Angry Birds first Christmas song ("Fly Me Home Tonight") released by Rovio.

Apple downgraded by Citi on China suppliers, while first weekend iPhone 5 sales in China top two million.

NRA goes silent in wake of Newtown, CT, school massacre as President Obama vows to get tougher on guns.

Diet Pepsi quietly changes sweetener in advance of new logo, tagline and can design.

Barclays protests US energy fine.

Best Buy extends deadline for founder's buyout bid.

Chrysler undecided on minivan plan.

Cisco reportedly plans to sell Linksys brand.

Coca-Cola resurrects Mello Yello in Australia, plans pop-up beach at Sydney Cricket Stadium.

Facebook's monetization efforts may ride on Walmart campaign lessons.

Li Ning projects substantial loss.

Microsoft urged to ditch Windows brand by Dell.

PPR goes shopping for young brands.

Starbucks defended by London mayor Boris Johnson.

Toyota set to seize global auto sales crown as GM vies for 2nd place.

For PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, the driving force of her reign has been a desire to transform the company into a purveyor of better-for-you foods and beverages for the masses as well as the classic "junk" food brands such as Pepsi soft drinks and Frito-Lay corn chips.

In this quest, Nooyi already has wheeled PepsiCo into fruit-based snack chips, all sorts of healthier beverages and, most recently, a new yogurt brand. But there's another big initiative up her sleeve that Nooyi believes will advance the company still further down her chosen, more nutritious track: "drinkifying."

That's PepsiCo-speak for the R&D push to "drinkify" snacks and "snackify" beverages — creating liquid snacks out of food and vice versa. Nooyi cited a drinkable oatmeal, Leche con Avena, produced by its Quaker brand in Latin America. And Naked smoothies have plenty of food content.

"A way to grow the beverage business is to take foods and drinkify them," Nooyi said at an industry conference sponsored by Beverage Digest this week, according to the Financial Times. "There's a whole range of products we have in the pipeline that are value-added products that can be snacks made into beverages."Continue reading...

Want to have your face on a Pepsi can? Well, first you need to sell more than a 100 million albums around the globe and win 16 Grammy awards. At least, that’s what it took for Beyonce to get her face etched into aluminum.

As already announced, Bey is starring in the Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl XLVII halftime show in February as part of the brand's multimillion-dollar return to the Big Game after pulling out in 2010 to reallocate its funds for the social Pepsi Refresh crowdsourced philanthropy platform. Now

Now PepsiCo is expanding its Super Bowl deal with the performer beyond the half-time show into a full-blown partnership in a $50 million deal that will burnish the Pepsi brand and Brand Beyonce, including marketing support for her new album that's dropping next year.Continue reading...

Apple joins Google in $500M+ bid for Kodak patents; smacked by USPTO as 'Steve Jobs Patent' for iPhones and iPads deemed invalid and Siri secrets revealed.

Diageo seen as unlikely to bid for Beam following UK report that drinks giant talked to Suntory about joint bid.

Barnes & Noble cuts Nook price from $99 to $79.

Michael Bloomberg weighs making bid for The Financial Times, which includes the paper and a half-interest in The Economist. 

Caribou Coffee celebrates 20th anniversary.

Carlos Slim brings Telcel brand to U.S. for Mexico calls.

CVS Caremark reportedly aims to acquire drug-store chain in Brazil.

Chili's begins soft rollout of new menu items.

Darden Restaurants looks to retool value proposition for its Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants.Continue reading...

The siren song — or is that a moo? — of dairy drinks continues to draw America's soft-drink giants deeper into investments in milk-based products. Coca-Cola has today announced an equity investment in a new company that has been formed to market Core Power, a dairy-based recovery brand that the company began distributing a few months ago.

In fact, Coke said, through the newly created Fair Oaks Farms Brands, it plans to help "drive growth and expansion of Core Power and to create an innovative portfolio of brands and products that feature the value-added nutrition of dairy." Fair Oaks Farms and Select Milk Producers, Coke's partners in the new venture, came up with Core Power, and the high protein recover shake brand is run by former Coca-Cola executive Steve Jones.Continue reading...

PepsiCo is doing everything it can to try and convince the 1.2 billion people of India that they might want to try a Pepsi. Or maybe a Mountain Dew?

The beverage giant has just signed on as the title sponsor the Indian Premier League, a major cricket tournament that will be called the Pepsi Indian Premier League for the next five years. And the naming rights only cost about $72 million, twice the amount that the previous five-year sponsor, realtor DLF, shelled out.

Nasdaq.com comments that PepsiCo “has quite a lot invested in the country with a range of snacks (Lay's and Kurkure being the flagship brands) and its usual line of beverages.” That kind of investment has the company trying to protect its place in India as local companies and others try to unseat them. As a CNBC report in the market asked this week, 

While the beverage and food multinational is already a big sponsor of cricket, the IPL investment is reportedly its biggest investment in the game so far. But is the IPL association worth so much money, given that the last edition of the tournament saw viewer ratings at their lowest and given that the BCCI continues to have a volatile relationship with team owners?

India's Economic Times notes that Kurkure and Lay’s, which are the leaders of India’s snack market, are losing market share to such local snack makers as Balaji, Yellow Diamond and DFM Foods' Crax. And new competitors are likely to spring up since the salted-snack market in India has grown 25% annually.Continue reading...

HP CEO Meg Whitman pilloried over $8.8 billion start-up acquisition charge for Autonomy as stock plunges and former CEO comes out of woodwork.

News Corp. reportedly eyeing Simon & Schuster as add-on to HarperCollins and acquires 49% of YES Network as former newspaper execs charged with bribery. YES, meanwhile, extends Yankees TV rights through 2042.

Amazon unveils brand pages and looks to reinvent publishing model with Tim Ferriss book.

Apple products top kids' holiday wish lists, while spaceship-like campus delayed until 2016.

BlackBerry dropped by US agency over device reliability concerns.

Big Ten college sports conference brand could be diluted by eastern driven.

Darden CMO defects to Ruby Tuesday.Continue reading...

Singer and adidas/Pepsi brand ambassador Nicki Minaj released the official commercial for her Pink Friday perfume, named for her first album, which debuted at #2 two years ago. It's a follow-up to an unofficial commercial that hit the web last month.