Google announced the Nexus 7 tablet. It will have a 7-inch screen. The $199 device will ship in mid July. Consumers can start ordering it through Google on Wednesday, initially in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The announcement made at the The Google I/O conference on Wednesday.

Vibrant Media has hired John Haskin as VP Marketing. Haskin, to be based in New York,will handleVibrant's marketing, corporate branding, custom creative, sales marketing, sales development,and sales research teams.

Agency holding company Omnicom is reportedly in talks to buy independent digital shop LBi, reports Campaignlive.com. Speculation surfaced last week that LBi was in play after WPP agreed to purchase indie digital shop AKQA for about $540 million. Earlier this week LBi confirmed the speculation, essentially putting out the For Sale sign. Campaign reports that talks are focused on a price of $575 million. Some analysts believe another round of consolidation in the digital agency ranks is underway, with Sapient potentially in play among others.

Yahoo hasn’t had much to brag about in recent years when it comes to music, but a new partnership with Spotify could help to improve the Web portal’s appeal in that area. Under their agreement, Spotify’s on-demand music service will initially be offered within Yahoo Music before being rolled out across other Yahoo properties like Movies and omg! Besides giving Spotify access to its audience of 700 million worldwide, Yahoo will also create a branded app for Spotify’s platform featuring unspecified original entertainment content. "Delivering compelling premium experiences across screens is core to our mission at Yahoo!. Spotify is …

Mobile rich media ad firm Celtra on Tuesday announced the latest version of its AdCreator platform, boasting 70 new ad features. The company said AdCreator 3 also included an overhaul of the user interface to improve the ad-building experience and provide additional working area. Celtra’s system allows users to create HTML5-based rich media display ads that run within mobile apps and on the mobile Web across smartphones and tablets and different mobile operating systems. Last year, the company integrated the IAB’s Mobile Rich Media Interface Definitions (MRAID) into AdCreator, letting advertisers create traffic and track rich media mobile ads …

At the Lures of Retail event in Boston, New Balance's head of global digital brand marketing Stacey Howe compared the relationship between marketers and consumers to the "five second rule" whenever you drop food on the ground.

Speaking at the Boston Ad Club's Lures of Retail event, eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey said, "The consumer is no longer just a couch potato." Instead, Ramsey calls them them the "couch octopus" because of all of the multitasking they do.

Ford, which by now could publish a playbook on social-media launch campaigns for cars and crossovers, is launching another one for the new 2013 Fusion. The campaign also shows how television is becoming a support for digital media, as it features Ryan Seacrest, who made his name on TV. The campaign, "Random Acts of Fusion" has Seacrest guiding consumers through the launch via social media.

After securing $3 million in venture funding earlier this year, mobile demand-side platform (DSP) today said it has raised an additional $500,000 to close its first-round financing. The latest investment comes from SoftTech VC and Siemer Ventures, and angel investor Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics. StrikeAd also announced moving its headquarters from London to New York and said the new capital raised would be used to fuel its expansion in the U.S.

New HBO drama "The Newsroom" --- coming from Aaron Sorkin of "West Wing" and "Social Network" fame -- started off decently, with some 2.1 million viewers on Sunday. All that is a pretty good number for debuting on a pay TV service that only gets into around 30% of all U.S TV homes. Previous big HBO dramas started out around the same or lower levels-- "Games of Thrones" in 2011 hit 2.2 million, "True Blood" took in 1.4 million in 2008; and "Luck", which started up earlier this year, had a 1.1 million number. Still, HBO's more successful current dramas …