Nicki Minaj Delivers 'Only' Video Featuring Drake, Lil Wayne & Chris Brown

With Nicki Minaj‘s ‘The Pinkprint’ album just days away, the buzz and anticipation is steadily growing. The rapper keeps the momentum going by dropping the visuals to ‘Only,’ featuring Drake, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.

The video starts off with a shirtless man seemingly knocked out in a bathroom. Then he’s dragged away by a scantily-clad model and tied to another guy, who’s also been knocked out.

It turns out that Minaj is in charge of a team of women who kidnap men, as she sports a barely-there black outfit alongside her Young Money team.

Soon after, Drizzy and Tunechi make an appearance, but they’re not tied into the kidnapping storyline at all. They just perform the song, while Breezy sings the hook — wearing gold fronts, colored contacts and a nose ring. There’s also a weird shot of him singing through a white stretchy rubber kind of material, which adds another level of oddity to the video.

‘Only’ is the third single off ‘The Pinkprint’ album, which comes out on Dec. 15. It’ll be interesting to see how it does in its first week of release. Perhaps she’ll beat J. Cole’s ’2014 Forest Hills Drive’ album, which is expected to sell over 200,000 units in its first week.

Watch Nicki Minaj Twerking Supercut Video

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Facebook Delivers Confident Pitch to Advertisers

Speaking to marketers in New York at a time when the company faces acute pressure to increase revenue, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, sought to assure the industry that Facebook was single-mindedly focused on proving the promise of advertising on its platform.

“Rather than just talk at large groups of anonymous people, businesses can relate to a consumer and establish an ongoing relationship,” she said at the Advertising Week conference. “And importantly, that consumer has an average of 130 friends there, so when they are talking to that consumer, that person brings their friends along.”

Ms. Sandberg played down the company’s falling stock price, saying the ethos of the West Coast meant that the company had already moved on.

“While certainly people were disappointed, you know, Silicon Valley companies, we cycle quickly,” she said. “We iterate so quickly, and so we’re pretty good at moving forward. We launch products. Some of them work. We launch the next product.”

Ms. Sandberg, pressed by her interlocutor, the television journalist Charlie Rose, said that pressure from investors had neither damped confidence among employees nor stymied their ability to churn out new products. “We are really happy with the progress we are making,” she said.

The enthusiasm has not spread to Wall Street. The company has lost nearly half its value since its initial public offering in May, and its executives have been criticized for setting high expectations and failing to meet them.

The stock closed Tuesday at $22 a share, from an offering price of $38, and remained unchanged in after-hours trading following the public appearance of Facebook officials. The company is to report third-quarter earnings later this month.

The market research firm, eMarketer, recently scaled back its bullish revenue projections; it now estimates that Facebook will earn $5 billion in revenue this year and grow to $6.6 billion in 2013.

Facebook’s bread and butter is advertising, and it needs to prove to Madison Avenue that money spent on Facebook will yield measurable results. Facebook, Ms. Sandberg said at the conference, can transform how marketers reach their audience because Facebook knows exactly who is in that audience.

These days, Facebook is pushing stronger than ever at targeted advertising. It is using not only the data it has from its roughly 955 million users worldwide, it is matching that with the trail of data consumers leave as they shop online and offline — and using it to analyze what kinds of advertisements work best on Facebook.

It is a gamble. Facebook also must persuade users to trust the social network with their personal information.

Facebook’s new forays reveal the rich trail of data that consumers can leave, often unwittingly, every time they buy groceries with a loyalty card or when they longingly eye a pair of shoes online. All of that data can trickle back to Facebook: With nearly a billion users, the company can find those consumers when they log on to Facebook and direct tailored ads to them.

In an experiment that stirred some controversy, Facebook linked arms with Datalogix, a data-mining company, to glean what individual shoppers buy at offline stores. Datalogix says it gets this information from loyalty card data and other sources.

Facebook can find those shoppers on its own platform if they have a Facebook account. It can then serve them advertisements based on their purchase history. Facebook calls the results promising: Shoppers who are shown advertisements on their Facebook page are spending more at the cash register.

Facebook says it is not sharing its user data with third parties. It also says it makes personal information anonymous by hashing the data, though security researchers have questioned the effectiveness of such tactics.

The partnership with Datalogix led the Washington-based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Another new advertising offering is Facebook Exchange. With this effort, an online shopping site like HauteLook can target its customers on Facebook. It knows when customers are browsing for items on its own site, and can then ask Facebook to serve advertisements to those customers when they log onto Facebook.

The process is called retargeting. It is common on the Web, though new for Facebook.

At the conference on Tuesday, Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member and early investor who was seated at Ms. Sandberg’s side, offered a vision of other ways that Facebook might leverage the information it has about its users.

If he is walking past a restaurant where his Facebook friend — say Mr. Rose, the television journalist — was having lunch alone, he could be notified on his cellphone, along with a discount offer for lunch. Mr. Andreessen described this as a win for all parties concerned: a lunch date for Mr. Rose, a discount for himself and a new customer for the restaurant.

Mr. Rose asked whether using that data could make Facebook users feel uncomfortable. Ms. Sandberg said new technology always elicited new anxieties, but that Facebook would have to reassure its users.

“Trust is the cornerstone of our business,” she said.

I.B.M. Delivers Solid Quarterly Profit

I.B.M. delivered solid quarterly profits on Wednesday that easily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations, even though it reported weak revenue, which was pulled down by economic troubles in some markets, lower hardware sales and the impact of a strengthening dollar.

I.B.M. was sufficiently encouraged by the results to slightly lift its guidance for the full year to “at least $15.10 a share,” from $15 a share previously.

The quarterly result, said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, pointed to “fortress I.B.M.,” a company whose profit performance seems all but impervious to industry cycles.

The company, Mr. Sacconaghi noted, has raised its full-year guidance in 12 of the last 14 quarters and met or beat Wall Street’s average earnings estimate for 29 consecutive quarters. “It’s boringly predictable,” he said. I.B.M. is the largest global supplier of information technology — hardware, software and services — to corporations and governments.

In a statement, Virginia Rometty, I.B.M.’s chief executive, said the strong profit performance reflected the success of the company’s “long-term business model.” That model combines focusing on higher-margin businesses and faster-growing markets abroad with aggressive cost-cutting. The strategy has served the company well, with earnings improving steadily throughout the recession and financial crisis.

But the second-quarter report was also the fourth straight quarter that I.B.M’s revenue has fallen below Wall Street’s estimates. “But revenue growth is the missing piece of the puzzle in the long term,” said Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS.

In after-hours trading, IBM shares rose $3.40 a share, nearly 2 percent, to $191.65 a share. In the regular session, the company’s stock price closed up $4.60 a share, at $188.25 a share.

The company reported a 6 percent increase in second-quarter net income to $3.9 billion. Its operating earnings per share rose 14 percent to $3.51, partly reflecting fewer shares because of buyback programs. The company has spent about $17 billion buying its own shares in the last year, Mark Loughridge, a chief financial officer, said in a conference call with analysts.

The profits per share were well above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $3.42, as compiled by Thomson Reuters.

I.B.M. reported revenue of $25.8 billion, down 3 percent from the year-ago quarter. That was about $500 million below analysts’ consensus estimate of $26.3 billion. Most of the company’s sales are overseas, so a stronger dollar cut revenue by about $1 billion in the quarter, Mr. Loughridge said.

Revenue was depressed by lower hardware sales, down 9 percent from the previous year when a new model of mainframe computers were selling briskly.

The slowing global economy has hurt other technology suppliers. Several companies have recently alerted investors to weaker-than-expected profits including Advanced Micro Devices, a chip maker; Seagate Technology, a disk drive manufacturer; and Infosys, an Indian supplier of outsourced services and software development.

The companies have cited a pullback in technology spending caused by a struggling American economy, Europe’s financial troubles and a slowdown in China.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, reported profit that outpaced Wall Street estimates, but sharply lowered its 2012 projections for sales growth.

I.B.M. has so far managed to avoid the cyclical swings in the technology business by winning business in fast-growing foreign markets like China, India and Brazil, and shifting more of its business to higher-profit software and services businesses. Those high-margin ventures typically build on the company’s investment in research and development.

I.B.M. has projects around the world to help cities and nations use computing and data-tracking to improve traffic management, energy use and policing.

Revenue from such projects — I.B.M.’s Smarter Planet initiative — increased more than 20 percent in the quarter.

Revenue from I.B.M.’s big services businesses fell slightly to $14.7 billion, but profit margins and income rose sharply. “We manage these businesses for profit and cash generation,” Mr. Loughridge said.

I.B.M. Delivers Solid Quarterly Profit

I.B.M. delivered solid quarterly profits on Wednesday that easily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations, even though it reported weak revenue, which was pulled down by economic troubles in some markets, lower hardware sales and the impact of a strengthening dollar.

I.B.M. was sufficiently encouraged by the results to slightly lift its guidance for the full year to “at least $15.10 a share,” from $15 a share previously.

The quarterly result, said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, pointed to “fortress I.B.M.,” a company whose profit performance seems all but impervious to industry cycles.

The company, Mr. Sacconaghi noted, has raised its full-year guidance in 12 of the last 14 quarters and met or beat Wall Street’s average earnings estimate for 29 consecutive quarters. “It’s boringly predictable,” he said. I.B.M. is the largest global supplier of information technology — hardware, software and services — to corporations and governments.

In a statement, Virginia Rometty, I.B.M.’s chief executive, said the strong profit performance reflected the success of the company’s “long-term business model.” That model combines focusing on higher-margin businesses and faster-growing markets abroad with aggressive cost-cutting. The strategy has served the company well, with earnings improving steadily throughout the recession and financial crisis.

But the second-quarter report was also the fourth straight quarter that I.B.M’s revenue has fallen below Wall Street’s estimates. “But revenue growth is the missing piece of the puzzle in the long term,” said Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS.

In after-hours trading, IBM shares rose $3.40 a share, nearly 2 percent, to $191.65 a share. In the regular session, the company’s stock price closed up $4.60 a share, at $188.25 a share.

The company reported a 6 percent increase in second-quarter net income to $3.9 billion. Its operating earnings per share rose 14 percent to $3.51, partly reflecting fewer shares because of buyback programs. The company has spent about $17 billion buying its own shares in the last year, Mark Loughridge, a chief financial officer, said in a conference call with analysts.

The profits per share were well above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $3.42, as compiled by Thomson Reuters.

I.B.M. reported revenue of $25.8 billion, down 3 percent from the year-ago quarter. That was about $500 million below analysts’ consensus estimate of $26.3 billion. Most of the company’s sales are overseas, so a stronger dollar cut revenue by about $1 billion in the quarter, Mr. Loughridge said.

Revenue was depressed by lower hardware sales, down 9 percent from the previous year when a new model of mainframe computers were selling briskly.

The slowing global economy has hurt other technology suppliers. Several companies have recently alerted investors to weaker-than-expected profits including Advanced Micro Devices, a chip maker; Seagate Technology, a disk drive manufacturer; and Infosys, an Indian supplier of outsourced services and software development.

The companies have cited a pullback in technology spending caused by a struggling American economy, Europe’s financial troubles and a slowdown in China.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, reported profit that outpaced Wall Street estimates, but sharply lowered its 2012 projections for sales growth.

I.B.M. has so far managed to avoid the cyclical swings in the technology business by winning business in fast-growing foreign markets like China, India and Brazil, and shifting more of its business to higher-profit software and services businesses. Those high-margin ventures typically build on the company’s investment in research and development.

I.B.M. has projects around the world to help cities and nations use computing and data-tracking to improve traffic management, energy use and policing.

Revenue from such projects — I.B.M.’s Smarter Planet initiative — increased more than 20 percent in the quarter.

Revenue from I.B.M.’s big services businesses fell slightly to $14.7 billion, but profit margins and income rose sharply. “We manage these businesses for profit and cash generation,” Mr. Loughridge said.