• Apple's iOS Content-Blocking Capabilities Causing Ad Agita
    The accommodating nature of Apple's forthcoming iOS9 to ad-blocking apps on its Safari browser is not only upsetting publishers because of what it can do, it's all the more threatening because it may make the practice of just saying no to being pitched a mainstream practice.
  • Apple Watch Sales Data May Be Better Than It Has Hinted
    Although Apple has been touting its Watch's ability to track everything from minutes of brisk activity to glucose levels, it has been vague about its own sales data for the device since it went on sale in late June. A new report, however, suggests that it burst off the blocks and trails only the much-simpler and less-expensive Fitbit in the wearable-devices race.
  • Farmers Rejoice As Monsanto Drops Pursuit Of Syngenta
    After four months of an aggressive but controversial wooing of Swiss-based agrichemicals company Syngenta, St. Louis-based Monsanto is walking away after its third and last offer - $46 billion - was summarily rejected.
  • BK To McDonald's: 'Let's Make Burgers Together'
    Burger King is proposing that arch-rival McDonald's join it in a one-day cease-fire by opening a pop-up shop in Atlanta on Sept. 21 to sell a specially concocted "McWhopper" that "gets the world talking" about Peace One Day, an annual "day of global ceasefire and nonviolence" founded in 1999.
  • Financial Advisors Trot Out The 'Stay Calm' Messaging
    The U.S. stock market rout in recent days -- call it a long-anticipated "correction," a reaction to the economic slowdown in China, or both -- has financial-services marcom types, money-beat columnists, quotable academics and a social-media sage or two working overtime to distribute the familiar scripts of "don't panic" and "buy low." In other words, we've been here before and we'll be there again.
  • Samsung Can't Please Everybody
    Samsung raised expectations with a series of earlier-than-usual product announcements last week but some tech critics are expressing frustration over everything from unavailable product to poor marketing, and at least one competitor has jumped on it for its distribution strategy.
  • Subway Cuts Fogle As Report Of Impending Plea Surfaces
    Subway's terse tweet yesterday - "we no longer have a relationship with Jared and have no further comment" - looks to definitively disassociate the company and its franchises from its longtime spokesman but Fogle's expected guilty plea to possession of child pornography today in Indianapolis inevitably puts it back into the headlines.
  • QVC Sees Something Special In Zulily
    The flash-sale site Zulily is being snatched up by Liberty Interactive, the parent of home-shopping network QVC, for $18.75 a share - almost 15% less than the $22 a share it fetched at its initial public offering 21 months ago. The discount reflects some admittedly poor marketing choices by Zulily even as its stock hit more than $72.75 a share in February 2014.
  • 'Compton' Sizzles As Universal Keeps The Beat
    "Straight Outta Compton" was a straight outta Hollywood success story for Universal over the weekend, with the biopic of rap group N.W.A. taking in a "scorching" $56.1 million at the box office, almost twice its $29 million budget, as the "Variety" headline put it. "It's the kind of opening usually reserved for so-called tentpole movies that trade in costumed heroes and special effects, not urban violence," as Brent Lang writes.
  • Honest Gets $100 Million More To Nurture Growth Spurt
    Honest Co., the mostly online, subscription-based, "non-toxic" baby products company co-founded by actress Jessica Alba in 2012, has raised $100 million in additional funding, pushing its valuation to an estimated $1.7 billion.
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