With its most famous resident putting a "For Sale" sign in her front yard, the city of Malibu, California, is looking for new ways to attract tourists and boost income. 

CNBC reports that Malibu has signed a deal with Excel Corp. in order to start “licensing apparel, active wear, and even things like sunglasses, watches, and volleyballs” with the extra money going to “fund special projects.”

The city is forking over $90,000 for Excel to design a logo and find licensees.Continue reading...

Bid adieu to another legendary brand. The New York Times Company is rebranding its 125 year-old International Herald Tribune as The International New York Times as it strives to buttress its international presence. 

The change ends the 40-year-old IHT brand—which is perhaps most familiar to U.S. expats—and underscores the tectonic shifts in newspaper journalism and revenue streams wrought by digital and an increasingly competitive environment for readership.

Based in Paris, the rechristened paper will debut a new website this fall. “This recognizes our global reach and is an exciting and logical move,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times. 

Mark Thompson, president and CEO said in a statement there was “significant potential to grow the number of New York Times subscribers outside of the United States…The digital revolution has turned The New York Times from being a great American newspaper to becoming one of the world’s best-known news providers. We want to exploit that opportunity.”Continue reading...

Winnebago Australia has finally done what America’s Winnebago Industries has been wanting it to do for decades: change its name. After a long legal battle, Winnebago Australia, which has never been affiliated with the U.S. motor home company of the same name, is changing its name to Avida.

Avida actually successfully trademarked the word “Winnebago” in Australia back in 1997, but Federal Court of Australia Justice Lindsay Foster ordered the cancellation of that registration last summer, saying that CEO Ben Binns “intentionally hijacked the Winnebago marks in Australia in a bold attempt to preempt Winnebago’s opening its doors here,” Bloomberg reported at the time.

However, don’t think that Avida is finished using the Winnebago name for its own self-promotion in Australia and New Zealand just yet.Continue reading...

It's just another day in the mad, mad world of fashion. kate spade new york, the eponymous U.S.-based fashion brand is launching "kate spade Saturday," a brand whose name is being disputed by a similarly-coined NYC retailer.

The diffusion line is making its debut in Japan via an online store and a retail location in Tokyo—complete with an American-style café—with plans to have an online presence in Brazil and the U.S. later this spring. (A "sneak peek" at selected items from the new brand was offered on Fab.com through today, February 20.) CEO Craig Leavitt said the brand "saw an opportunity in the market to engage a new customer base—one that aspires to be part of the kate spade new york brand."

The new sub-brand will feature apparel, a beauty line and home decor at a notch below typical kate spade prices, with a target demographic of consumers ages 25 to 35. The price point will be "about 50 percent below" the kate spade brand, and its retail experience promises to thread digital throughout the graphic, pop art-inspired clothes. However, the brand's introduction has not been without some controversy.Continue reading...

ICANN has been moving full-steam ahead under new CEO Fadi Cherhade, announcing that April 23rd will be the approval date for the first TLDs for delegation.

Once recommended for delegation, an applicant must pass a technical test and sign a Registry agreement with ICANN, which takes between five to six months, before a registry launch—which can take up to a year after they have been approved for delegation. 

There is no “sunrise” period for branded TLDs (Top Level Domains), but generic terms or open registries require a sunrise period of 30 days for trademark holders, followed by a 60-day landrush period, after which public domain sales could start. 

About 1,900 applications for new gTLDs are currently pending; 40 percent are for brand names and another slice is for “generic” words like .app, .insurance, .search and .book. “If allowed to register as closed domains, a single player could control the entire domain string related to a “generic” word – and prevent others from registering within it,” notes an article by InfoLawGroup.

Many have already voiced concern about “closed generic” domains and ICANN has asked the public for comment by March 7, 2013. 

Meanwhile, the American Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has asked ICANN to slow the process down “to set up a defensive mechanism so trademark holders can prevent registration of their exact trademarks across all the registries for a single reasonable fee.”Continue reading...

For generations, background music of pretty much any type has been commonly known as Muzak.

Elevator riders, phone customers on-hold and consumers everywhere would often find themselves pausing in their day to figure out the name of the Muzak-adapted song they had stumbled across.

But now it appears that future generations will have no idea what Muzak is, and that the Muzak name itself will belong to the past.Continue reading...

The Old Spice Man is no longer on a horse, but he's got a few other creatures at his back.

The latest W+K effort by director Tom Kuntz for the P&G-owned brand promises unbridled (yet elegant) animal magnetism with The Wild Collection, a trio of manly new scents: Wolfthorn, Hawkridge and Foxcrest. The tagline, naturally, is "Answer the smell of the wild."

Watch the first two spots, featuring tuxedo-clad gents and their wolf and hawk companions, along with their social messaging, below. Update: According to Ad Age, the Wolfthorn spot will run during the Super Bowl — but only in Alaska, home to America's biggest wolf population.Continue reading...

BlackBerry CMO Frank Boulben explains why Research in Motion is no more and the company is rebranding in a video taped during Wednesday's BlackBerry 10 launch in New York.

Also at the event, as you can watch below, Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys explained in an on-stage chat with CEO Thorsten Heins why a self-described "iPhone junky" is taking on the global creative director title at the company.Continue reading...