Most Powerful Brand in the World

Market research firm Millward Brown Optimor named Google the most powerful brand in the world with a brand value of $86.1 billion.

As the second most powerful brand, GE had a reported value of $71.4 billion. Microsoft came in third at $70.9 billion, and Coca-Cola was fourth at $58.2 billion. Rounding out the top five was China Mobile with a value of $57.2 billion.

The rest of the top 10 were, in order, IBM, Apple, McDonald’s, Nokia, and Marlboro.

Tag Heuer to make Luxury Mobile Phone

Tag Heuer has confirmed that they are making a luxury mobile phone named Meridiist.

They are collaborating with ModeLabs to design, produce, and market these special edition mobile devices.

Intel debuts new chips, cuts prices on select quad-cores

Intel cut the price of its quad-core products by half, including the Core 2 and Xeon.

The 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 new price is $266, down from $530. Likewise, the 2.66GHz Xeon X3230 chip was also cut to $266.

Intel also unveiled 2.66 GHz and 2.6GHz Celeron dual-core chips, as well as new Core 2 Duo processors.

Battery shortage hurting EEE PC sales

Asus has said that the sales of their EEE PC are being affected by the global shortage of laptop PC batteries.

The company expects the problem to be resolved by June this year. Asus is still aiming to meet their target of sales of 5 million units by the end of the current year.

China Has The Most Internet Users

Beijing-based researcher BDA China reported that China has 220 million users as of February, making it the world’s largest user of the Internet.

But in terms of percentage of population, the U.S. still remains on top with 71 percent, while China has 17 percent Internet penetration rate.

Nintendo Wii Leads March Video Game Sales

Research firm NPD Group reported that U.S. video game sales rose 57 percent in March to $1.7 billion and Nintendo led in both video software and hardware sales.

The Wii captured 58 percent of video game hardware sales in March, with 721,000 of the game consoles sold in the U.S. Nintendo’s “Super Smash Bros: Brawl” for the Wii game console sold 2.7 million copies, making it the No. 1 title in March.

IBM sells some of its stake in Lenovo

IBM has revealed that they have sold some of its stake in the Chinese PC maker Lenovo.

The company has now offloaded $83.6 million worth of stock at a 6 percent discount. IBM now has a 6.5 percent stake in Lenovo.