Bits Blog: Apple Urges Trade Agency to Stop Product Ban

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Disruptions: Social Media Product Plugs Draw Scrutiny

Texas Instruments

In 1982, Bill Cosby appeared on television showing off a snazzy new computer. “Looking for a powerful home computer?” he said as he waved his hands over a Texas Instruments PC that looks archaic now. “This is the one! With 16K memory, it can take you a long way.”

The commercial made it obvious that Mr. Cosby, a prominent comedian and television star, was being paid to promote the boxy device.

Computers have changed significantly in the decades since. And, to the confusion of consumers, celebrity endorsements have, too.

Today, when celebrities and people with large followings on social networks promote a product or service, it’s often impossible to know if it’s an authentic plug or if they were paid to say nice things about it.

Take Miley Cyrus, the 20-year-old pop star who was traveling around America last week promoting her new album. One morning she posted on Twitter: “Thanks @blackjet for the flight to Silicon Valley!” The details of the arrangement between BlackJet, a Silicon Valley start-up that arranges for private jet travel, and Ms. Cyrus are unclear. But Dean Rotchin, chief executive of BlackJet, said “she was given some consideration for her tweet.” Ms. Cyrus did not respond to a request for comment.

Thanks @blackjet for the flight to Silicon Valley! #wecantstop

— Miley Ray Cyrus (@MileyCyrus) June 3, 2013

Did her 12 million Twitter followers know about the arrangement? It’s unlikely, and that lack of clarity, increasingly common in the social media postings of celebrities, is starting to draw the attention of federal officials.

“In a traditional ad with a celebrity, everyone assumes that they are being paid,” said Mary K. Engle, associate director of the advertising practices division at the Federal Trade Commission. “When it’s not obvious that it is an ad, people should disclose that they are being paid.”

Under F.T.C. guidelines, companies and the celebrities they are sponsoring risk being deceptive by not noting that these endorsements are advertisements, Ms. Engle said. Sometimes, they are breaking federal rules called “Dot Com Disclosures” that require clarity about sponsorships, even on Twitter. People who violate the law can be given warnings or be fined, though the size of the financial penalty isn’t clearly defined.

Some celebrities are unapologetic about promoting their investments anywhere they can. In 2011, Ashton Kutcher was guest editor of an online-only version of Details magazine, where he profiled a dozen companies in which he was an investor or adviser, but did not disclose the investments. At the time, Dan Peres, the editor in chief of Details, said the magazine stood “by how we communicated Ashton’s involvement with some of the companies.” Mr. Kutcher declined to comment.

Mr. Kutcher has also tried to sneak companies in which he invests onto “Two and a Half Men,” the CBS show for which he is a lead actor, by placing stickers for the tech outfits Foursquare, Chegg and Flipboard on his character’s laptop. He boasted in an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he “pulled it off,” until the network found out and started blurring the back of his laptop during the show.

Mr. Kutcher regularly posts about companies he invests in on Twitter, too. He also uses his Twitter and Facebook heft (he has about 14 million followers on both services) when negotiating with companies he wants to invest in, by noting that he will share the product on these social networks. The F.T.C. declined to comment on any particular instances where celebrities have posted about companies with which they have financial relationships. The agency did say there are “open investigations” into companies that have broken federal rules.

“Like advertorials and infomercials, with Twitter, our view would be that the consumers have a right to know. It gives them that additional information, just like a celebrity endorsing something on TV,” said Andrea C. Levine, director the National Advertising Division, part of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which reviews advertising claims for accuracy.

“It’s a new day, with a new way, but an old issue,” Ms. Levine said.

According to talent agency employees, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to divulge private dealings with clients, some A-list celebrities can be paid as much as $20,000 for a Twitter post or Facebook update.

In May, Kim Kardashian posted on Twitter: “Pregnancy lips…. @EOS to the rescue! LOL” with a picture attached of her using EOS lip balm. Ms. Kardashian did not respond to a request for comment.

Last month, the actor Michael Ian Black was more forthcoming and told his two million Twitter followers that Dos Equis had paid him thousands of dollars to share an ad for the beer company.

@planetoffinks No, they wrote it and paid me thousands of dollars to run it.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) May 11, 2013

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chairwoman of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, said that in all of these contexts the advertisers, investors and celebrities had a responsibility to disclose that they have something to gain.

“The message to brands is that you are responsible for the action of your spokespeople, so when you engage them, they should be aware of their obligations,” Ms. Goldstein said. In some cases individuals are breaking the law, she said, and she believes the F.T.C., or another government agency, will eventually bring fines against a celebrity for not disclosing his or her financial relationship.

Although there are no specific rules about the language people must use in an endorsement, Ms. Engle of the F.T.C. suggested using the word “ad” to preface a tweet. “It only takes up two extra characters.”

There is a risk, of course, that today’s celebrities could anger fans by not disclosing their financial ties. In an interview with InfoWorld magazine in 1982, William Turner, the marketing manager for Texas Instruments’ consumer products group, was asked why he had chosen Mr. Cosby to represent the company.

“He represents comfort,” Mr. Turner said, “and people trust him.”

Pregnancy lips…. @eos to the rescue! LOL twitpic.com/ctpyjj

— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) May 28, 2013

Latest Product From Tech Firms: An Immigration Bill

But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate mostly to Democrats.

The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives.

They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.

Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out the package were informed.

“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for years.”

Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed — which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its individual supporters.

The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and firing Americans.

Silicon Valley was once politically aloof before realizing in recent years that its future profits depended in part on battles here in Washington. Its effort to influence immigration legislation is one of its most sophisticated.

The technology industry “understands there’s probably not a tremendous amount of resistance to their part of the bill,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview last week, saying he welcomed the industry support. “But their future and getting the reform passed is tied to the overall bill.”

The bill has a good chance of winning passage in the Senate. The hardest sell will come in the House, where many conservative Republicans see the deal as too generous to immigrants who came to this nation illegally.

Rob Jesmer, a former top Republican Senate strategist who helps run the new Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit group that sponsored the Rubio ad, insisted that his organization’s push is based on the personal convictions of the executives who donated to the cause and who believe immigration laws need to be changed. Those convictions just happen to line up with what their corporations are lobbying for as well, he said.

“It will give a lot of people who are educated in this country who are already here a chance to remain in the United States,” Mr. Jesmer said, “and encourage entrepreneurs from all over the world to come to the United States and create jobs.”

The profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is illustrated by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in Congress. Facebook’s lobbying budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year.

That boom in spending translates into hiring of top talent in the art of Washington deal-making. These companies have hired people like Joel D. Kaplan, a onetime deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration who now works for Facebook; Susan Molinari, a former House Republican from New York who is now a Google lobbyist; and outside lobbyists like Steven Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader, who works for Facebook.

The immigration fight, which has unified technology companies perhaps more than any other issue, has brought the lobbying effort to new heights. The industry sees it as a fix to a stubborn problem: job vacancies, particularly for engineers.

“We are not able to fill all the jobs that we are creating,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee late last month.

Chief executives met with President Obama to discuss immigration. Venture capitalists testified in Congress. Their lobbyists roamed the Senate corridors to make sure their appeals were considered in the closed-door negotiations among the Gang of Eight, which included Mr. Rubio and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who have been particularly receptive.

In the many phone calls and hallway asides on Capitol Hill this year, those lobbyists realized that they had to give a little to get a lot of what they wanted. At the top of their wish list was an expansion of a temporary visa program called the H-1B, which allows companies to hire foreigners for jobs in the United States. There are a limited number of H-1Bs available each year, and competition for them is fierce.

Companies like Facebook and Intel use them largely to bring workers to their own offices. Consulting companies like Tata, based in India, use them to supply computer workers at American banks, oil companies and sometimes software firms.

Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco. Neha Thirani contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.

Design: Who Made That Universal Product Code?

On a Sunday afternoon in 1971, an I.B.M. engineer stepped out of his house in Raleigh, N.C., to consult his boss, who lived across the street. “I didn’t do what you asked,” George Laurer confessed.

Laurer had been instructed to design a code that could be printed on food labels and that would be compatible with the scanners then in development for supermarket checkout counters. He was told to model it on the bull’s-eye-shaped optical scanning code designed in the 1940s by N. Joseph Woodland, who died last month. But Laurer saw a problem with the shape: “When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared,” he says, “so I came up with my own code.” His system, a pattern of stripes, would be readable even if it was poorly printed.

That pattern became the basis for the Universal Product Code, which was adopted by a consortium of grocery companies in 1973, when cashiers were still punching in all prices by hand. Within a decade, the U.P.C. — and optical scanners — brought supermarkets into the digital age. Now an employee could ring up a cereal box with a flick of the wrist. “When people find out that I invented the U.P.C., they think I’m rich,” Laurer says. But he received no royalties for this invention, and I.B.M. did not patent it.

As the U.P.C. symbol proliferated, so, too, did paranoia about it. For decades, Laurer has been hounded by people convinced that he has hidden the number 666 inside the lines of his code. “I didn’t get the meat,” Laurer said ruefully, “but I did get the nuts.”

CODE BREAKER
Bill Selmeier runs the ID History Museum, an online archive dedicated to the bar code.

You worked at I.B.M. in the 1970s and then helped promote the U.P.C.?
Yes, I started the seminars where we invited people from the grocery and labeling industry into I.B.M. We were there to reduce their fear.

What were they afraid of?
They were afraid that anything that didn’t work right would reflect badly on them — particularly if it was only their own package that wouldn’t scan. The guy from Birds Eye said, “My stuff always has ice on it when it goes through the checkout.” So we put his package in the freezer and took it out and showed him how it scanned perfectly.

Why are you still so interested in the history of the U.P.C.?
Let me put it this way: What bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?

Bits: Updates From Apple's Product Event

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, introduced the new iPad Mini.

Apple unveiled a smaller iPad, a new iMac and other revamped products on Tuesday at an event at the California Theater in San Jose, Calif. I filed updates from the event, and my colleagues Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton in San Jose, and Nick Wingfield in New York, pitched in with commentary.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The big question around the iPad Mini is, will people pay an extra $130 for a device that is roughly the same size as its competitors? Apple is hoping its iOS 6, hundreds of thousands of apps, and of course, the lovely little Apple logo will be enough to entice them. But $130 might be enough to push customers in another, less expensive direction. People will decide with their dollars.

(Update: Dropping reference to retina display in the Mini, as there is none.)

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

And we’re done here. While everyone expected to meet the new iPad Mini, today’s biggest surprises were a new iPad and the skinny new iMac. Watch for our full story on the announcements, coming soon.

At a starting price of $329, the iPad Mini is only $30 more than the much smaller, redesigned iPod Touch. That could make the iPod Touch a tougher sell.

— Nick Wingfield

Apple’s new iPad Mini ad features someone playing “Heart and Soul” on their iPad Mini piano. Everyone is cooing thinking about that scene from “Big” with Tom Hanks at FAO Schwarz and how far we’ve come.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iPad Mini will sell for $329, quite a markup from Google’s $200 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet, and Amazon’s latest 7-inch tablet which sells for $160.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The iPad Mini has a better camera than the iPad 2 for high-definition videochat, “ultrafast wireless” and the new, smaller Lightning connector that is in the iPhone 5. The battery life, sigh, is still 10 hours. A video featuring Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer, features Mr. Ive saying: “There is inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. We went back to the very beginning to design a concentration, not a reduction, of the original.” Cue the applause.

A reader, Nick in Los Angeles, notes that the welded-togetherness of the new iMac means it is not likely to be possible to upgrade its hard drive on your own, which was still possible with the last-generation iMac. It looks like the locked-up hardware of the iPhone and iPad is now seeping into the Mac line too.

— Nick Bilton

Apple is showing its typical video featuring its executives discussing the iPad Mini. Jony Ive is wearing a grey T-shirt, rather than his usual black V-neck. My mind is blown.

— Nick Bilton

Mr. Schiller is taking a few digs at Google with a side-by-side comparison of the iPad Mini versus the Android-powered Nexus. The iPad Mini’s screen is 7.9 inches diagonally, compared to 7 inches for the Nexus, but the display surface is 35 percent larger. The biggest differentiator, Mr. Schiller says, are the apps. “They have phone applications stretched out, not tablet applications,” Mr. Schiller says of Android apps. He is talking up the fact that Apple now has 275,000 apps customized for the iPad.

Phil Schiller is showing the iPad Mini next to the Google Nexus tablet. Reminds me of when he was in court for the Samsung patent trial, showing the iPad next to Samsung tablets.

— Nick Bilton

The new iPad Mini is “light as a pad of paper,” says Mr. Schiller. It features a 7.9-inch screen, compared to its 9.7-inch big brother.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new iPad Mini, which fits in one hand. Steve Jobs once said that smaller tablets made by its competitors would never sell. He called them “tweeners.” Times change.

Mr. Schiller returned to debut the fourth-generation iPad. Inside is a new chip that offers faster performance. Of the iPad’s competition, Mr. Schiller says, “I can’t even see them in the rear-view mirror.” The new iPad has twice the graphics- and image-processing power of the previous generation, and still has 10 hours battery life. It’s getting the Lightning connector that is in the new iPhone. It sells for the same price, $499, as the previous iPad.

This is a surprise — a fourth-generation iPad is being introduced. Nobody saw this coming. Everybody was expecting the smaller iPad to be the only new iPad introduced today. The third-generation iPad has only been on the market for seven months, so this is unusual.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says 94 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 are now developing applications for the iPad.

Tim Cook is talking a lot about the importance of the iPad in education. The education market is a priority for e-reader makers because schools are now buying the devices for students.

— Nick Bilton

Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says Apple did not expect the iPad to be a game-changer in education. The company announced iBooks Author earlier this year to encourage the development of textbooks for the iPad. Today, Mr. Cook says iBooks textbooks are now available for 80 percent of American high school core curricula and are available in 2,500 schools in the United States.

The new iMac, which is 5 millimeters thick, looks awfully similar to those things we call televisions. It looks like it’s just a matter of time before Apple takes this flat screen and sticks it on a wall.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says the iPad hit the 100 million mark two weeks ago. “This is unprecedented for a new product in a new category,” he says. Apple sold more iPads in the June quarter than any other PC maker sold PCs, Mr. Cook says.

Mr. Cook is back and says Apple has sold 100 million iPads in 2.5 years. (Compare that to the 15 million 7-inch tablets that Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google have sold combined.)

— Brian X. Chen

The 21.5-inch iMac will sell for $1,299. The 27 inch version will sell for $1,799. People are clapping. Mr. Schiller keeps talking up how “environmentally friendly” these new versions are. Both use 50 percent less power than previous versions.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller is boasting about the “Fusion” drive in the new iMac. Basically the operating system is installed on a flash drive for faster performance, and files are on the hard drive. Last I checked this was called a hybrid drive, which has been around for a while.

— Brian X. Chen

The new iMac is 80 percent thinner and eight pounds lighter that the previous generation. It features something called “friction stir welding” that sounds like voodoo, but really just means the entire hardware has been welded into one piece. The display comes in two sizes: 27 inches and 21.5 inches. Apple added an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare by 75 percent, Mr. Schiller says.

The iMac, which is now in its eighth generation, was the comeback computer for Apple when it was introduced 12 years ago. Back then, it was a blue bubble with a handle on the back that was added to help customers feel less intimated by computers.

— Nick Bilton

This is a pretty significant upgrade for the iMac, but it has been about 540 days since Apple last upgraded its all-in-one desktop.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iMac is much thinner than the last one. A lot of people in the audience are clapping — I suspect many of them are Apple employees.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

— Brian X. Chen

Apple just debuted the new iMac, a sleeker, smaller, slighter version of the previous generation. It’s eliciting roaring applause from the audience. The computer is “the most beautiful iMac we have ever made,” says Mr. Schiller. The screen looks about as thick as a file folder.

Phil Schiller is talking a lot about gigahertz, terabytes, megapixels, SSDs and a number of other things that most consumers no long think about thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new Mac Mini. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, costs $599 and will start shipping today.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Apple’s live webcast of the event keeps cutting away to a shot that shows Bertrand Serlet, the former head of Mac development at Apple, in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Mr. Schiller is showing Apple’s new MacBook Pro ad, which talks up the retina display. The ad features cute pictures of kids, and people are getting emotional.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A starting price of $1,700 for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display. That’s a bit more expensive than the 13-inch MacBook Pro was previously. But Apple is still selling a non-retina version of the MacBook Pro for $1,200.

— Brian X. Chen

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is now almost as light as the 13-inch MacBook AIr, which weighs three pounds. Maybe they should have called it the Airy MacBook Pro.

— Nick Bilton

The new MacBook Pro features a high-definition camera for FaceTime videoconferencing camera and dual microphones. The most exciting thing, Mr. Schiller says, is what’s inside: “Everything has been reengineered from scratch.” He says the new MacBook Pro has an Intel dual-core processor and 7-hour battery life. It also “power naps” — while it’s sleeping it automatically runs software updates and backs up contacts. It will cost $1,699.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a retina display, following the iPhone, iPad and 15-inch MacBook Pro. Will we see a retina display on the smaller iPad today?

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, just took the stage to introduce the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s 0.75 inches thick, 20 percent thinner than the previous version, and is a pound lighter, making it “the lightest MacBook Pro ever,” Mr. Schiller says. The computer features Apple’s “retina” display and has four times as many pixels as the previous version.

The Mac has been outgrowing the PC market for the last six years, Mr. Cook says: “The Mac is the No. 1 desktop in the U.S. and the No. 1 notebook in the U.S.”

With the introduction of continuous scrolling in iBooks, the book reading software will now feel similar to reading on the Web and in most of the offline reading apps available for the iPad.

— Nick Bilton

There are now 1.5 billion books in Apple’s bookstore, Mr. Cook says. The company is announcing a new reading option that has continuous scrolling — no more flipping page by page. This elicits “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience.

Mr. Cook says people have downloaded 35 billion apps for iOS devices, and Apple has paid $6.5 billion to developers. There are now 275,000 apps that have been custom-designed for the iPad.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

There are 200 million devices running iOS 6 — by comparison the latest version of Google’s Android is only running on 1.8 percent of all Android devices. Despite Apple’s new Maps app, people are upgrading to iOS 6 extremely fast.

— Brian X. Chen

Mr. Cook says there are now 200 million devices powered by iOS 6. In the last year people have sent 300 billion messages through Apple’s messaging system, or 28,000 a second.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Tim Cook just took the stage and is talking about the iPhone 5, showing a video of people standing in line for the phone all over the world.

We’re seated and getting ready to go. It’s a packed auditorium. Looks like an old cinema.

— Brian X. Chen

Bits Blog: Microsoft Drops Metro Name for New Product Look

Over the last 12 to 18 months, one buzzword at Microsoft has come to encapsulate a bold redesign of the look of its most high-profile products: Metro. First used to describe the new tile- and typography-heavy user interface for Windows Phone, its smartphone operating system, the Metro look has popped up on the Xbox, Windows 8 and even in the layout of PowerPoint slides used by Microsoft executives.

Now Microsoft is banishing the Metro name from its products.

The Verge first reported Microsoft’s plan to dump the Metro name on Thursday, saying it had been prompted by Microsoft’s “discussions with an important European partner,” according to an internal Microsoft memo. Other Web sites have speculated that the European partner could be Metro, a German retailer that could have had trademark concerns about the name.

Mark Martin, a spokesman for Microsoft, confirmed that Microsoft would no longer use the name. He declined to comment on any discussion Microsoft had with a partner over the name, but he provided a statement suggesting that the Metro name had been intended to be used only temporarily.

“We have used Metro style as a code name during the product development cycle across many of our product lines,” the statement said. “As we get closer to launch and transition from industry dialog to a broad consumer dialog, we will use our commercial names.”

Microsoft gave little indication before that the name was only temporary, and it has not widely referred to it as a code name.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a case of inside baseball, with little lasting import. After all, Microsoft is only dumping the Metro name, not the interface that the term represents. Yet it’s hard to understate how hard the company tried to drill the word “Metro” into the minds of people in the technology industry.

In a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, and other speakers mentioned Metro 27 times. “You saw Metro in the phone, you saw Metro in Windows, you saw Metro in Xbox,” Mr. Ballmer said. “It’s everywhere: tablets, PCs, phones, TV and Xbox.”

And in case his audience missed the point, Mr. Ballmer concluded with: “So, in 2012 what’s next? Metro, Metro, Metro — it’s all right, I’ve got you — and, of course, Windows, Windows, Windows.”

This is not the first time Microsoft has changed the name for the design style that Metro represented. The first name its designers came up with for the look was Airport, because its neat grids of tiles and words were inspired by European transportation signs.

In an interview late last year for an article on Windows Phone, Bill Flora, a former Microsoft designer who came up with the early concepts for what became Metro, said Microsoft executives had decided to drop the name because of trademark concerns related to Apple’s AirPort networking products.

Bits Blog: Microsoft Drops Metro Name for New Product Look

Over the last 12 to 18 months, one buzzword at Microsoft has come to encapsulate a bold redesign of the look of its most high-profile products: Metro. First used to describe the new tile- and typography-heavy user interface for Windows Phone, its smartphone operating system, the Metro look has popped up on the Xbox, Windows 8 and even in the layout of PowerPoint slides used by Microsoft executives.

Now Microsoft is banishing the Metro name from its products.

The Verge first reported Microsoft’s plan to dump the Metro name on Thursday, saying it had been prompted by Microsoft’s “discussions with an important European partner,” according to an internal Microsoft memo. Other Web sites have speculated that the European partner could be Metro, a German retailer that could have had trademark concerns about the name.

Mark Martin, a spokesman for Microsoft, confirmed that Microsoft would no longer use the name. He declined to comment on any discussion Microsoft had with a partner over the name, but he provided a statement suggesting that the Metro name had been intended to be used only temporarily.

“We have used Metro style as a code name during the product development cycle across many of our product lines,” the statement said. “As we get closer to launch and transition from industry dialog to a broad consumer dialog, we will use our commercial names.”

Microsoft gave little indication before that the name was only temporary, and it has not widely referred to it as a code name.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a case of inside baseball, with little lasting import. After all, Microsoft is only dumping the Metro name, not the interface that the term represents. Yet it’s hard to understate how hard the company tried to drill the word “Metro” into the minds of people in the technology industry.

In a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, and other speakers mentioned Metro 27 times. “You saw Metro in the phone, you saw Metro in Windows, you saw Metro in Xbox,” Mr. Ballmer said. “It’s everywhere: tablets, PCs, phones, TV and Xbox.”

And in case his audience missed the point, Mr. Ballmer concluded with: “So, in 2012 what’s next? Metro, Metro, Metro — it’s all right, I’ve got you — and, of course, Windows, Windows, Windows.”

This is not the first time Microsoft has changed the name for the design style that Metro represented. The first name its designers came up with for the look was Airport, because its neat grids of tiles and words were inspired by European transportation signs.

In an interview late last year for an article on Windows Phone, Bill Flora, a former Microsoft designer who came up with the early concepts for what became Metro, said Microsoft executives had decided to drop the name because of trademark concerns related to Apple’s AirPort networking products.

Media Decoder Blog: General Mills Adds Social Media to Product Pitch

General Mills, a marketer whose brand-building efforts date to the days when housewives listened to radio shows while vacuuming, is turning to social media like Pinterest to help bring out a new product.

The product, called Fiber One Chewy bars, is aimed at children, meaning that mothers are the target audience for the advertising campaign.

Although the campaign includes traditional elements like television commercials and newspaper coupon inserts, the social media aspects are indicative of how marketing giants like General Mills are turning to new ways to reach consumers as those consumers’ media consumption habits change.

For instance, Fiber One Chewy will sponsor a board on the Pinterest page of Hungry Girl, which began as an e-mail newsletter in 2004. About a million people now receive the newsletter each day, and there is also a Hungry Girl Web site.

General Mills had earlier turned to Hungry Girl to promote Fiber One products like cereal, yogurt and snack bars. This is “the first time Fiber One has done anything with Pinterest,” said Julia Travis, associate marketing manager for Fiber One at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn.

“We know Pinterest is such a growing space, and wanted to test the waters,” she added, particularly because “food is one of the top Pinterest categories.”

The idea is to reach “moms who are pinning fun and creative snacking ideas on their Pinterest boards,” Ms. Travis said, and “re-pinning their ideas onto the Fiber One-sponsored board on the Hungry Girl Pinterest site,” which will be called Fiber One Chewy Snack Champs.

Those Pinterest users whose ideas are selected to appear on the board will receive a badge recognizing them as “Snack Champs.”

Lisa Lillien, creator of Hungry Girl, who is based in Woodland Hills, Calif., said the use of social media “is definitely on the rise” among her readers, citing examples like the Hungry Girl presences on Pinterest and Facebook.

“They feed each other,” Ms. Lillien said, as Facebook fans visit the Pinterest page and vice versa.

“I love to be wherever these women are,” she added.

Other aspects of the Fiber One Chewy campaign will include content on the Fiber One Facebook page, mom blogs, e-mail and banner ads on the Hungry Girl Web site. The creative agency for Fiber One is Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe.

Among the other companies using Pinterest are Kraft Foods; L.L. Bean; Meredith, for magazines like Better Homes and Gardens; Sony Pictures, for the movie “Hope Springs”; the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, for magazines like Real Simple; and Whole Foods Market.

Media Decoder Blog: General Mills Adds Social Media to Product Pitch

General Mills, a marketer whose brand-building efforts date to the days when housewives listened to radio shows while vacuuming, is turning to social media like Pinterest to help bring out a new product.

The product, called Fiber One Chewy bars, is aimed at children, meaning that mothers are the target audience for the advertising campaign.

Although the campaign includes traditional elements like television commercials and newspaper coupon inserts, the social media aspects are indicative of how marketing giants like General Mills are turning to new ways to reach consumers as those consumers’ media consumption habits change.

For instance, Fiber One Chewy will sponsor a board on the Pinterest page of Hungry Girl, which began as an e-mail newsletter in 2004. About a million people now receive the newsletter each day, and there is also a Hungry Girl Web site.

General Mills had earlier turned to Hungry Girl to promote Fiber One products like cereal, yogurt and snack bars. This is “the first time Fiber One has done anything with Pinterest,” said Julia Travis, associate marketing manager for Fiber One at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn.

“We know Pinterest is such a growing space, and wanted to test the waters,” she added, particularly because “food is one of the top Pinterest categories.”

The idea is to reach “moms who are pinning fun and creative snacking ideas on their Pinterest boards,” Ms. Travis said, and “re-pinning their ideas onto the Fiber One-sponsored board on the Hungry Girl Pinterest site,” which will be called Fiber One Chewy Snack Champs.

Those Pinterest users whose ideas are selected to appear on the board will receive a badge recognizing them as “Snack Champs.”

Lisa Lillien, creator of Hungry Girl, who is based in Woodland Hills, Calif., said the use of social media “is definitely on the rise” among her readers, citing examples like the Hungry Girl presences on Pinterest and Facebook.

“They feed each other,” Ms. Lillien said, as Facebook fans visit the Pinterest page and vice versa.

“I love to be wherever these women are,” she added.

Other aspects of the Fiber One Chewy campaign will include content on the Fiber One Facebook page, mom blogs, e-mail and banner ads on the Hungry Girl Web site. The creative agency for Fiber One is Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe.

Among the other companies using Pinterest are Kraft Foods; L.L. Bean; Meredith, for magazines like Better Homes and Gardens; Sony Pictures, for the movie “Hope Springs”; the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, for magazines like Real Simple; and Whole Foods Market.