Squeak of the Week

There's an app for everything — and now there's even one for everything else.

MasterCard, which has built its marketing around the theme, "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard," is extending that strategy with an iPhone app that allows users to upload their own "priceless" favorites into a socially networked nationwide grid.http://tr.im/uAlu

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Marketers Get School's Valedictorian to Plug Movie in Her Speech, but the Flick Still Flops.

Unfortunately for the studio, lightning didn't strike. "I Love You, Beth Cooper" has been a bomb in an otherwise buoyant summer movie season. The movie, which cost an estimated $19 million to make, took in $13.4 million domestically its first three weeks in release, according to Hollywood.com. Even Ms. Mejia hasn't seen it.
Nor has the 67-second YouTube clip become the blockbuster Fox hoped for. More than a month after it was posted, the clip had garnered fewer than 2,000 views.http://tr.im/usVy

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Vivian Schiller's coming out party has a nice look to it. Featuring a cleaner look and easier navigation, the new site is focused on making NPR the #1 new destination, over the air AND online. http://www.npr.org/

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Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider.

The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. http://tr.im/ucVJ

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Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.http://tr.im/tTaJ

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