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Talk of the day: Microsoft has new tune, cuts price of Zune

By Times Wires
Published September 6, 2007

Microsoft Corp. slashed $50 from the price of its Zune digital media player Wednesday. The 30-gigabyte Zune now costs $199, the softwaremaker said on its Zune Insider blog. "It's part of the normal product life cycle, something we've had on the books for months," wrote Cesar Menendez, a Microsoft employee and Zune Insider blogger. Apple's iPod accounts for the vast majority of digital music player sales in the United States. Zune comes in a handful of colors, but only one hard drive size, while Apple's music players come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, noted that Microsoft is expected to announce new Zune models for this holiday season.

Time runs out for Business 2.0

The latest dot-com casualty comes from the newsstand, not the Internet. Business 2.0, a monthly magazine about the new economy, will be shut down rather than sold, its owners at Time Inc. have decided. The publication, which has been suffering from a decline in advertising revenue, will cease publication after its October issue, which will have a cover article on where to invest in a real estate downturn. Time Inc. will reassign the editor of Business 2.0, Joshua Quittner, and nine other editorial staff members to Fortune magazine, where they will help with Fortune's technology coverage, conference business and Web site.

LA Times cooks up idea for movie ad

Newspapers are struggling to keep advertisers. The Los Angeles Times thinks the answer is a piece of cake: frosted cake. On Sunday, the paper will run a full-page ad for the Fox-Walden film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium that, when scratched, will release "the universally beloved frosted cake scent," the Times said in a statement. Mr. Magorium, starring Natalie Portman and Dustin Hoffman, is about a magical toy store, and the aroma is supposed to remind readers "to be young and have fun." The studio paid $110,000 for the ad, and some in-paper marketing of the ad, about double what a full-page usually costs.

Former Monkee joins Gorilla team

GorillaTrades (www.gorillatrades.com), a Jupiter-based online stock trading company, has signed former teen idol singer and Monkees front man Davy Jones as the company's celebrity spokesperson. Jones' image will appear in forthcoming print and broadcast media advertisements for the company. The TV spots will first air on the Bloomberg Network and CNBC. Jones was a teen sensation during the 1960s as the lead singer of the Emmy Award-winning television classic The Monkees, whose album sales surpassed all previous records and continue to be best-sellers 40 years later.

[Last modified September 6, 2007, 00:21:18]