As far as fantasy sports scenarios go, we may never know how a team or player of old would compare athletically to their contemporaries, but at least we know how they would in terms of their marketability, thanks to the team at Nielsen. To ascertain which of the U.S. Olympic basketball "Dream Teams" has more marketing muscle - the Michael Jordan-led 1992 team or this year's version - Nielsen utilized E-Poll's so-called "N-Score' rating system, which measures the endorsement potential of celebrities, and determined that the 1992 team would trounce the 2012 lineup by a large margin: 158.7 N-Score points …

A new study by Strategy Analytics suggests the rise of HTML5 doesn’t spell doom for the app economy. Rather, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to leverage the best of native and open standards. “HTML5 is not the future of apps. While developers dream of ‘write once run everywhere’ the fragmented support for and limited APIs within HTML5 make this impossible. In fact, we predict the hybrid app is the future,” stated Josh Martin, director of Apps Research at Strategy Analytics. That …

The iPhone continues to be a crucial device for AT&T even though other carriers now also sell it. Apple sold 3.7 million of the Apple handsets in the second quarter, more than a fifth (22%) of which came from new customers. That total was up slightly from 3.6 million a year ago. AT&T said it activated a record 5.5 million smartphones in the quarter. Verizon last week said it sold 2.7 million iPhones in the period, along with 2.9 million Android smartphones. AT&T added a total of 1.3 million wireless customers, including 320,000 net new contract subscribers. That’s down from …

The Direct Marketing Association has formed a new group, the True Simplification of Taxation Coalition, which will lobby Congress regarding taxes of online purchases. Other members of the new coalition are the American Catalog Mailers Association, Electronic Retailers Association, and NetChoice.

Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp has taken control of Newsweek Daily Beast, as joint venture partner The Harmon Family steps into a minority role, reports Reuters.

Matt Jacobs has joined Digitas San Francisco as senior vice president-strategy and analysis from founder and principal of consulting firm Telegraphe Partners. Jacobs is rejoining Digitas, previously working in the New York City office from 2005 to 2008.

Alastair Taylor has joined WPP's MEC Canada as senior vice president-managing partner, effective immediately. Taylor, who reports to MEC Canada President Michele Pauchuk,will be responsible for managing MEC's Molson account and supporting Michele in the running current and new business initiatives.He joins MEC from Carat Toronto, where he was vice president-managing director.

MLB Advanced Media said today the latest version of its popular At Bat app hit five million downloads for the first time in a single season. That easily eclipsed the 2011 total of 3.9 million downloads. Video viewing on the At Bat 12 app, which has a $9.99 subscription fee for the season, is also up sharply. Baseball fans have watched some 21 million video streams on the iPhone and iPad, and Android smartphones and tablets, a 20% increase from last year season-ending total. The daily average for streams on the At Bat has more than doubled from last year.

CNN-owned Zite in April launched a program giving participating publishers their own dedicated sections within its newsreader app. The Daily Beast, Motley Fool and The Huffington Post were among the first outlets to sign on. Today, Zite announced the expansion of its publisher program with the addition of the Chicago Tribune, Cult of Mac, Entrepreneur, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, the International Business Times, the Los Angeles Times, and IDG titles Macworld, PC World and TechHive. Each specialized section feature’s a publication’s own branding as well as articles and content tailored to a user’s interests and tastes through Zite’s algorithm. …

Zite has extended its mobile news aggregator app to the Windows Phone platform. The app, which made its debut last year on the iPad, is now also available on the iPhone, Android devices, and the HP TouchPad. The company said the latest version of the Zite app is optimized for Windows Phone devices and takes advantage design principles built into the platform’s Metro interface. Given the tiny market share of Microsoft’s mobile OS, the move won’t necessarily catapult Zite’s downloads to new heights. Windows Phone’s share of the U.S. smartphone market as of May was 4%, according to comScore …