AT&T slashes price of Lumia smartphone.

Aereo online-TV service expands in U.S.

Bank of England chief denies New York Fed chief gave warning on rate-rigging.

Richard Branson considers bid for Virgin Records.

Coca-Cola beats estimates with international sales up 5%.

Famous Dave's expands beyond U.S..

GM likely to retain Opel brand despite brand's woes.

Gap eyes Lululemon's Athletica stores with its own Athleta store openings.Continue reading...

Facebook heads into IPO today with record pricing and a strategy to raise money, not hype, WSJ says — but also with persistent questions among brand marketers about the value of advertising, among other challenges. Meanwhile, average investors face long odds on a big Facebook payday, which will make Bono the richest rock star and Mark Zuckerberg richer than Google's co-founders.

Yahoo names new executive team as Alibaba deal apparently looms.

HP plans to slash workforce by up to 30,000, WSJ says.

Bud Light is drawing online buzz from Millennials.

Amazon to sell ads on Kindle Fire welcome screen.

Barneys New York relaunches website.

Coca-Cola bests Pom Wonderful in court in latest round of long-running labeling dispute.Continue reading...

Apple's next iPhone will have a bigger screen, sources tell Reuters.

JPMorgan faces FBI probe as shareholders sue the company and CEO Jamie Dimon over $2B loss.

Time Warner Cable and Viacom settle iPad dispute.

Air Pacific returns to Fiji Airways branding.

Ben Silverman's Electus details programming for YouTube's new food-centric Hungry channel.

Chevron benefits from Japan's shift away from nuclear.

Comcast launches Skype in select U.S. markets.Continue reading...

The race for NFC-based mobile payments is heating up with projections for 2013 exceeding $13 billion globally, up from just over $7 billion in 2011, according to Gartner research.

Isis, the mobile-payments joint venture backed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, has signed up Coca-Cola, Macy’s, Aéropostale, Dillard’s, Foot Locker (and its subsidiary Champs Sports) and Jamba Juice, as well as hundreds of local retailers in Texas and Utah who will start accepting Isis payments by this summer.

Both Isis and competitor Google Wallet use NFC chips that store user’s credit card data or pre-loaded digital cash. Both companies are also working with check-out scanners and retailers including Gap, Office Max, Toys ‘R’ Us and Walgreens. 

Google Wallet is currently available on four Sprint handsets and none from the mobile operators backing Isis. Sprint is the only U.S. carrier backing Google Wallet and to that end just released the LG Optimus Elite for Virgin Mobile.Continue reading...

Making history this week, President Obama finally declared his support of same-sex marriage, the first such declaration by a U.S. president. Now it's time for brands to step up and get over any aversion to showing same-sex couples in their campaigns.

Case in point: Gap’s new billboard featuring a real-life same-sex couple — Tony nominee Rory O'Malley and his boyfriend Gerold Schroeder — helps bridges the gap a little bit more between mainstream advertising and homophobic prejudice.

Featured prominently on a Los Angeles corner, the ad is part of Gap’s "Be Bright" campaign and the handsome couple are certainly a significant step in the brand’s efforts to reinvigorate lackluster sales and enlarge its customer embrace.

JCPenney, under its new "Fair and Square" tagline, continues to fight the good fight, too, facing down conservative pressure groups like One Million Moms by choosing openly gay Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson and recently featuring a lesbian couple and their daughter on their Mother's Day catalog.Continue reading...

One trick of the high-school set when writing what they believe to be a ridiculously long paper is to just change the margins. Push things in a little and it makes it that much easier to achieve the required number of pages. Some never leave this little trick behind. A judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, who is hearing a trademark suit involving Gap Inc.'s flagship Gap brand, requires that all documents put before him be double spaced. But lawyers represent the mega-retailer have been accused of adjusting the spacing in such a way that they achieved “four extra lines per page,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 

The lawyers in question work at Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu PC and they are working on a case about “a trademark dispute involving T-shirts labeled with the phrase ‘Lower East Side’ and ‘LES NYC,’” the Journal notes. Their adversaries, the legal team at Patterson Belknap Webb Tyler LLP, took a recent brief sent by Gap lawyers and “used a computer program to determine that the line spacing on Fross Zelnick’s reply brief was ‘1.75’ instead of double spaced.” Because of this, the judge allowed Patterson Belknap to “file a 30-page, instead of 25-page, brief on Thursday” so that the two sides would be given equal space to express themselves. 

As for the suit itself, it was filed by New York-based designer Robert Lopez of LES Clothing Co, who has quite a track record taking on big brands.Continue reading...

Angry Birds Space sets mobile download record.

Apple and Microsoft face price-gouging inquiry in Australia.

Barack Obama tests "Forward" as a campaign slogan.

BP will pay $4 billion on new oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

BlackBerry will be in the hot seat at BlackBerry World conference by RIM on Tuesday.

Broadway tests autism-friendly theater performances.

Brooklyn Nets unveils new team logo designed by Jay-Z.

Chrysler boosts Jeep production.

Facebook will announce a "life-saving tool" on Good Morning America on Tuesday.Continue reading...

Americans love their gift cards, as the average American adult gives five a year and they are the most requested gift. Now they can turn to Wrapp, a social gifting service that enables F2F (friend-to-friend) marketing on behalf of brands.

The Swedish startup, founded last year, launches today in the U.S. with major retail partners including Gap, Fab.com, H&M, Sephora, the Wall Street Journal, Brooklyn Industries, Warby Parker, WeSC, Gant, Bjorn Borg, with another 15 retailers in the wings.Continue reading...