In a throwback to programs offered by banks and credit unions in the 1950s and 1960s before credit cards allowed people to spend money they did not have, Stephanie Clifford reports, Toys "R" Us is setting up a "Christmas Savers Club" in which customers set aside money to spend on holiday gifts. Participants get a card to which they add funds through cash or credit card payments. Toys "R" Us pays 3% interest on the balance. "They're trying to bring back the tried-and-true, pay for things before you buy them concept," says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for …

The good news is that demand for pre-orders of the iPhone 4 is so great that AT&T and Apple are having trouble keeping up. That's the bad news, too, of course -- coupled with an apparent second breach of customer security on AT&T's Web site in a week. Sites for both companies had difficulty processing orders and AT&T's, in certain instances, appeared to reveal other people's personal information, Niraj Sheth and Roger Cheng report. The new device officially goes on sale June 24, but the companies began taking pre-orders yesterday. Even as they did, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was …

CoreBrand founder and CEO James R. Gregory asks the question: How can you build brand equity as strong and durable as that enjoyed by such venerable names as Paine Webber, AlliedSignal or Handi Wrap? Answer: The old fashioned way. Buy it. "Instead of investing significant amounts of one's budget in building a new brand name, entrepreneurs would do well to consider exploiting the existing brand equity that resides in names we, as consumers, once favored and still remember fondly," he writes. And a surprising number of orphan brands are up for sale, he reports, at a fraction of …

Nintendo will unveil a 3-D portable game player this morning at the E3 game conference in Los Angeles, Pavel Alpeyev and Masatsugu Horie report. The company says that the 3DS model that president Satoru Iwata will introduce represents the biggest overhaul of its handheld player since 2004. Among other features, it will probably feature a camera that tracks users, with the 3-D picture adjusting as they move. "The expectations for the 3DS are extremely high," says Yuuta Sakurai, a Tokyo-based analyst at Nomura Securities Co. "Starting with the DS and Wii, the company has consistently released products that …

Starbucks will offer free Wi-Fi in all of its locations starting July 1, CEO Howard Schultz announced yesterday, and will add exclusive free content when it launches Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo and other sites, this fall. Shultz hopes to make money from these initiatives indirectly, Eliot Van Buskirk reports, by "enhanc[ing] the experience" and making the content "so compelling that it drives incremental traffic." He says that the free Wi-Fi is "just the price of admission" and that the company wants to create new sources of content that can be viewed only at Starbucks. …

The power in the tech market has moved from straight-laced business people who needed spreadsheet software to balance their bottom lines to consumers looking to network and play games, Sharon Pian Chan reports. That's why Microsoft has launched a free Web-based version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote along with the more robust paid version of Office 2010. There's a lesson there for all tech marketers. It's a generational thing, says Viji Murali, CIO at Washington State University, who sees a divide between Millennial "digital natives" and Boomer "digital immigrants." Digital natives, she says, know what they want and …