Kodak, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Jan. 19, filed court documents on Wednesday requesting that it sever its contract with the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, according to Kodak.

"Kodak has filed a motion with the court to allow us to discontinue the sponsorship that included theater naming rights," said spokesman Christopher Veronda in an e-mail to CNNMoney.

Veronda would not confirm or deny reports that the contract was for $4 million per year.

"We have not released the terms of the annual payment," he said.

The filing comes just weeks before the Oscars ceremony, scheduled for Feb. 26 at the theater.

Karen Diehl, spokeswoman for CIM Group, the company that owns the theater, said that Kodak Theatre has hosted the Oscars since 2002 credit score. But she would not comment as to whether the contract’s cancellation will affect this year’s presentation.

Eastman Chemical, the anti-Kodak

Kodak, a once mighty icon of the photography industry, has struggled to evolve from film and compete in the digital age, even though it was an early pioneer of digital photography.

The Rochester, N.Y.-based company, which was founded in 1888, said in its filing that it had more than 100,000 creditors with debts totaling $6.75 billion.

Kodak said it managed to obtain $950 million in financing from Citibank (, Fortune 500) to maintain operations. 

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People outside the Fed have

Lincoln Park Zoo officials fear images of the frolicking chimps broadcast worldwide do little to help conservation efforts, inaccurately portraying the animals as unthreatened and even as cuddly and harmless pets.

“If people see them that way they are less likely to try and conserve them,” Stephen Ross, assistant director of the zoo’s Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, said of the commercial that shows chimps laughing at a `Kick Me” sign on the human. “Individual chimps are being harmed and wild populations are being harmed by this frivolous use of an endangered species.”

Ross said he and other animal welfare advocates have been complaining to CareerBuilder.com ever since the company started using chimps in Super Bowl commercials in 2005. But this year is different because he’s armed with a Duke University study that he says supports his longtime claims: Commercialized chimps dressed as people _ even when running up big banana daiquiri bar tabs _ makes viewers less concerned about the plight of wild chimps.

“The argument they (CareerBuilder.com) make is it doesn’t matter how they’re portrayed, they are helping to protect them,” said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology who led the study. “The opposite is true. These commercials are negatively affecting people’s decisions about how they support conservation.”

CareerBuilder.com declined to comment on the study or any suggestion that the commercials put wild chimpanzees in danger. But in a prepared statement, the Chicago-based company said the “chimpanzee stars” were not harmed and that the American Humane Society watched the commercial being filmed to ensure the animals were “treated with respect.”

Hare is particularly concerned about how a Super Bowl commercial _ shown around the world _ will persuade people in Africa, some desperately poor, to capture and sell the animals.

“This advertisement teaches them there is a market for these animals, that there are some crazy people in America and Europe who would want them as pets,” he said. “Even if there isn’t a market, they think there’s a market.”

And that, he said, could devastate the wild population of chimpanzees that has already dwindled from more than 1 million to about 100,000.

Further, he and Ross said the message that chimps make good pets is a dangerous one, as was demonstrated in 2009 when a chimpanzee attacked a Connecticut woman, ripping off her nose, lips, eyelids and hands before being shot to death by police.

Ross said he’s not optimistic that CareerBuilder.com will pull the ad before this year’s Super Bowl. “They already paid for this one,” he said, adding that the company has never responded to any of the letters he’s written them since 2005.

In fact, in an effort to drum up publicity about the ad, the company sent another email to The Associated Press trumpeting the upcoming commercial starring “CareerBuilder’s beloved chimpanzees” that was back by “popular demand.”

In that email, the company pointed to statistics that showed CareerBuilder.com business surged after previous Super Bowls and that its brand awareness also has grown dramatically.

But, he said in an email, maybe his concerns will find an audience of its own that the response from “a wider segment of the public … is negative enough for (CareerBuilder.com) not to invest more money in extending the campaign with new ads.”

Ross and Hare are encouraged by another conclusion of the Duke study: The commercials may not be all that effective. Contrary to Careerbuilder.com’s suggestion that the commercials helped their business, Hare said people who watched the commercials reported that they found commercials with chimpanzees less interesting than those that featured athletes, music and other things.

That is not surprising to Peter Dabol, chief executive of Ace Metrix, a firm that rates the effectiveness of ads.

“These kinds of slapsticky, kind of funny ads and these ads in particular, were relatively low scoring ads even though their likeability is high,” he said.

“These (CareerBuilder.com) ads performed at the bottom of the pack of all Super Bowl ads,” he said. “That’s typical of what we see as pure humor, cheap laugh ads.”

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The 27 heads of state and government will get a taste of the popular frustration with austerity and high unemployment as they try to get to the summit in a city paralyzed by strikes.

While the official theme of Monday’s meeting is boosting growth and jobs, the elephant in the room will be Greece.

Leaders aren’t expected to make any decisions on a new massive bailout for Greece until international debt inspectors have issued a new report on the country’s finances.

Athens’ euro partners have grown frustrated with its slack implementation of spending cuts and reforms almost two years after first receiving international aid.

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Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.8 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday, a sharp acceleration from the 1.8 percent in the prior three months.

It was, however, a touch below economists expectations in a Reuters poll for a 3 percent rate, and two-thirds of the increase was due to the build-up in business inventories.

Soft underlying demand and a sharp slowing in core inflation supported the Federal Reserve’s decision this week to keep in place an ultra easy monetary policy to nurse the recovery.

“The areas of strength are unlikely to be strong in the current quarter and the areas of weakness are more than likely to be weaker,” said Steve Blitz, a senior economist at ITG Investment Research in New York. “Frankly, I don’t think there is an awful lot the Fed can do about it.”

On Wall Street the Dow ended down as investors took a dim view of the composition of growth. U.S. Treasury debt prices rose for a third day and the dollar hit a 6-1/2 week low against the euro.

The economy got a temporary boost from the rebuilding of inventories, which logged the biggest increase since the third quarter of 2010.

Excluding inventories, the economy grew at a tepid 0.8 percent rate, a sharp step-down from the prior period’s 3.2 percent pace and a sign of weak domestic demand.

THE POLITICS OF GROWTH

For all of last year, the economy grew just 1.7 percent, and economists expect only a bit of quickening this year.

Sluggish growth could hurt President Barack Obama’s chances of re-election in November, and might lead the Fed to launch a further round of bond purchases to spur the recovery.

“Clearly, much work remains to achieve the Fed’s dual mandate of maximum sustainable employment in the context of price stability,” New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley told reporters.

The central bank on Wednesday said it expected to keep interest rates at rock bottom levels at least through late 2014, and it warned the economy still faced big risks, a suggestion the euro zone debt crisis could still hit hard.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Friday also gave a lukewarm assessment of economy’s prospects.

“We’re still repairing the damage done by the financial crisis. On top of that we face a more challenging world. We have a lot of challenges ahead in the United States,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

The robust inventory accumulation in the fourth quarter - a $56 billion build-up - suggests the recovery will lose a step at some point in early 2012 when businesses throttle back guaranteed online payday loans.

But economists said there was no sign businesses were uncomfortable yet with the amount of inventory they had on hand, suggesting they could add more in the current quarter.

“We had dealer stock build in the fourth quarter, but it was really to make sure we had the inventories that support the going-rate in terms of days’ supply,” Ford Motor Corp Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth said on a conference call.

“I think we’re at 58 days, which is actually lower than our typical level,” he said.

Weak spots during the quarter included business investment spending, which advanced at just a 1.7 percent annual rate, the slowest since 2009.

A sharp drop in defense spending and still weak outlays at state and local authorities combined to yield a fifth straight quarterly contraction in government spending.

Though exports held up, an increase in imports left a trade gap that also chipped growth, and while home construction rose at the fastest pace since the second quarter of 2010, it was helped by unseasonably mild winter weather.

SLUGGISH INCOME GROWTH

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, also accelerated, stepping up to a 2 percent rate from the third-quarter’s 1.7 percent.

However, it was largely driven by pent-up demand for cars. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami had disrupted supplies early last year, leaving showrooms bereft of popular models.

Consumers also benefited from a moderation in inflation.

A price index for personal spending rose at a 0.7 percent rate in the fourth-quarter, the slowest increase in 1-1/2 years.

A core measure that strips out food and energy costs rose at a 1.1 percent pace, off sharply from the prior quarter and the slowest in a year. The slowdown could worry the Fed, which would prefer it nearer its 2 percent inflation target.

High unemployment has led to sluggish income growth, which in turn has prompted households to tap savings and credit cards to fund their purchases.

A sustained GDP growth pace of at least 3 percent would likely be needed to make noticeable headway in absorbing the unemployed and those who have given up the search for work.

“Though the unemployment rate has improved, the jobs market remains a major challenge,” said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago.

“The high level of people out of the workforce and underemployed people show there isn’t really much income generation to contribute to a better spending pattern.”

Even so, another report on Friday showed consumer sentiment reached its highest level in nearly a year this month.

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The Fed will offer details Wednesday about how long it plans to keep interest rates very low. It also will release an economic forecast. Later, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will take questions from reporters.

Traders continue to monitor negotiations between Greece and its private bondholders aimed at reducing the nation’s crushing debt load.

Apple Inc. is up 6.9 percent after reporting its best quarter ever.

The Dow Jones industrial average is down 49 points, or 0.4 percent, at 12,626 shortly after the start of trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down 4, or 0.3 percent, at 1,310. The Nasdaq is up 13, or 0.5 percent, at 2,799.

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The two co-CEOs of the Canadian company resigned Sunday. The new CEO is Thorsten Heins, who was the company’s chief operating officer.

Even though the company is in deep trouble and has seen its stock price fall 89 percent from the all-time high it hit in 2008, Heins said Monday that his appointment means “no seismic change” for the company. He’s confident in the course laid out by his predecessors, which hinges on the software revamp.

The new software is called BlackBerry 10, and it’s due in new smartphones late this year. For BlackBerry fans, it should be a welcome upgrade. It’s based on QNX, an industrial-grade operating system that runs devices that need to be very reliable, like core Internet routers and anesthesia monitoring devices.

That means it’s a stable platform that can give BlackBerrys a new look and new capabilities. BlackBerry 10 will have a completely new user interface, built from the ground up for touchscreen input and “very fluid,” Heins said in an interview.

But it amounts to BlackBerry tossing out its own quirky, outdated software, first introduced in 1999, and adopting a slick, touch-oriented operating system, much like Android, Google Inc.’s popular smartphone software, and the software on the iPhone.

Heins said BlackBerry 10 is “extremely competitive” and insisted that RIM is “not in a catch-up race” with the makers other mobile operating systems. He emphasizes that BlackBerry 10 will offer “multitasking,” or the ability to run several applications at the same time. This is something Google Inc.’s Android software and the iPhone operating system offer in a limited fashion.

Phone software developers generally stay away from full multitasking because it can shorten battery life considerably. Improved multitasking was one of the hallmarks of Palm Inc.’s webOS when it launched in 2009, but that didn’t save it from obscurity.

One thing that could entice buyers: the new software will expand the choice of applications greatly, by running ones written for Android. There are hundreds of thousands of such apps, but it’s unclear how many of them will run on BlackBerry 10 without modification.

The PlayBook, RIM’s tablet computer, already runs an early version of BlackBerry 10. RIM had huge hopes for the device when it put it on sale in April, but quickly had to slash the price. In December, the tablets that originally cost $500 were selling for $200, below the cost of making them. RIM wrote off $485 million worth of inventory.

The PlayBook also illustrates the big challenge RIM is facing switching operating systems. It launched without an email program, apparently because it’s very difficult to get QNX to work with the RIM servers that shunt emails around.

Application developers will also have to relearn their tools to write programs for BlackBerry 10, which could prove a big hurdle.

“The platform risks suffering from the same chicken and egg problem as many others_ users won’t buy a device without any apps, and developers won’t develop for a platform without any users,” said Jan Dawson, an analyst with Ovum.

But the main problem analysts see with BlackBerry 10 is that the phones are set to come out so late. They were originally slated for early this year, but pushed to late this year. The company said that was because the right chips weren’t available. When they come out, it will be more than five years since Apple released the first iPhone and set a new standard for phone software.

And even if BlackBerry 10 makes the phones more competitive, that doesn’t mean it can reverse RIM’s fortunes. Analyst Tavis McCourt noted that the history of phone makers who fall on hard times and try to turn things around is not encouraging.

“In fact, it is hard to think of a single successful case in the smartphone era,” he wrote.

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Bullishness among institutional investors has reached its highest level since last summer, and their buying has been powering the stock market’s surprising early-year advance, according to a new analysis by TrimTabs Investment Research. The Dow Jones industrial average is up almost 4 percent in the first three weeks of January.

It should be noted that such bullishness isn’t necessarily positive. Widespread optimism sometimes has foreshadowed a drop in share prices. If most investors are already in the market, the logic goes, then there are few new buyers left to come in and lift prices higher.

Still, the upbeat mood among institutional investors points up the vastly divergent opinions between Wall Street and Main Street.

Risk-averse retail investors have contributed only $3.3 billion into stock mutual funds so far this month, even though inflows are typically heavy in January guaranteed online personal loans. Individuals stuffed $932 billion into checking and savings accounts last year, dwarfing the $117 billion they put in stock and bond mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, according to TrimTabs.

“While retail investors continue to put most of their money under the mattress, institutions are more bullish now than at any time since the big sell-off in early August 2011,” said David Santschi, a TrimTabs executive vice president.

A variety of surveys and other sentiment indicators point to rising bullishness among professionals. A survey of hedge funds showed that 42 percent of managers are optimistic versus 30 percent who are bearish, the highest level of bullishness since July.

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The company’s market cap slipped below the $400 billion mark by midday as Apple’s (, Fortune 500) stock fell back from the all-time high of $431.37 it set earlier in the morning. Shares ended the day slightly down, leaving Apple with a $398 billion market value.

Still, that puts Apple in some pretty exclusive territory. Only Exxon Mobil (, Fortune 500) has a higher valuation, at about $420 billion. PetroChina () is Apple’s closest competitor, at $270 billion, and Microsoft (, Fortune 500) follows at $235 billion.

Apple’s market cap is higher than the gross domestic product of Greece, Austria, Argentina, or South Africa. (For more comparisons, check out this excellent blog: Things Apple is Worth More Than.)

Despite its size, Apple is still one of the fastest growing technology companies. The company will report its finances for the past quarter next week, and analysts expect Apple to announce that its sales grew by 45% compared to last year, according to a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters.

Apple’s financial empire

Unsurprisingly, Apple topped CNNMoney’s survey of technology analysts about the best tech company to invest in for the future. Choosing Apple for the prestigious spot as one of the Four Horsemen of Tech, respondents noted that Apple is a frontrunner in the smartphone revolution. Its iPad created a new category of mobile computing, and Apple has embraced cloud computing with its high-profile iCloud.

Apple’s growth is a stunning achievement for a 35-year old company that had a market cap of just $10 billion a decade ago.

The company’s turnaround began with the launch of the iPod, and growth really skyrocketed after the iPhone’s release in 2007. Apple is forecast to have sold a record 30 million iPhones last quarter, following the launch of the iPhone 4S in October.

Apple on Thursday announced three new initiatives to reinvent the textbook, including the ability to create and publish searchable, updatable and interactive e-textbooks for the iPad. The company also released a publishing tool for secondary school curriculums and instituted a $15 price cap for e-textbooks on the iBookstore. 

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