• Apple, Google Top Interbrand's Rankings
    Coca-Cola officially has lost a little bit of its fizz with both Apple and Google besting it for the first time as the world's most valuable brand in the annual rankings by Interbrand, which has become quite the model of smart PR itself.
  • Heaps Of Praise For McDonald's Health Initiatives
    "Would you like some milk and kiwi on a stick with that?"
  • Guinness' Arthur's Day Faces Stout Opposition
    In the great tradition of Hallmark Holidays such as Boss's Day, a few years ago Diageo's Guinness brand invented a festivity out of whole hops to celebrate 250 years of its stout. It called it Arthur's Day after the founder of the Dublin-based brewer, who died in 1803. Today is Arthur's Day worldwide.
  • NY AG Mows Down Astroturfing
    It probably did not come as a surprise to you to learn that some of those online reviews of products and services on sites such as Yelp and Google Local from users who claim them to be "too good to be true" turn out to be "too good to be true" themselves. But you may not have realized that it's against the law and could set a marketer up for costly civil suits as well.
  • Burger King Looks To Satisfry Calorie Counters
    Burger King is rolling out Satisfries, a crinkle-cut version of the french fry it claims contains 25% less fat and 20% fewer calories than its classic fare. Nobody's claiming that Satisfries are actually good for you but the fact that they're less bad may make them a hit. Or not. The history of less-junky junk food is a mixed one at best.
  • BlackBerry Disconnects Consumer Market
    Ontario-based BlackBerry, the company that controlled more than half of the smartphone market in the U.S. before it was known as the smartphone market and when it was still called Research in Motion, announced on Friday that it had more than $1 billion in unsold inventory and is canceling it commitment with the consumer market to focus on its mainstay business customers.
  • Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's Autocratic Visionary, 85
    Hiroshi Yamauchi, a college dropout who took a "run-of-the-mill" family firm that manufactured playing cards in Japan to the pinnacle of high-tech success around the world and became known as "the godfather of the console" in the process, as "The Guardian"'s Keith Stuart reports, died yesterday from complications of pneumonia. He was 85.
  • Starbucks Bans Guns But Won't Confront Customers
    "Tired of being thrust onto the front lines of the nation's debate over guns," as the "New York Times"' Stephanie Strom writes in her lede, Starbucks is facing attack from all sides after CEO Howard Schultz issued a "respectful request" yesterday that guns not be carried into its company-owned stores in the U.S -- although they are not formally banned -- unless they are worn by law enforcement officers.
  • Eiji Toyoda, Toyota Patriarch, Prime Mover, Dies At 100
    Eiji Toyoda, who led Toyota's charge into the U.S. market while he was president of Toyota Motor from 1967 to 1981 and still held the title of "ultimate adviser" when he died of heart failure at 100 in Tokyo City yesterday, "nurtured international ambitions for his cars at a time when Japan was still derided as a flogger of cheap radios," as Jonathan Soble writes in "Financial Times."
  • Tesla Challenged On Pricing
    More signs that the Tesla is more than a passing figment of one entrepreneur's obsession arose yesterday in the forms of two attacks on the highly regarded and suddenly profitable all-electric vehicle whose list price currently starts at 70Gs for the long-range Model S and vroooms upwards to 95Gs with options.
« Previous Entries