ABC sells out ads for Oscars.

AOL is constantly innovating but toward what end remains unclear.

American Airlines and U.S. Airways move closer to merger as U.S. Airways rises to top of customer-loyalty survey. 

Banana Republic hooks up with Match.com for Valentine's mixers.

Boeing prepares redesign of troubled Dreamliner batteries.

Campbell Soup enlists celebrity chef in heart-health campaign.

Chipotle plans mid-year price increase.Continue reading...

Will Facebook’s newly unveiled social graph feature soon bring the company profit and additional relevance? 

Mixed reactions are meeting Graph Search, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg called "one of the coolest things we've done in a while" in announcing the feature on Tuesday.

Graph Search enables search using natural language and replaces links to answers with direct results. Sample searches include “Movies my friends in San Francisco like,” “Photos my friends took in the 1990s,” and “Languages my friends from college speak.”

"This is a beta product," Zuckerberg said at the company's rollout event in Menlo Park, Calif. "We focused on a few use cases that we think are good. Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook."Continue reading...

American Apparel seeks rescue financing to avert bankruptcy.

Apple revamps MobileMe, sues Samsung over Galaxy phone; Samsung vows to fight back.

McDonald's launches US hiring blitz today.

Asos could be forced to rebrand in Germany.

BMW's DesignworksUSA expands to China with Shanghai office.

Burger King settles with franchisees over Value Menu.

Dish Network will keep 600 Blockbuster locations open.Continue reading...

AT&T promotes its 4G network with a commercial that rewinds a football player's life back to the moment his dad first bought him tickets to a game, purchased (of course) with his AT&T phone.

Watch more new spots — from Audi, Coca-Cola, TurboTax, Intel and other brands — after the jump.Continue reading...

Comcast today unveiled Tunerfish, a social discovery platform for video content created by John McCrea at Plaxo, which Comcast acquired in 2008. It's now tweeting, and opens to the public next month in beta (sign up here), with iPhone and iPad apps in development. Robert Scoble, who calls it Foursquare for TV, shot the above video with McCrea.

Other brands in the news:

Apple may introduce new iPhone next month.

After delay, BP plans plug attempt as Gulf oil leak costs rise.

Coca-Cola is partnering with RecycleBank in the UK.

Dish Network and Weather Channel signed a new US TV pact.

Ford is investing $135M to boost electric car production.Continue reading...

Hewlett-Packard confirmed rumors that it will acquire Palm for about $1 billion, and plans to "invest heavily in product development." The sale should be good news for mobile computing and Palm investor Bono. In personal branding news, Bruce Willis taped a spot (above) for his upcoming cologne launching in (Cologne?) Germany while David Letterman is launching his own music label. Also garnering buzz today:Continue reading...

What goes around comes around: In the '90s, Conde Nast's Internet branch CondeNet shut down the thriving dating and personals service it ran through its Swoon website, ceding the lucrative space to Match, Nerve and eHarmony.

Now the company (facing a brutal round of closures, layoffs and cutbacks) has decided to try again, with trulymadlydating.com, aimed at matching women who read Glamour with GQ's male audience. Gawker's sleuths note the site appears aimed at the British market and is operated by The Dating Lab.

Conde Nast (my former employer, I need to note) moved quickly onto the Internet in the mid-90s, though it was slow to evolve online for a while thereafter. Swoon was their early attempt to take content from print magazines like Glamour, Self, and Mademoiselle and package it under new stand-alone web brands. Swoon, focused on relationship content, and Phys, which was about health and fitness, are long gone, but Conde Nast's approach of separate web brands continues with Style.com (fashion content from Vogue and W), Epicurious for food and Concierge for travel.Continue reading...