Microsoft's new search engine is reportedly dumping its codename, Kumo, in favor of the brand name Bing. To get the word out, Microsoft is planning a massive advertising campaign to launch its new search brand. Bing's debut will feature a $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign, according to AdvertisingAge. To put that number in perspective, Google's entire advertising budget for all of 2008 was $25 million, AdAge says. Microsoft is hoping a major ad push will take a chunk out of Google -- the number one online search brand -- in favor of Bing, the same way Microsoft's laptop hunter ads helped in its fight against Apple.But Microsoft's ads won't take on Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com directly by name. Instead, the Bing ads will try to convince you that by using "today's search engines" you're missing out on all that your search experience could be. To back up this assertion, Microsoft offers some internal data indicating 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query, AdAge reports. Furthermore, Microsoft has found 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at a search results page.
New iPhone rumors out today come very close to confirming the existence of a 32GB iPhone, and even resurrect the possibility of a $99 iPhone from Apple. We're less than two weeks away from Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference from June 8-12, and it is assumed Apple will unveil new iPhone hardware during WWDC or shortly thereafter. No one knows for sure what a new iPhone would look like, but the most popular iPhone rumors include the addition of an OLED screen, rubber backing, a faster processor, more RAM, improved battery life, and bigger storage. Today, no new features are hitting the rumor mill, but if news from around the world is to be believed, a 32GB iPhone is all but inevitable before the end of the summer.
Intel's eight-core Nehalem EX server processor will include a technology derived from its high-end Itanium chips that helps to reduce data corruption and ensure reliable server performance, the company said Tuesday.The processor will include an error correction feature called MCA Recovery, which will detect and fix errors that could otherwise cause systems to crash, said Boyd Davis, general manager of Intel's server platforms marketing group, at a press conference.The chip will be able to detect system errors originating in the CPU or system memory and work with the operating system to correct them. That could help make systems more fault tolerant and provide greater uptime, he said.Error correction is a feature Intel includes in its high-end Itanium chips, designed for servers that require very high levels of availability. Itanium uses a different instruction set to x86 server chips and competes more with RISC-based processors like Sun's Sparc and IBM's Power.Though Intel is trying to push the Nehalem EX chips into higher-end environments, Davis brushed off concerns that the processors might cannibalize sales of its more expensive Itanium chips.Including the error correction feature in Nehalem EX marks a shift in Intel's strategy, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. Intel tried to keep Xeon confined to the lower end of the market and wanted customers to buy Itanium for mainframe-type applications. By equipping Xeon chips with higher-end features, Intel is pushing Xeon up into that market, Brookwood said.However, customers running legacy applications or who need very high levels of availability, such as stock markets and banks, may continue to buy Itanium systems, he said.Adding error correction to the Xeon line will be useful as workloads get more complex and use more memory, Davis said. It may also be helpful as workloads are spread across virtual machines in data centers. Data corruption in one virtual machine can spread to other VMs and cause a server to crash, Davis said. Nehalem EX will be able to isolate an error and restart individual virtual machines without crashing an entire system, he said.The Nehalem EX chips will be the first x86 server chips to include such error correction features, Davis said. Intel is sampling the chips to server makers, and systems powered by them will begin shipping early next year, Davis said. Intel won't say yet what clockspeeds the chips will run at.IBM displayed an eight-socket server at Tuesday's press event with 64 cores running 128 software threads simultaneously.Intel is targeting the EX processors at high-end systems running data-intensive applications such as databases. The chips are built on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which improves system speed by cutting data bottlenecks that plagued Intel's earlier chips. Intel's existing Xeon 5500 quad-core chips, which launched in March, are also based on Nehalem.
