It would ignore years of strategizing, research and development - and 10 million miles of test-drives - to categorize Ford's wager on its spanking new F-150 pickup trucks as a roll of the die-cast aluminum. But as the first new vehicles emerged yesterday, auto pundits were wondering if the world is ready for them. And, by the way, the recent steep decline in gas prices won't help propel sales of the fuel-efficient vehicles.

With its slice of the pie still dominant but declining, Pizza Hut yesterday announced what the newly promoted David Gibbs called "one of the biggest moves we've ever made in our history." Gibbs, the president of Pizza Hut, U.S., who will become global CEO of the Yum Brands subsidiary on Jan. 1, hosted a gathering of the media yesterday to announce a new menu starting Nov. 19, along with an overhaul of its marketing.

Hollywood liked what it saw over the weekend: Two high-budget movies, targeting different audiences, each took in more than $50 million domestically for their openings and observers expect them to rake in quite a bit more as they hang around through the Thanksgiving holidays and expand their reach.

Right now, Amazon is touting such features as its ability to quickly and flawlessly spell "cantaloupe." And you can only add items you have a sudden hankering to acquire - cantaloupes, say - to a shopping list. But make no mistake about what a new personal- assistant device called Echo is meant to become.

Some Internet memes rely on added sugar and mysterious ingredients to extend their shelf lives, as we discussed yesterday. Others, such as "Alex from Target," are like French black truffles - not only are they wild, rare and out of the reach of most of us but they also require highly sensitive snouts to root them out.

There's a lot of hoo-haw out there this morning about three new "viral" videos in the "McDonald's "Our Food. Your Questions" campaign that are explicitly "about the McRib - just as the product is rolling out into about 75% of McDonald's restaurants nationwide," as Bruce Horovitz reports in "USA Today."

"What?... Can you hear me?... You're fading...." Sprint - the No. 3 mobile carrier that has been hampered by a weaker network than its lager rivals, lingering confusion over its pricing and a failed merger scheme with T-mobile - continues to lose its connection with its branded customers.

Bouncing back from its inability to close a deal with Omnicom earlier this year to bulk up for a counter-offensive against the Google/Facebook et al. juggernaut, Paris-based Publicis Groupe has agreed to buy Boston-based Sapient for $3.7 billion in cash in a deal that underscores how big a deal Big Data is becoming. Lest there be any doubt about Publicis' intentions, the sentence introducing the bullet points of the agreement reads: "Transformative acquisition establishes Publicis Groupe as the clear leader in the digital age."