Japanese firms, fueled by a strong yen and low interest rates, have spent $75bn this year on foreign deals with no evidence of a slowing down. Now Japanese mobile operator SoftBank has agreed to pay $20.1 billion for a 70 percent stake in Sprint, marking the company's largest overseas acquisition to date.

“This transaction provides an excellent opportunity for SoftBank to leverage its expertise in smartphones and next-generation high speed networks, including LTE, to drive the mobile internet revolution in one of the world’s largest markets," stated SoftBank's billionaire founder and chief, Masayoshi Son, in a joint press release. 

"As we have proven in Japan, we have achieved a v-shaped earnings recovery in the acquired mobile business and grown dramatically by introducing differentiated products to an incumbent-led market. Our track record of innovation, combined with Sprint’s strong brand and local leadership, provides a constructive beginning toward creating a more competitive American wireless market.”Continue reading...

Yum! Brands third quarter earnings report is being closely watched.

Barclays to buy ING online assets.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer urged to repurchase stock, profiled in New York magazine.

AT&T shares network with IBM to lure more customers to the cloud.

Amazon veers more into advertising.

American Airlines loses traffic over operational issues.

Apple asked by Taiwan to blur satellite image as Samsung spat dings brand perception.Continue reading...

KitchenAid apologizes for anti-Obama tweet during presidential debate, the most-tweeted event in US political history, which saw Mitt Romney gain the upper hand on Barack Obama. Romney's anti-PBS comment on Big Bird also took over social media, while "Walmart mom" is the new soccer mom. The campaigns, judged the most negative in recent times, inspire JetBlue to offer chance to pull an Alec Baldwin and leave the country after election result.

HP warns about grim outlook, sending shares to lowest level in almost a decade.

Facebook passes one billion users with plans to charge to promote user posts, while Twitter measures brand impact with Nielsen.

Amazon now offers loans to small businesses.

American Airlines pulls 47 jets after loose-seat debacle as image suffers.

Apple rumors of smaller iPad persist as the #2 Best Global Brand earns kudos for admitting maps screw-up.Continue reading...

Big moves are afoot at Yahoo!, where new CEO Marissa Mayer this week outlined her strategy for a new era at the company she joined from Google in July. In an all-hands meeting Tuesday at the company’s Sunnyvale, California headquarters, Mayer outlined her vision for personalizing the Web for users, from content to email to ads, while expanding that user base, talent pool (witness her new CFO hire, "Silicon Valley legend" Ken Goldman) and advertiser partners. 

Articulating her vision of "four C's" (Culture, Company goals, Calibration and Compensation), Mayer wants Yahoo! "to become something users touch every day," according to Business Insider, and to achieve that, the company must move more quickly, with employees having more ownership over and resources for their projects which will be approved only if they have the potential to scale to 100 million users or $100 million in revenue. As AllThingsD detailed, Mayer also spoke of more "acqui-hires," buying small companies for tech talent rather than products, and emphasized mobile as an area where Yahoo! "will be strong" by 2015.

While the company remains one of the world's most popular websites with more than 700 million monthly users of its email service and readers of its news pages, stiff competition from Facebook and Google and diminished online display ad prices have led to stagnated revenue. Dominance in the billion dollar industry of contextually relevant ads is up for grabs and Yahoo! is staking its claim. To that end, Yahoo! and Media.net just announced a long-term agreement to launch Yahoo! Bing Network Contextual Ads to provide web publishers with customized ad units that display relevant text ads from across the Yahoo! Bing Network.Continue reading...

TiVo settles patent lawsuit vs Verizon for $250.4M; Verizon will license TiVo technology.

McDonald's brings back annual Monopoly game contest for 20th edition across U.S.

Yahoo's Mayer will lay out vision at all-hands company meeting this week.

Kroger rolls out Simple Truth™ and Simple Truth Organic® private label in-store brands.

Lay's Potato Chips issues last call for consumers to submit next great potato chip flavor idea for a shot at $1 million payout.

Madame Tussauds Hollywood launches first-ever social media contest for 2013 figure.

Neiman Marcus reaches out to fashion bloggers.Continue reading...

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer only been running the company since the middle of July but she’s got plenty of items ticked off on her to-do list: Bringing In Cash, Doling Out Phones, Changing Logo.

First off, her company just pulled in $4.3 billion after taxes from its “deal to sell part of its stake in Alibaba back to the Chinese Internet giant,” according to Wired. That’s pretty sweet, considering the company has been struggling financially for the last year. Instead of using it make acquisitions and build a big nest egg, though, Yahoo! is handing out $3.65 billion of it to its once-suffering investors, and hanging onto just $646 million. And what can you get for that?

The company will also now be saving a little bit of dough every time it prints something out on letterhead. Mayer also approved removing the registered trademark symbol from the company’s logo. Mayer posted an image of a deposed ® to her Instagram feed on Monday. It looks like it is waiting to gather with its R brethren to be put off in the backyard, like the Russians did with the fallen statues of its former heroes.Continue reading...

Adidas dumped by university over labor concerns.

American Airlines expects thousands of job cuts and faces rash of late, canceled flights..

Anschutz plans to sell its entertainment group, part-owner of Los Angeles Lakers, in AEG sale to include LA's Staples Center.

Barry Diller and Scott Rudin enter e-publishing of books.

Caesars to rebrand Imperial Palace as The Quad.

Campbell Soup Co. boosts digital marketing.

Canon slashes prices in India.

Coca-Cola heirs lose $37M in foreclosure crisis.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...