Hot games hardware sales filip… Glass ceiling graduates… Living longer facts… Make meetings matter

New Nintendo Wii and the Playstation3 send hardware sales soaring

Game hardware sales rose 74% in the first three months of 2007. Figures from GfK show that 491,768 consoles were sold in the three months to March 30, up more than 90,000 units on the same period last year. Hardware sales almost doubled from $59.6 million to 103.1 million. Hardware and software sales rose 28% to reach $220.4 million.

Women’s low pay begins at graduation

Women start earning less than men for similar work almost as soon as they graduate, according to new research reported in Time.

The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation study of more than 10,000 US university graduates found that just one year after graduation women on average earned 20% less than men.

Although the fact that women tend to choose careers in lower paying fields is part of the explanation for the gap, the study found evidence of income disparity even between male and female students who received the same degree from the same university.

And it gets worse – 10 years after graduation, the income gap between male and income graduates has widened to 31%.

The numbers on our longer lives

A boy born in 2005 can expect to live until 78, four years longer than his counterpart born a decade earlier, and female life expectancy has grown to 83, according to new statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in the Measures of Australia’s Progress.

We’re smarter and richer on average too. Almost 60% of Australians now hold a tertiary qualification. And each Australian is worth on average $237,000.

But our longer, richer lives in taking place in a degraded environment. About one third of fish stocks are over-fished and total land clearing is above 300,000 hectares annually. Bird and mammals are becoming extinct at a faster rate in the past 10 years.

Australians are increasingly aware of this. A new report shows 90% of Queenslanders consider climate change the most important issue facing Australia. A survey of 180 people by CSIRO’s Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies said people wanted more leadership on the issue.

Meeting tips

Here’s some tips from Entrepreneur.com on how to make every meeting count.

Know your audience. Who are you meeting with or interviewing? Have you done a Google search on them? Do you know who set the agenda if it wasn’t you? The more you know about the people you meet, including their backgrounds, needs and how they define success, the more productive your discussions will be.

Eat, sleep and be merry. Nothing beats a good night’s rest and a full stomach when it comes to meeting with someone. If you’re in a pinch, grab some coffee and an energy bar before you start. It beats hearing your stomach growl and fighting yawns during a meeting.

Practice makes (almost) perfect. Rehearsals aren’t just for plays. Whether you think of a meeting as a performance or not, it’s your job to both inform and entertain so your audience remembers your key points. Being able to have a direct conversation while making eye contact is your goal here, not reading from a script.

Follow up and follow through. If you tell the people you meet you’ll get back to them on a particular issue, make sure you actually do it. Keeping promises goes a long way and reinforces the quality image and brand you want to project. If you write things down, they generally get done.