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Apple has charged ahead of Google in brand reputation, jumping from fifth place last year to No. 1 this year, according to a U.S. consumer survey released today.

Apple has the highest score in the 13-year history of the study by Harris Interactive and beats all the other companies in four of the six key reputation areas: financial performance, products and services, vision and leadership, and workplace environment. Whole Foods was top ranked for social responsibility and Amazon.com for emotional appeal.

The Reputation Quotient (RQ) for Apple is 85.62 and for Google, 82.82. Rounding out the … Read more

What do you desire most right now? A drink? A cigarette? A nap? That hottie at the next table? Come on, be honest. What you really want to do this instant, if you haven't already done it, is to tweet the headline of this story.

You really thought I'd buy "coconut water" as an answer? I write for Crave, people.

In fact, perhaps the only group more tuned in to people's desires than our stable of writers is the team from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business that conducted an experiment with more than 200 people to try to gauge what tempts them most.

Lead researcher Wilhelm Hofmann explained to the Guardian that the participants, located in the German city of Wurtzburg, were pinged seven times a day via their BlackBerrys and asked to report any desires they had experienced in the past 30 minutes, as well as the intensity of each want.

Sorting through the thousands of "desire episodes" reported, the team found that it was easier for people to resist more traditional temptations like coffee, alcohol, sex, work, or spending money than it was to spurn the yearning to tweet.… Read more

iTunes U lets people download college courses with all the included materials, and study a subject on their iOS device.

As a recently released product there are currently not many courses to take at iTunes U (about 30 at the time of release), but it's pretty easy to predict the app will probably gain more traction as we approach the fall when classes resume for a new year. Of the courses offered, many big-name schools have contributed their coursework including Yale, MIT, Harvard, and several others.

The interface for the iTunes U app shares the look and layout of … Read more

In an Apple event this morning in New York, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, took the stage to introduce iBooks 2, an update to the popular e-reader for iOS devices that adds textbooks.

As Apple's flagship e-reader, iBooks is already a crisp-looking app and storefront that runs on iOS devices. But today, iBooks 2 moves into the world of education by adding interactive textbooks with the aim of keeping students' attention (and certainly adding yet another revenue stream for Apple). … Read more

Apple's purchases of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) microphones during 2011 have put it ahead of Samsung as the largest buyer, according to a new report by IHS iSuppli.

The research firm says Apple purchased 349 million of the tiny microphones, which are built into its products, a 173 percent increase from the 128 million it bought in 2010. That beat out Samsung, which bought nearly 251 million units, representing a 90 percent increase from its own purchases in the preceding year.

IHS iSuppli attributes the massive growth, which gave Apple 27 percent of the MEMS microphone purchase market share in … Read more

For years, analysts have debated whether tablets will eventually replace laptops. Turns out that consumers largely believe they will--and the elderly are far more convinced of that fact than whippersnappers.

Polling company Poll Position, which surveyed 1,155 registered American voters last week, found that 46 percent of respondents believe tablets will eventually replace laptops. About 35 percent of those folks say that devices like Apple's iPad or the Amazon Kindle Fire won't replace notebooks. Nearly 20 percent of respondents had no opinion on the matter.

Although it's generally believed young people will drive the adoption of … Read more

The time has come for the U.S. government to focus a single agency's efforts on reinforcing the security of the electrical grid, MIT researchers said today in a wide-ranging report.

The issue, MIT's researchers say, is that the many stakeholders involved in maintaining the U.S. electrical grid aren't working together, even though "cybersecurity regulations for bulk power systems already exist in the form of the NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection reliability standards." For one, the researchers point out, those standards only apply to "the bulk power system and [do] not include the distribution … Read more

Alkitab Bible Study is a free, open source Bible reference and study aid. It offers multiple viewing options, daily devotionals, a powerful search tool, and extras like plug-ins, as well as the ability to download and install a wide variety of texts, commentaries, dictionaries, concordances, lexicons, and other reference works, many of them time-tested classics. Since it's an open-source project, it grows over time through updates and participation. It's also public domain. Alkitab Bible Study requires Java 6 or better.

Alkitab's installer includes several optional reference books you can select with checkboxes: King James Bible, Strong's … Read more

The holidays are shaping up to be a big revenue generator for online companies, according to new research from ComScore.

According to the company, U.S. consumers will spend $37.6 billion online in the last two months of the year, up 15 percent compared to the $32.6 billion they spent last year. To put that figure into perspective, online customers in the U.S. spent $124.3 billion between January and October of this year.

ComScore has based some of its findings on the cash consumers have already spent. According to the company, between November 1 and November … Read more