Consumers may be in the last days of the Golden Age of Unlimited Data Downloading as other carriers follow Verizon's lead and reconfigure the way they charge users who are increasingly using smartphones -- and other devices such as tablets -- for activities other than simple phone conversations, which have fast become a quaint relic of other recent centuries. (Ever try to get a teenager to respond to a phone call?)

Home may still be where the hearth is but it's also where the wealth has been and gone -- at least for the middle class -- dispiriting figures released by the Federal Reserve yesterday indicate. Primarily due to plunging home values, the net worth of the median family in America from 2007 to 2009 fell to the level it was at in the early '90s -- a time when Mark Zuckerberg was being driven to play dates and several years before the word "McMansions" appeared in the New York Times for the first time in a piece Benjamin Cheever wrote …

Software developers may chafe at the iron-fisted rule Apple exerts over the apps it purveys in its App Store but they love the fact that Apple maintains strong control over the hardware and software that run its devices because it's far easier to produce and test an app for the iOS than it is for Android devices. That dichotomy is one compelling reason why Apple still commands the loyalty of developers even though Android hardware outsells Apple by 59% to 23% in the smartphone market, as Nick Wingfield and Brian X. Chen make clear in the New York Times this …

If you haven't yet figured out where you're going to get in line for your Air Yeezy 2s, which go on sale tomorrow, Complex.com's Brandon Edler has compiled a helpful list of which stores will be stocking the Kanye/Nike collaboration and how they'll be distributing them (lottery, first come-first served, bracelets, MMA cage match, etc.).

Shareholders in bedding companies are shell-shocked from the mattress wars this morning as Tempur-Pedic, citing increased competition, "aggressive" marketing campaigns and price-slashing, yesterday revised its outlook downward for the year while also projecting a falloff in same-quarter profits, which will be announced June 30. The company's stock price plunged 49%, dragging down competitors such as Select Comfort (down 21%) and Sealy (5%) in the process.

The folks who have decided that Hillshire Brands Co. will be the new name for Sara Lee -- the old conglomerate we knew and were conditioned by a cloying jingle to "like" -- discovered a while back what was not to like about baked goods: low margins. Now bearing the banner of its leading remaining brand, which it purchased in 1971, it's promising to beef up its marketing and promotion of its processed meats.

Walt Disney chairman Robert A. Iger, who today will announce with First Lady Michelle Obama a new set of nutritional standards for products that advertise with the company's child-focused media outlets, says the company's motives are not altruistic.

Though they still lag behind Japanese automakers in J.D. Power polls measuring U.S. consumers' perceptions of dependability, Detroit's Big Three are said to be "on a roll, thanks to new products and improved quality." But there's a reconstituted "bug" in their soup in the form of Volkswagen, which has made no secret of its ambitious Group Strategy 2018 plan to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, improve ROI and add jobs worldwide with a "first class team." More specifically, it has a goal of more than doubling sales in the U.S. to 800,000 (make that one million if you throw in …

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land you'd hardly recognize for its lack of a ubiquitous commercial message, a creative product looking to be published, shot or produced or might sometimes stand on its own two (or three) merits, such as quality, entertainment value or capturing the zeitgeist. Not so much anymore, and in talking to analysts at the Sanford C. Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference 2012 Wednesday, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger made that abundantly -- he hopes -- clear.