Miscellaneous 'Shoe: Coke Acquires Tea Company, Wal-Mart Opens Banks in Mexico

-- Coke has taken a 40% interest in Honest Tea. More noncarbonated growth for the biggest seller of sugar water in the world. (Okay...high fructose corn syrup and water, and articificial sweetener and water.) This acquisition is considerably smaller than last year's purchase of Glaceau, maker of Vitamin Water, and we probably won't see 50 Cent pitching Honest Tea any time soon. Browse the Honest Tea site.

-- Hulu is hosting Super Bowl commercials after the game. That's called added value. If you haven't tried Hulu yet, sign up for the private beta and maybe you'll get an invitation. It's a great service. The videos are at this page, and a few commercials are being shown at the Hulu blog, so everybody will be able to see them. That's a great way to get eyeballs before Hulu exits beta.

-- Viktor Schreckengost, Master of Product Design, Dies at 101. According to the obit, Schreckengost's impact on the U.S. economy was more than $200 billion.

-- Wal-Mart finally gets into banking...in Mexico, not the U.S. Its first consumer bank opened in Toluca. Eighty more are on the way this year.

--  There are a few decent kernels of wisdom in this NFL-themed article about  hiring talent at BusinessWeek.com. (Side note: I'm glad the Super Bowl is over so football-related stories will stop showing up in business publications.)

"Most business leaders—like most NFL teams—can only dream of achieving such sustained high performance, in part because they don't take the time to really align their talent to drive their business strategy. Instead, they view talent management as an HR-driven initiative with little direct involvement of top leadership and separated from the explicit requirements of the business. Rather than start with strategic context, they focus first on individual talent."

-- Everybody's talking about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. Some think it will be bad for Silicon Valley startups. Here's a well-crafted position by Marc Andreesseen that says an acquisition would have no impact on Silicon Valley M&A.

-- Related: Flickr users are protesting the potential deal by uploading protest images. (Flickr is owned by Yahoo.) That's what I call a passive protest -- but par for the course in the Internet era. View the photo pool here.