Four hundred fast-food outlets, cafes and other retailers will start using iPads in place of more old-fashioned cash registers, thanks to cloud-based cash register company Revel Systems, GigaOm reports. "The simplicity of touch-screen based checkout systems could be a major revelation for grocery owners," GigaOm says. Revel also offers a "cloud-based grocery inventory and payment system." Plus, the platform allows consumers who use mobile payment apps to pay with their smartphones.

Companies are starting to use a new "largely invisible," metric -- the e-score -- to decide which ads to show to which consumers, The New York Times reports. E-scores rate rank consumers based on factors ranging from salary to home value to spending patterns. Unlike credit scores, people have no easy way to discover their e-scores, the Times' Natasha Singer writes. She says these scores can determine the types of offers people receive online. Federal regulators are expressing concerns that the scores "could pigeonhole people, limit their financial choices and channel some into predatory loans."

Rumors are that Hulu CEO Jason Kilar will step down, per an internal memo that was leaked to Variety . The three-page memo, dated from July, lists several possible changes for the streaming service, the top two: "Outline transition plan for new CEO" and "Discuss potential candidates and process." CEO Jason Kilar has had problems with Hulu's owners, Disney, News Corp and NBCU, since he publically criticized the broadcast networks and the amount of ads it ran last year.

Best Buy chose a new chief executive to lead the company as it struggles with falling sales and manages a public discussion with founder Richard Schultz. He resigned from his chairman post, but wants to take the retailer private. The new CEO, Hubert Joly, was chief executive of Carlson, which includes Radisson and T.G.I. Friday's. Joly has a record of turning companies around. Best Buy, with 1,400 stores, is struggling amid competition from online retailers able to offer lower-price electronics.

When Republicans convene next week in Tampa, Fla., and Democrats the week after in Charlotte, N.C., major broadcast networks, as well as Politico and HuffPo, will provide extensive, often live coverage of events. There will be gavel-to-gavel coverage – just not on TV. Marc Burstein, senior executive producer for special events at ABC News, predicts “we are going to reach millions more viewers in ways other than just television." ABC’s partnership with Yahoo has greatly expanded its digital reach. Time magazine has formed a partnership with Foursquare.

GM has forged a unique multiplatform alliance with fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, the daily deals brand LivingSocial and media giant Time Warner. Mizrahi conceived a new line, Malibu Style, inspired by the 2013 Chevy Malibu, targeting women 25-45. Fifty videos, starring Mizrahi, will be streamed across Facebook and TW-owned sites. Both the line and the car will be promoted. Carat brokered the deal.  

As part of a broader overhaul of its Play Store, Google has enabled so-called “smart app updates,” Android Police reports. “Normally, when an update to an application comes out, the Play Store downloads it in full, which with large apps and slow connections can get quite painful,” the blog explains. With smart apps, however, “only the incremental difference (a.k.a. the delta) between the old and new apks [sic] would be sent over the wire, thereby saving huge amounts of data for both Google and Play Store users.” 

Hide your prized chief operating officers! Sparing no expense, Yahoo is hot on the trail of a new COO, reports AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Yahoo is looking for someone with what Swisher calls “turnaround experience.” Yet, “It is not clear if [new CEO Marissa Mayer is on board with this plan for a COO. Sources tell Swisher that Mayer has different ideas for the management organization at Yahoo, “including an elaborate general manager system that is similar to that at Google.”  

Earlier this month -- well before Facebook stock hit a new low of $19.87 on Wednesday -- Mark Zuckerberg conceded in a companywide meeting how “painful” it was to watch the company’s stock sink. “Zuckerberg is no longer brushing off concern about his company's sinking stock price, acknowledging to employees for the first time that the selloff could hurt them,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The meeting was part of a new effort over recent weeks to buck up morale.” 

Google Maps now offers schedules for more than 1 million public transportation stops in nearly 500 cities around the world, 9to5Google reports. To compliment this offering, Android this week updated to make the new transit data more easily assessable to users. “We’ve made some changes to the Transit Lines layer, so that you can select a specific mode of public transportation (train, bus, tram or subway) to display on the mobile map, hiding the other modes,” Christopher Van Der Westhuizen, a Google Maps software engineer, explained on the official Google blog.