Under its Virgin Mobile prepaid banner, Sprint will offer a monthly Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram-only plan to consumers who use the phone for gabbing about as often as their parents sent a telegram for $12 to $15 (the amount varies in different accounts, as it always seems to do when you're talking phone bills). Or they can get all four for about $10 more. And $5 will get them unlimited streaming of a music app such as Pandora or Spotify.

Will expense accounts go the way of three-martini lunches in corporate America? Uber and Airbnb, the poster startups of the sharing economy, both announced programs targeting business professionals this week that will utilize the software of expense management company Concur to allow users to charge their room and car service fees to the company tab.

Zillow and Trulia, the Nos. 1 and 2 in online real-estate listing sites, announced an all-stock merger yesterday, creating a behemoth that will "dominate the traffic for online home listings" and result in combined savings of about $100 million by 2016, reports the New York Times' Michael de la Merced.

It took a female action hero who uses more than 10% of her brain and kills her foes with the methodical precision of a Tarantino character to finally put a slight smile on the face of Hollywood executives fretting over the evaporation of their summer audiences, which have vanished as suddenly as the humans in the HBO series "The Leftovers."

Bill Simon, who discovered he'd lost the competition for the top job at Walmart to Doug McMillon last November, is leaving the company after he spends six month consulting with his successor as president and CEO Greg Foran, who started in retailing as a teenager stocking grocery shelves in his native New Zealand.

The cost of Gilead's hepatitis C drug Sovaldi is so high -- $1,000 a pill -- that a congressional investigation has been launched to determine why some state Medicaid programs and private insurers are beginning to restrict its use.

Dick's Sporting Goods yesterday yelled out a loud "fore!" for the trajectory of its golf business by laying off 400 to 500 - accounts differ - of the pros who gave its stores a touch of country-club elan and presumably kept the dotcom wolves at bay.

Bill Ackman - the "activist investor" also frequently modified as "billionaire hedge fund honcho" - has promised a showdown in the digital corral at 10 a.m. ET today with slides and videos blazing against Herbalife, the company his Pershing Square Capital Management first shorted in May 2012, with a presentation packed with "particularity."

As the world of marketing eases its way into the summer doldrums, we can always count on Comic-Cons to provide some action for our coverage. The one with more gimmicks below its cape than the Legion of Super Heroes has had reboots and re-launches -- the San Diego event that kicks off Thursday for about 130,000 attendees -- truly has "marketing executives [asking], 'what have we got to show the geeks,'" this year, as the "Wall Street Journal's" Ben Fritz puts it.

In anticipation of an overhaul of its infamously siloed culture, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday announced an anticipated "restructuring" that will begin by laying off up to 18,000 workers over the next year - 14% of its staff - mostly from the mobile phone and tablet area that swelled with its acquisition of Nokia.