News to know: Twitter ads, Intel earnings, Macbook refresh, MySQL

Twitter's business model, Intel's earnings and a Macbook refresh lead today’s themes. You can get the day’s rolling postsvia Twitter,RSS, oremail.

Here are the key themes for Wednesday, April 14, 2010:

Twitter is finally talking about a business model, the first phase of which is called Promoted Tweets. The company says the paid tweets will look like regular tweets that appear in user feeds based on Twitter search keywords. But what about the content creators, all of us tweeters who contribute to the ecosystem daily, and the many others who have powered Twitter's growth? Shouldn't we get a cut, too? No one ever said a business model wouldn't be complex.

If there was any question as to whether the economy - at least in the tech sector - is starting to see a recovery, look no further than Intel. The technology bellweather declared this week that "The industry is nearly fully recovered" as the company reported better-than-expected first quarter earnings. (Earnings preview) Separately, the company said its next chip platform, codenamed Sandy Bridge, will go into production by the end of 2010, according to a ZDNet UK report. Sandy Bridge is the successor to Nehalem.

Apple is in the news again - this time with a refresh of the MacBook Pro lineup. Andrew Nusca's post has details on all the specs, including faster processors, more powerful NVIDIA graphics and longer battery life. Couple of questions: Where are the Blu-ray drives? And is this the last Macbook refresh before the next big announcement? (Gallery)

Meanwhile, over at the MySQL conference, Oracle showed off the beta of a “much faster” MySQL and insisted that the company will continue to invest in the open source database.

Gallery: More images of the Macbook refresh