The elite Yellow Pages. The Who's Who of the rich and famous. A modern take on ye olde Social Register. Call it what you want, but the NYIndex: The Wall Street Journal's Empirical Guide to Power, Fame and Infamy delves deeper into the pockets of NYC's elite than ever before. 

WSJ introduced its NYIndex as so: “Power is the most coveted and volatile currency in New York—and, often, the most misunderstood. It's a city where almost anything can be purchased at any hour, but not power.”  

Attaching “stock” and “value” to people is nothing new. Forbes has been doing it for years, beginning with its old school Social Register, which the New York Times described in 1997 as the, “slightly oblong black book with the orange lettering, which lists addresses, phone numbers, club memberships and yacht names of its approximately 30,000 families. It has been helping blue bloods keep in touch for more than 100 years.”Continue reading...

Ford has taken some arrows as the auto industry's social-media-marketing leader, most notably around a staged press conference in Sept. 2011 that was pushed out on social media. But for the most part, the automaker's social aggressiveness has helped it conquer new territory. Becoming an acknowledged trailblazer in the arena also has helped Ford sidestep potential problems that can attend companies if they get too far out on social-media limbs.

"Ford being well-respected ... in the social space, has given us an added level of credibility and it has given us a legion of fans who actually act as our eyes and ears and who can flag stuff for us," Scott Monty, Ford's director of social media, told Business Insider. People are "looking out for our best interests and will say, you know, 'You guys might want to take a look at this.'" Including, evidently, the company's CEO.Continue reading...

Honda is punctuating its 2012 comeback in the U.S. market with souped-up output and fetching advertising for the new 2013 Accord mid-size sedan.

Throwing the ninth generation of its mainstay Accord — the first substantially overahauled version since 2008 — into the increasingly competitive and crowded U.S. mid-size sedan market with its official launch this week, Honda is beginning a new integrated advertising campaign "designed to artfully highlight the new Accord's sophisticated design, dynamic performance, rich feature content and value," according to a Honda press release.

And, in fact, the new ads do just that, in the early stages of Honda's "It Starts With You" campaign. The print ads feature, for instance, a bee-startled driver and the caption "Lane Departure Warning. Because Distractions Happen" and a caught-in-the-headlights startled deer (Caption: "LED Headlights.").Continue reading...

Facebook users can now capture their nightlife experience in a rich multimedia manner that shares the fun, virtually.

It's all thanks to the NightTag app, which "lets your friends know where you are, what you're doing, and what you're listening to. It gives you club listings [in select regions] and, if you're not going out, brings the music to you through a selection of live radio streams."

The app, billed as the first social music app specifically for Facebook, posts a photo from, say, a nightclub; activates music-recognition software that identifies the song and the location where it’s playing via GPS, then posts the elements onto a user’s Facebook Timeline in one, unified photo post.Continue reading...

Kids and Young Adult (YA) e-book sales in the U.S. grew by triple digits in February, reports the Association of American Publishers, as compared to relatively flat adult e-book sales figures. The total for e-book sales in the category is close to 25 million sold in January 2012.

The key contributing factor: adults are devouring YA e-books like The Hunger Games trilogy, and — still — Harry Potter. The Hunger Games franchise held the top three spots for the month of January on both the physical bestseller list and the Kindle paid bestseller list, appearing on USA Today’s bestseller list and taking first place for Amazon and Kindle sales. With the March release of the movie, stats on e-book sales to be released next month could be record-breaking.

On the Pottermore e-hub, which was announced last June, Harry Potter e-book sales reached close to 525,000 in the first month, totaling about $4.8 million. The Pottermore e-bookstore launched on March 27 as the exclusive place to buy Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks followed by the full Potter digi-verse on April 14.Continue reading...

“Alohomora!” J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website to keep the world of Harry Potter alive on digital has finally opened its e-bookstore.

While Rowling's books have sold an estimated 450 million physical copies and been translated into more than 70 languages, the author had retained the digital rights as part of her book publishing contracts, so the e-book editions weren't immediately available — until the Pottermore (think "Potter" plus "ever more") digital brand extension plan was announced last June. Already, Slate is calling it a game-changer for publishing.Continue reading...

In the latest example of an auto brand tapping the deep veins of nostalgia to peddle their wares, a most unlikely marque is going to that well beginning today: Toyota and its new Prius c hybrid.

Riffing on Hasbro's The Game of Life classic board game, the brand's "The Game of Life with Prius c" campaign demonstrates key vehicle attributes in what Toyota calls a "fun and approachable way" that aims to appeal to first-time car buyers with a more reasonably priced and smaller version of Prius, whose price premiums — compared with a similarly equipped and -sized conventional vehicle — have certainly deterred many a buyer.Continue reading...

Google unveiled Google Play today, rebranding its media and app markets into one place as it seeks to unify social and mobile around games, video, music and other content as part of its "One Google" effort. The pitch for Google Play: "Your favorite entertainment is now all in one place, always accessible on the web and across your Android devices." Learn more in the videos below.Continue reading...