IT Buoy

Some people hoping to get a boost in PC performance recently got a rude surprise: the microprocessors they bought were not only not genuine Intel products–they weren’t even chips at all. Intel confirms that online retailer Newegg passed along some pretty crude facsimiles of the chip maker’s Core i7 920 microprocessors. According to reports and video links supplied by news sites such as HardOCP , the customers received a box (with some misspelled text) that contained a fake cooling fan, blank paper stapled together as a “manual” and a piece of plastic that looked vaguely like a chip. “Intel is getting samples to inspect and until then we can say that everything in the package appears fake,” says Daniel Snyder, an Intel spokesman. Illicit copies and counterfeits have always been a big problem for software companies. Chip makers haven’t worried as much, since it’s an extremely expensive proposition to make a real chip–particularly at the current state of the art, which can top a billion transistors. The more common problem, Snyder says, is “remarking”–taking a chip that might run at 2 gigahertz and sell for $100, say, and relabeling it as a model that runs at 3 gighertz and sells for $200. Fabricating a piece of plastic to look like a chip is a rarity, he adds

Some people hoping to get a boost in PC performance recently got a rude surprise: the microprocessors they bought were not only not genuine Intel products–they weren’t even chips at all. Intel confirms that online retailer Newegg passed along some pretty crude facsimiles of the chip maker’s Core i7 920 microprocessors. According to reports and video links supplied by news sites such as HardOCP , the customers received a box (with some misspelled text) that contained a fake cooling fan, blank paper stapled together as a “manual” and a piece of plastic that looked vaguely like a chip. “Intel is getting samples to inspect and until then we can say that everything in the package appears fake,” says Daniel Snyder, an Intel spokesman. Illicit copies and counterfeits have always been a big problem for software companies. Chip makers haven’t worried as much, since it’s an extremely expensive proposition to make a real chip–particularly at the current state of the art, which can top a billion transistors. The more common problem, Snyder says, is “remarking”–taking a chip that might run at 2 gigahertz and sell for $100, say, and relabeling it as a model that runs at 3 gighertz and sells for $200.

Major League Baseball’s excellent At Bat iPhone app is back for another season, this time at its most expensive price ever: $14.99. And so far, the app is tearing up the charts, despite its price tag. At Bat 2010 is already the no. 8 most popular paid app on iTunes. Read the rest of this story

Amid competition in the online-payment business, eBay’s PayPal is making a push to attract developers of social-media payment applications, whether or not the product is branded with the PayPal name. Reuters At the annual Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco, eBay CEO John Donahoe expanded on PayPal’s efforts to woo developers , saying that although PayPal may not be creating applications itself, “we want to be the platform on which some of these social-media applications get built.” Mr. Donahoe mentioned Twitpay , a service that allows users to send payments via Twitter, as an example of the kind of product PayPal specifically wants to encourage. He said he believes developers and social-networking services will need to use a system like PayPal because the complexity of running a real transaction system is too great for many companies to handle. “The risk and fraud capabilities you need, the anti-money laundering … the ability to do it cross-border are very different things than just doing a virtual currency,” he said. As Digits reported earlier this month , Facebook recently integrated PayPal into its service, in part because of the eBay unit’s international footprint. EBay has faced difficulties as online shopping habits have shifted away from auctions, but the company reported a boost in net income and revenue last quarter. Mr

The January search share numbers are in. The big story is that Microsoft’s Bing continues to gain share, jumping another half-point to 11.3%.