Business news digest

NATION

Allstate Corp. names new chief marketing officer

NORTHBROOK, Ill. — Allstate Corp. on Monday named a former General Motors Corp. executive to its chief marketing officer position.

Mark LaNeve, 50, will join the Northbrook, Ill.-based company Oct. 26. LaNeve will oversee all marketing initiatives including marketing, advertising, corporate identity, customer loyalty and field marketing. He had been GM’s U.S. sales chief until he resigned last week.

Server failure affects Sidekick-phone owners

NEW YORK — Owners of Sidekick phones may have lost all the personal information they put on the device, including contact numbers, because of a failure of servers that remotely stored the data.

The phones are made by a Microsoft Corp. subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile USA, which say many Sidekick owners’ information is “almost certainly” gone. T-Mobile is offering customers $20 to refund the cost of one month of data usage on the phone.

Microsoft spokeswoman Debbie Anderson said Monday that there was a still a chance some of the lost user data could be restored from a backup system.

Engineers were working at it in the Microsoft data center where the failure occurred, she said.

Associated Press