World markets are in a new danger zone, head of World Bank says, but the markets notched solid gains early on Monday.

AOL finds content growth comes at a cost

BNY Mellon accused of favoritismin Florida suit.

CNBC gets a bounce from covering stock-market ills.

Dick’s Sporting Goods supports concussion testing of high-school athletes.

Google to buy Motorola Mobility in largest acquisition.

Lowe’s cuts view of prospects.

Ralcorp rejects latest takeover bid by ConAgra.Continue reading...

Time Warner Cable has finally done what Wile E. Coyote has attempted to do with every tool imaginable for eons: rid the screen of that pesky Road Runner.

The little speedster has been a longtime mascot for the cable operator's high-speed Internet service, called Road Runner, but the mascot is being “replaced by the line drawing of a human eye and ear that is used to promote TWC's cable-TV and phone services,” Fortune (another Time Warner property) reports.

A vestige of the days when Time Warner Cable was part of Time Warner (it was spun off in 2008 in a separation that was finalized the following year), the speedy Warner Bros. cartoon character was adopted by the company's cable operation as the brand for its high-speed Internet service, which will still be called "Road Runner," but now comes in many more flavors including Road Runner Mobile, PowerBoost and WiFi hotspots.Continue reading...

Qatar-based Al Jazeera finally has a toehold in Manhattan after months of persistent pressure on U.S cable and satellite systems.

Al Jazeera English (AJE) is now being simulcast in New York City 23 hours a day on RISE, a cable channel adjunct to WRNN, which is carried by Time Warner Cable and rival Verizon FiOS. The deal makes AJE available starting today on Time Warner Cable's channel 92, with FiOS channel 466 adding the feed in the coming days, for a total reach of 2 million New York area homes.

As part of its carriage contract, RISE must carry one hour of daily local programming; now, the other 23 hours will be a live feed of AJE. While the contract gives Al Jazeera a presence in a key U.S. market, it's hitting the Big Apple via a sublease deal as opposed to outright carriage deal, which means its opportunities for marketing and branding are hindered.

“It’s all about leverage in this business, and they don’t have any,” observed Paul Maxwell, a cable industry consultant, to the New York Times.Continue reading...

British PM David Cameron tells Parliament that he now regrets hiring former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as News Corp. faces US calls for Dow Jones inquiry over phone hacking and London police say their investigation could take years. Wendi Murdoch fever also explodes on the web as her husband's media empire attempts to restore reputation.

American Express reports record cardholder spending.

American Idol co-creator Simon Fuller is suing Simon Cowell for a cut of The X Factor on FOX.

Associated Press will link to sources starting Aug. 1st.

Coach signs Gwyneth Paltrow for UK launch campaign.

Google offers credit card to advertisers, winds down Google Labs, launches Google+ iPhone app.

Intel quarterly results beats analysts' expectations.Continue reading...

The longer America’s economic doldrums continue, and the debt-ceiling talks drag on, the more that Corporate America feels compelled to speak out, both in criticism and defense of the man in the middle of the maelstrom: President Obama.

Last week’s berating of America's corporate chieftains by GE head Jeff Immelt amounted to a sort of defense of the president and his policies. Immelt, a key figure on Obama’s jobs council, told his fellow CEOs to stop whining about the economy and the dire employment situation and to create jobs within their companies.

And earlier this week, a group of CEOs were convened for an education roundtable (at top), evidently eager to meet with President Obama to help him figure out how industry-led partnerships can help improve the prospects for America's youth — the foundation of all future job growth, of course.Continue reading...

Transparency is, and has always been, a hot topic in political and business circles.

Run a news search on "transparency" and reams of recent articles turn up. The most notable brand to made the headlines for transparency? Groupon.

Now, Corporate Responsibility Magazine has released its annual "Black List" of the large companies who with the worst transparency and corporate citizenship.

Surveyed companies are selected from the large-cap Russell 1000 companies list. The Black List's rankings are based on an audit of seven categories from publicly-available data. And it's not pretty.Continue reading...

Hollywood's wagons are circling against content theft with a new coalition, Creative America, to fight piracy and protect creative works and jobs.

The entertainment industry coalition states “that halting the looting of America’s creative works and protecting jobs must be a national priority."

Statistics cited on the group's homepage:

• Websites trafficking in stolen film and TV content get nearly 150 million visits every day, more than 50 billion visits per year. 
• Content theft isn’t just about movies. TV shows are illegally streamed and downloaded millions of times each week.  
• Content theft threatens over 2 million jobs supported by the film and televisio n industry in all 50 states and D.C. 
• The vast majority of workers in film and TV are middle class, earning $55K a year on average. These are the people hurt by content theft.  
• Content theft has already cost 140,000 U.S. jobs, along with $5 billion in wages and revenues for residuals and pensions. 

The founding members — including NBC Universal, SAG, Sony Pictures Entertainment, AFTRA, CBS, the DGA, IATSE, Twentieth Century Fox, Viacom, Disney and Warner Bros. — call themselves a “grassroots organization” supporting 2 million Americans whose jobs are in creative fields.Continue reading...

How leading industry brands are performing in social media customer service comes under the microscope in a new study released by market researcher Alterian — specifically, how effectively 12 brands are using social media to resolve customers' issues and the impact on their marketing efforts.

Microsoft was the top performer in the report — titled "Social Media Report Cards: Measuring Brand Engagement" — across all industries, achieving the highest overall score for social media customer service. 

Alterian's researchers examined brand leaders in six industries: travel, banking, cable, mobile, gaming and consumer electronics, and concluded that higher scores went to brands showing “a correlation between rapid customer service response times and positive consumer sentiment on social media.”Continue reading...