branding

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is expected to roll out the first "Nehalem" processor for laptops on Wednesday.

Nehalem is Intel's new processor microarchitecture and is used currently in its high-performance Core i7 series of desktop processors and more inexpensive Core i5 series. The chipmaker is expected to move most laptop, desktop, and server processors to the Nehalem architecture in 2010.

The Core i7 "Clarksfield"--expected to be introduced Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum--is a quad-core processor for higher-end laptop designs. Laptop models from major PC makers are also expected.

The Nehalem architecture will manifest itself later … Read more

Updated on September 23 at 12:30 a.m. PDT: adding information about the Atom Developer Program.

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini focused on moving beyond the PC while introducing a new processor technology and a new development platform for the Atom processor.

"We're moving from personal computers to personal computing," Otellini said.

He called this a transition to a continuum. "The same experience on any device. How we build this continuum out. That's the theme," he said. "Moore's Law, platform architecture, … Read more

Pretty much everyone in the audience at Sheryl Sandberg's talk on Tuesday morning as part of New York Advertising Week understood the meaning of the slide she displayed that read "Nielsen and Facebook are in a relationship." A nod to announcements on Facebook's homepage "news feed," the "in a relationship" phrase is now a recognizable slice of Internet culture--much as social network Facebook itself has become ubiquitous.

And Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, hopes it will be just as ubiquitous in the advertising world. Her goal on Tuesday was to formally … Read more

Given the beating Microsoft has taken lately, it's impressive that Microsoft still ranks third in Interbrand's "Best Global Brands 2009" report. Given Microsoft's still-robust brand, what should the company be doing to rejuvenate key areas of its business?

Only IBM (2nd) and Coca-Cola rank higher than Microsoft, and Google (7th) and Intel (9th) trail by a considerable margin. Apple, for all its sex appeal, barely scrapes into the top 20. Such resilience is all the more striking, given Microsoft's less-than-stellar year, as the report suggests:

2009 marks the first year-on-year decline in Microsoft's … Read more

Apple's brand is getting stronger, according to the 2009 Best Global Brands list released on Thursday by market research firm Interbrand.

Calling Apple "among the most iconic of relatively young brands in the world," Interbrand moved it up four spots since its 2008 evaluation of the world's top 100 brands, from No. 24 to No. 20.

While many of the companies stayed near last year's ranking, the top five brands in the world did not move at all from 2008's report: Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, and Nokia.

Other brands on the list naturally … Read more

PowerReviews, a company that provides white-label customer review tools for retailers and brands, is preparing to release a service called BrandConnect.

BrandConnect features two elements: Listener and Megaphone. According to Darby Williams, the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews, "Listener will help brands track and understand what their customers really want out of their products."

Listener To do so, PowerReviews first asks users to review a product in more detail than they might be accustomed to. According to Williams, the process will first ask consumers what the pros and cons were of a particular product. It then asks … Read more

Updated at 2:15 p.m. PDT: adding information about Dell system.

The main message of the new Core i5 chip is simple: it's cheap--even cheaper than Intel chips based on older technology.

The i5, which brings Intel's new "Nehalem" microarchitecture into the mainstream PC market, immediately makes many, if not most, of the older desktop processors obsolete. Consumers need look no further than pricing on sites like Amazon. The i5-750 lists for $250, while the older--based on Intel's last-generation "Core 2" microarchitecture--Q9650 lists for $319.

The official pricing from Intel in quantities … Read more

On Thursday night, Facebook announced that it's launched its first official Twitter app--sort of. In a post on the company blog, Facebook announced that updates to "fan pages," public profiles for celebrities, brands, organizations, and what-have-you, can now be sent out through Twitter.

"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities … Read more

NEW YORK--On a Monday night earlier this month, the projection screen hanging on the wall of a bowling alley in Brooklyn's bar-heavy Williamsburg neighborhood was displaying neither strikes nor scores, but columns of the Twitter client TweetDeck.

More specifically, they were streams of Twitter search queries for a number of terms that would make little sense without context, like replies to the account @mtn_dew and occurrences of the hashtag #newdietdew. That's because PepsiCo, parent company of the Mountain Dew soda brand, had rented out the bowling alley to throw a "taste test" party for its new &… Read more