Google Glass blacklisters, haters and fashion police, rejoice. As of Jan. 19, Google is "closing the Explorer Program" it announced in a Google+ post yesterday afternoon. Google Glass fans, defenders and fashionistas, rejoice. It's doing so to "focus on what's coming next."

Strapped for cash with its turnaround plan sputtering - Weird Al Yankovic's "Toyland" holiday cheer notwithstanding - RadioShack is considering a bankruptcy filing as early as next month, the "Wall Street Journal" reports in a story that is generating angst among common shareholders, not to mention nostalgic geeks.

After slipping behind Under Armour in the sportswear market earlier this year, No. 3 Adidas is launching an all-out effort to show it has got game in the U.S. market and will use popular athletes in mainstream sports to make itself relevant to consumers here.

Even as gas prices hit their lowest points since the recession in 2009 and with experts predicting oil could go below $40 a barrel in coming months, the North American Auto Show opened in Detroit yesterday with lots of buzz about electric cars that will be hitting the road soon with more than twice the roving capacity of the current affordable offerings.

Dublin, Ire.-based Shire Plc will pay $5.2 billion in cash for NPS Pharmaceuticals, a Bedminster-N.J.-based company that has one rare-disease medication on the market and another one pending approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

With global layoffs at Coca-Cola in the headlines, PepsiCo this week is surely content with a series of small stories here and there that keep us abreast of its short-term advertising plans, "kooky" cook-offs, Super Bowl hype and demographic targeting philosophy.

Jet.com, a startup based in New Jersey that uses a bit of the Costco formula -- it's "the shopping club reinvented," it claims -- and is run by the numbers whiz who sold Diapers.com and its sister sites to Amazon, is about to open its portal to "friends and family," according to just-published pieces in "Bloomberg Businessweek" and "The Wall Street Journal."

The Consumer Electronics Show is opening in Las Vegas this morning with devices that smarten up the home, the car and the body in an elusive quest to connect us all to everything - at least in the Internet of Things. Pick your roundup of early announcements from "Press Day" Monday and you're likely to see a different angle.

There may still be a few places on earth where consumers can't be enticed with a targeted promotion for a glazed donut or instantly gratified with the best rate for a hotel room dozen of exits down the interstate but General Motors vehicles with the OnStar service activated will apparently no longer be among them.

Abercrombie downplays logos; Kohl's brings back brand names. Walmart undercuts the competition; Sprint and T-Mobile engage in a good, old-fashioned price war. Starbuck expands; Microsoft acquires. For all the disruption - and legal woes - of the Ubers and Airbnbs, and all the seeming need of marketers to refine social media and Big Data strategies, a big brand name in the headline proved to be the most reliable click bait for "Top of the News" in 2014. That's not to say that Ellen, Chucks, Restoration Hardware and Bill Ackman didn't have their appeal, too.