Get ready to see lots of Mickey, Bigfoot and Sing-a-ma-jigs!: Retailers are readying their toy departments for the coming holiday season, and the price guns are already drawn. Target says it is discounting prices on more than 1,000 toys—including 250 of which can be found exclusively at Target. The bargains include some of the toys expected to be the season's biggest hits, such as Sing-a-ma-jigs, Bigfoot, Squinkies, Toy Story 3 items, Zoobles, Kung Zhu hamsters, and Leapster Explorer Learning System. And Toys R Us, which has already announced an aggressive holiday expansion via pop-up stores, unveiled its "hot …

Vodka brand Stolichnaya is signing with Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the sales and marketing arm of the forthcoming Barclays Center in Brooklyn to be a Founding Partner in a five-year alliance with the the Nets NBA team and the sports and entertainment venue in downtown brooklyn, where the Nets will play. The Barclays Center is slated to open in mid 2012, and will be the first professional sports venue in Brooklyn since 1957 As part of the agreement with the Barclays Center, Stoli will have category exclusive branding throughout the new arena and the branding of six bars.

Looks like back-to-school shopping delivered at least a little more than stores expected after all, with major retailers posting modest gains for September. Teen retailers Abercrombie & Fitch and Zumiez saw big jumps, and mainline department stores turned in exceedingly solid results. But overall, the results are a bit of a decline. Kantar Retail, which tracks 31 large chains, says its monthly index fell to 2.8%, down a little from the 3.1% same-store sales gain in the previous month. But it was up from the 0.9% gain in September of last year. The International Council of Shopping Centers, which …

Will fail whales become extinct, similar to dinosaurs? Twitter has designed a new search architecture that took the company's search gurus about six months to build. The search team built the search architecture on a more efficient inverted index rather than a relational database. They chose to start with Lucene, a search engine library written in Java. More than 1,000 tweets per sec and 12,000 queries per sec that equal more than 1 billion queries per day puts a heavy load on machines, so the new system must last for several years with the ability to scale. The search team estimates …

McDonald's and Zynga today formally rolled out their partnership giving the fast-food chain its own branded plot in FarmVille where players of the social game can interact to win special prizes. Developed by appssavvy and OMD, the one-day promotion on FarmVille lets people help to grow crops on the McDonald's Farm to win rewards such as a "McCafe Consumable," a virtual good that lets players speed up their work rate. They can also earn a virtual McDonald's Hot Air Balloon to decorate their personal farm. Sorry, no actual McNuggets or Double Quarter Pounders on offer through the campaign. Read more

The Los Angeles Kings are the first sports franchise to advertise on Internet radio service Pandora with a local campaign tied to the start of the new NHL season. The "Be Part of the Pride" effort starting today will allow fans to use the platform's social share feature to create and share a "mixtape" of the team's favorite music. Favorite songs selected by Kings players including Ryan Smyth, Jarret Stoll and Rob Scuderi were combined in a mixtape fans can add to their personalized stations on Pandora. The creative campaign will run on the Pandora website and mobile phone …

Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. sit on a sprawling grassy campus formerly occupied (and still owned by) HP. Behind the main building is a basketball court, which if today's menu is any indication, employees had better start using. Today, the day of Facebook's hot-anticipated press conference coming off it's lockdown period, the court hosted not a game of 3-on-3, but three folding tables laden with hamburgers, barbecue ribs, collared greens, mac and cheese, and cookies. The ribs had just a hint of the slightly sweet tang of Korean BBQ and the mac and cheese clotted above the canned …

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced three new functions that would be rolling out on the social network over the next few days, the most significant of which is a ground up re-imagining of the way the Social Graf is organized. He, and key company product managers, pitched the new product as a solution solution to the biggest problem in social networking. A long time complaint many users (and people who refuse to become users) have had with Facebook, is that there is no one type of "friend." The fundamental problem of facebook was also the premise of Facebook. …

Gibby comes from agency background ... a year ago, Redbox was sitting on organic assets that were growing by hundreds of thousands a month. With 24K-plus kiosks, one number we think about is how many consumers actually see a Redbox ... it's about 230 million impressions a week. To consumers, Redbox is value, simple, convenient and fun. (Geez, it's all there!)

How Redbox Unleashed The Power Of Local Digital. With more than 24,000 locations nationwide, redbox rents more than a million movies a day. A national leader, redbox has never lost focus on "the community." Through geo-targeting, navigational tools and the formation of consumer communities, redbox is perceived as the local video store by millions of consumers and fans nationwide.