.6%. But if we look farther back, it is not quite so bad.

However, if we start the comparison in January 2010 then Berkshire actually beat the market by a small amount.

Analysts can torture data such as this any way they choose and that is why it is important to look at a stock over multiple time periods. I chose a 10-month look-back for the current bout of underperformance because the relative performance chart itself peaked in Jun 2010 as shown in the chart.

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The figures on housing starts may soon start looking disappointing for reasons that have little to do with the economy and a lot to do with the weather.

The report on February housing starts, issued Tuesday, appears to be mixed. New permits are rising, but the seasonally adjusted level of starts dipped a bit from January to February.

This has been a very unusual winter. From December through February, the government estimates there were 137,300 units started, up 26 percent from the comparable period last year. We havent seen a year-over-year increase that big for a three-month period in nearly 20 years. Those figures include single-family and apartment units. Starts of single-family homes are up 19 percent, also highly unusual.

The big question is how much of that is the economy and how much the weather. This was a very mild winter in most of the country, and it seems reasonable to think that units that would have been started in the spring were started earlier.

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The Durbin Amendment was created to “protect” retailers and gave the Federal Reserve the power to set interchange fees for debit card transaction processing.  The idea is lower debit card fees would improve economic growth, since retailers could lower prices on items when they pay lower fees to banks for accepting debit cards, and lower prices would result in more consumers buying. The debit card transaction fee was 44 cents per transaction before the amendment, and has been capped at 21 cents as a result of the Durbin Amendment.

Plaintiffs Arguing Against the Durbin Amendment

The following are among the plantiffs in the legal action against the Federal Reserve over the failings of the Durbin Amendment:

Their argument is that the interchange fees for debit cards do not comply with the Durbin Amendment, and that the amendment is heavily influenced by the banking industry which results in higher expenses for small retailers instead of the promised lower expenses the amendment was supposed to bring.

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Mortgage rates dropped for most types of mortgage products this week, led by a huge drop in average rates for 5-year adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said in a recent report.

According to the MBAs Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending February 24, average rates for 5-year ARMs decreased to 2.78 percent from 2.94 percent the previous week. The 2.78 percent mark is the lowest seen for the 5-year ARM by the MBA since the association began tracking that product in January 2011.

Despite this large weekly drop in rates for 5-year ARMs, the overall share of mortgage activity associated with ARMs actually decreased to 5.0 percent from 5.3 percent of total applications a week earlier.

Average rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages (those with conforming loan balances of $417,500 or less) fell to 4.07 percent from 4.09 percent one week earlier, while 15-year fixed-rate mortgages fell to an average of 3.36 percent from 3.38 percent the previous week.

Mortgage rates remained near survey lows last week, but refinance volume fell slightly, Michael Fratantoni, Vice President of Research and Economics at the MBA, said in a statement.

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