News

Minneapolis -- Best Buy Co. earned $146 million in the second quarter, down from $266 million in the year-ago period, topping analysts earnings estimates even as its revenue fell short. Its results were helped by ongoing cost reductions. Best Buy cut $40 million in annual costs last quarter, bringing the total to $900 million.

For the quarter ended Aug. 3, revenue dropped to $8.89 billion from $9.27 billion. Analysts had expected $8.99 billion. Same-store sales fell 2.7%, which was more than analysts had expected.

Express has enlisted Iris Mobile’s Rich Media Messaging (RMM) technology to drive its seasonal Back-to-Business sweepstakes campaign with GQ Magazine. A combination of both a participant-based sweepstakes and a voting-based contest, this campaign will award one emerging startup entrepreneur with a grant from Express based on public votes.

Menlo Park, Calif. – Women’s online shopping marketplace Poshmark is launching PoshMatch, a social merchandising engine that combines community curation and algorithmic technology to match shoppers to merchandise based on their social activity in the app. With PoshMatch, each shopper is greeted with their own real-time storefront built from their personal fashion shopping network and their style preferences.

Leading Northeastern food retailer Wegmans is introducing a new line of peeled, deveined and wild-caught Gulf of Mexico shrimp and enticing shoppers with seafood promotion featuring a wide range of domestically sourced products.
 

Atlanta – Customers of real estate management software provider Yardi can now have access to thousands of The Home Depot products either in store or online with a click of a button via the online procurement system offered with Yardi Procure to Pay, a fully automated end-to-end procurement and invoice processing platform.

In perhaps the most rapid shift in consumer behavior ever witnessed, the number of people who intend to buy something online has doubled from just three years ago, according to Nielsen’s new Global Survey of e-commerce.

Miami -- Burger King Worldwide agreed to buy Canadian quick-serve chain Tim Hortons for approximately $11.4 billion, creating the world’s third largest quick-serve restaurant company. Under a tax inversion deal, the corporate headquarters of the new company will be in Canada, where the combined company’s biggest market will be.  

Sterling, Va. - Social media demonstrated the best cost-efficiency of all major online advertising channels in second quarter 2014, coming in at 70% below the industry average for cost and showing a 32% cost decrease quarter over quarter. According to the Q2 2014 Media Intelligence Report from Neustar Inc., social’s reach-efficiency was 286% better than the next channel, portals, and its ability to reach exclusive users (not seen in other channels) improved by 65% quarter over quarter.