Nick / Rough Type:
Rumor: Microsoft set for vast data-center push  —  I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week.  One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard …

Intel:
Intel Announces Intel® Atom™ Brand for New Family of Low-Power Processors  —  Intel’s Smallest Processor Built Using World’s Smallest Transistors Designed for New Internet Devices, Low-Cost PCs  —  The Intel® Atom™ processor will be the name for a new family …

Laura M. Holson / New York Times:
Hollywood, Silicon Valley and AT&T?  It’s a Deal  —  Hollywood and Silicon Valley have something of a Mars/Venus problem: the two sides are talking but they don’t speak each other’s language.  A new venture involving a phone company may just add Pluto into the mix.

Scott Ferguson / eWeek:
Intel Drops an ‘Atom’ Brand  —  The chip maker’s new Atom brand includes its Diamondville chip for low-cost laptops and its Silverthorne processor for mobile Internet devices.  —  Intel’s latest branding scheme is truly atomic.  —  Starting March 3, Intel will corral all its processors for MIDs …

Om Malik / GigaOM:
Will RealNetworks Buy Scrabulous?  —  Scrabulous is like Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album of Facebook Apps.  Everyone loves it except the guys who own Scrabble (Mattel and Hasbro), the board game that inspired Scrabulous.  —  The legal troubles of the game cooked up by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla …

Mark Bittman / New York Times:
I Need a Virtual Break.  No, Really.  —  I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off.  I was fully disconnected for 24 hours.  —  The reason for this change was a natural and predictable back-breaking straw.

Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Twitter Details SXSW Traffic Preparation Measures  —  We’ve written about Twitter and their server/capacity issues since day 1.  This week we saw downtime which could be related to heavy usage at the future of web apps conference.  Next week is Twitter’s superbowl: SXSW.

Heather Timmons / New York Times:
Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words  —  NEW DELHI — The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.  —  Fans of the game are obsessive.