The world’s No. 2 personal-computer maker says the PC production line now being built at a facility in Whitsett, N.C., will allow the company to become more responsive to U.S. corporate clients’ demand for flexible supplies and product customization. Although the cost of U.S. production will be higher compared with overseas production, an added benefit will be to raise Lenovo’s profile in the U.S., where it ranks fourth in market share by shipment.

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Last week’s Republican Convention provided perhaps the most entertaining — albeit, not on purpose — political social meme on the Web, with Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood’s odd performance with an empty chair.

That quickly set off an instant flood of pictures posted on Twitter of people chastising their chairs — dubbed, of course, #Eastwooding.

And also the very funny Twitter account @invisibleobama, who had a nice Labor Day tip for us all:

On this Labor Day, take a moment to remember that today is the last day it’s appropriate to wear invisible seersucker anything.

— Invisible Obama (@InvisibleObama) September 3, 2012

Even President Barack Obama’s tweet-staff got into it by posting the photo below, with the caption: “This seat’s taken.”

This seat’s taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

Now that we are done making fun of inanimate objects, it will be interesting to see what pops up online this coming week at the Democratic Convention, which officially starts tomorrow in Charlotte, N.C.

Obviously, there are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr links from the main convention homepage, but there is also a share page in which users are being asked to fill-in-the-tweet: “I nominate Barack Obama Because …”

No surprise, the tweets are uniformly upbeat — and likely vetted — which is what you get with socially engineered social media.

Which is why what happens without the manipulations of the message-makers and political pros — that unexpected moment of reality just made for the medium — will be much more interesting to see as the week goes on.

Plans on file with Catawba County describe a $1.9 million, 11-room facility that will be adjacent to its main 500,000 square-foot data center (pictured via Google Earth) on the same property. The story says the new building will have “man traps” on opposite ends that require anyone entering to be cleared through an additional second door. It will also be surrounded by its own 8-foot chain-link fence, this despite the fact that it is located on Apple’s existing site, which is already heavily secured.

Apple has owned about 250 acres of land in the area since 2010. At least some of that land, though apparently not all of it, is being used for a huge farm of solar panels.

Another permit dated June 19 shows that Apple is building a massive hydrogen fuel cell facility that supplements the solar powered one. Reuters reported in May that solar concern SunPower and hydrogen fuel-cell start-up Bloom Energy have been tapped for both. The cost of the permit was $4.1 million.

A sister site to the company’s massive data center in Maiden, N.C., this facility will be significantly smaller — at least initially. Currently, Apple is building a 10,000 square-foot data center on the 160 acres it recently purchased in Prineville, Ore. But that’s clearly just the beginning.

As part of its deal with Prineville and Crook County, Apple was granted a 15-year property-tax break. In return, it is to invest $250 million in the data center, and hire at least 35 employees to run it.

“We’re looking forward to joining the community of Prineville with our new data center,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD. “In addition to the hundreds of employees at our retail stores, we will be hiring dozens of people and bringing hundreds of construction jobs to the area.”

Once finished, the Prineville facility is expected to be even more environmentally friendly than the one in Maiden, running on 100 percent renewable energy.

GigaOm, referencing a UBS research note, points out that $900 million will go into Apple’s retail outlets. The company says it will open another 40 stores in the next year.

Apple is vague, of course, about where the rest of the $7.1 billion will go, but references “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.”

So: Lots of places.

It’s tempting to assume that the bulk of the money goes into more iCloud projects, like its North Carolina data center. And we do know, for instance, that Apple is now building a giant solar farm to help power that data center.

But Apple really isn’t in the habit of hand-tipping, and all we really know is that $7.1 billion is a lot more than $4 billion, which is what Apple spent on non-retail capex last year.

Alternate reading: Aysmco’s Horace Dediu.

A new and interesting development in Apple’s evolving data center strategy. The company has reportedly purchased some additional data center capacity at a new facility Dupont Fabros is building in Santa Clara, Calif.–just miles from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

Data Center Knowledge, which first reported the news, says Apple has signed a seven-year lease with Dupont Fabros for 2.28 megawatts of power.

That’s a nice complement to the massive capacity of the company’s Maiden, North Carolina, facility, and a necessary one as well. A secondary data center on a different coast can help ensure out-of-region data recoverability in the event of a local failure or natural disaster, an important feature of any cloud or, rather, iCloud-based service.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Yes, Apple Did Buy the iCloud.com Domain
• Apple Poaches Microsoft’s Datacenter GM
• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

The order is said to coincide with the forthcoming release of a new product that Isilon is expected to announce next week.

So huge an order for data storage would coincide with the construction of Apple’s huge data center in Maiden, N.C., and that’s expected to be the hub for a new version of iTunes that relies more on storing media in the cloud and less on using its customers local hard drives.

If you have trouble getting your head around the petabyte, the fine folks at another EMC unit, the backup service Mozy (soon to be a unit of VMWare) produced this fascinating graphic. As they tell it, one petabyte is enough to store more than 13.3 years worth of HD video, meaning 12 petabytes would be enough to store nearly 160 years worth.

The scale of the storage infrastructure, if true, would amount to another potentially intriguing clue to the environment Apple is using inside its data center. Previously it had disclosed in job ads on its Web site that its hardware there will include a mix of systems running Mac OS X, IBM’s AIX, Oracle’s Sun/Solaris, and some Red Hat Linux-based machines.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

In a research note this week, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi reviewed a few of the more plausible ones, which run the gamut from the long-rumored iTunes streaming service to the back end for a natural language voice interface and navigation service for its iOS devices.

The first: an easy way of scaling the company’s iAd mobile advertising program. With its installed base of iOS devices likely to hit 200 million by the end of fiscal 2011, iAds could put quite a strain on Apple’s ad serving capabilities. Says Sacconaghi, “If iAd gets traction while serving interactive, multimedia ads then Apple’s underlying advertising platform will need to be significantly larger, and at a scale comparable to Google’s or Microsoft’s ad platforms.”

The second is a no-brainer and seems fairly likely to pan out given recent chatter about Apple’s MobileMe service going free come April: an overhauled verision of MobileMe that provides improved cloud-based synchronization of data and media, along with meaningful storage capacity.

The low-cost iTunes subscription service we’ve been hearing about for years now is the third. Again, this seems a completely plausible use for Apple’s new data center, and as Sacconaghi notes, the time may finally be right for the company to launch it. “In our meeting with Apple executives last month, VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue suggested that the reason that music subscription services had failed to receive traction with consumers was because they were too expensive, highlighting prevailing rates of up to $15/month,” he wrote. “We note that an annual subscription to Napster now costs $8/month, while the paid version – unlimited, higher-quality, ad-free – of music streaming from Pandora costs $3/month.” Add to that Apple’s 2010 acquisition of streaming music outfit Lala and the traction Spotify and Pandora have been gaining in the market recently and this seems a likely scenario as well.

Fourth on Sacconaghi’s list, an aggressively priced video streaming service. Given the popularity of Netflix’s iOS app among iPhone and iPad users, it might make sense for Apple to offer its own competing video subscription service. Or, it could simply acquire Netflix. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the money to do it–even if Netflix’s market cap is north of $11 billion.

And finally there’s that voice interface and navigation service I mentioned earlier. This one might seem a stretch, but don’t dismiss it out of hand. Last April, Apple acquired Siri, developer of a virtual personal assistant supported by speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search. And in 2009 it purchased PlaceBase, a mapping outfit that specialized in enhancing maps with private and public data sets. Put those two acquisitions together with a massive data center and Sacconaghi’s theory looks at least plausible.

“Apple could offer its own navigation service comparable to Google’s free and very popular voice-based navigation system on Android,” he writes. “The iOS device user-base could then potentially periodically upload anonymous information on routes travelled and speeds encountered, perhaps even in real-time, which would allow Apple to report back traffic conditions to its user-base.”

Sounds like a killer feature for the iPhone 5, doesn’t it?

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• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

The online retailer on Thursday took action in Illinois, as it had threatened to do, to counter a new law aimed at forcing online retailers to collect sales taxes in the state. Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island have enacted similar laws, and California is weighing action. Amazon is also in a court battle with New York over such legislation.

The Illinois law, signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Thursday, requires online retailers that work with affiliates in the state to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Illinois residents and businesses. Amazon responded to the measure by cutting ties to its Illinois-based affiliates, which are blogs and other websites that refer traffic to Amazon’s website and get paid commissions if customers make purchases there.

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has fiercely opposed all efforts to force it to collect sales taxes. “We had opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive,” Amazon said in its letter to Illinois affiliates. “We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action.”

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Were Apple to create the cloud-based version of iTunes that’s long been rumored–one from which users’ entire iTunes libraries could be streamed–and were it to bolster MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery services with more robust storage, even the 64GB Air might seem an attractive option to the high-end user. And Apple’s new N.C. data center, which is nearly five times the size of the one it operates in Newark, Calif., may well make both those things possible.

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• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

That’s the premise behind Narrative Science, a start-up that sells technology that “generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more–at scale and without human authoring or editing.”

And the pitch seems to be effective: It’s allowed the company to raise $6 million in a round led by Battery Ventures that closed this week.

The Evanston, Ill.-based company, which started up last year, is led by former DoubleClick executive Stuart Frankel, with Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, two Northwestern University computer science professors. Other investors include Frankel’s former boss David Rosenblatt, who stuck around Google for a bit after it bought the online ad company, and who now advises companies like Twitter, where he sits on the board.

Frankel and Hammond worked on an earlier incarnation of the idea at Northwestern, where they helped produce Stats Monkey, a program that could automatically create passable sports stories based solely on game data. And StatSheet, a North Carolina start-up, wants to use the same premise to fuel a network of sports sites.

But Narrative Science has ambitions bigger than box scores. The company wants to use structured data sets to produce a wide range of stories. Many of which you probably wouldn’t identify as stories (“narrative” is an intentionally broad term), and many of which you’ll never see anyway, because they’re behind a paywall of some sort. Think of financial reports, real estate write-ups, etc.

I suppose some people might get queasy about the idea of robot writers, but I think it makes perfect sense. There’s lots of content-making that machines can and should do much faster than humans, and at least as effectively.

Meanwhile, the push to produce more copy for less has been underway for a long time, even for publishers that don’t get labeled “content farms“–Reuters moved some of its financial-reporting resources to India years ago, and you never hear a peep about that.

The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do–work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can’t do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway.

But I’ll be very surprised if it is music related–like a new music subscription service, or even one that lets you stream music you already own to multiple devices.

(UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal says that Apple has finally signed the Beatles to an iTunes deal to be announced “soon”. Which makes tomorrow’s announcement a much easier guess.)

It’s easy to understand why Apple might head in that direction: Generally, because it seems inevitable and because Google has been talking about doing something similar. And specifically, because Apple has that shiny new North Carolina data center to play with.

But the music industry sources I’ve talked to so far today don’t know of any new deals between Apple and the big music labels. So that would rule out a new subscription service, which would definitely require a new rights deal.

And that also makes it very unlikely that Apple does the next best thing: Letting users upload their iTunes catalog to the cloud, and letting them access it anywhere they want.

Does Apple have to get a special deal with the labels in order to do that? Not necessarily. Some start-ups are offering similar services, without a deal (though one of them, MP3tunes, is getting sued).

And you can make a common-sense argument that simply storing someone’s data, then letting them access it again, shouldn’t require a deal. But the labels argue that it does.

So unless Apple wants to make them go ballistic–and freak out the movie and TV studios, the folks that Steve Jobs really wants to court–it’s hard to see Apple announcing a service without signed paperwork.

Okay. So what are they announcing? Again–got me. Hoping to find out before tomorrow, but if not I’ll be watching at 10 am Eastern like the rest of you.

Facebook will get $1.4 million in incentives from Rutherford County plus an economic development grant that could top out at $10 million if it meets certain goals. Construction will provide about 250 jobs for 18 months or so. Once up and running, the data center will employ 42 people.

Facebook’s is the latest of several high-profile data center efforts located in North Carolina. Google opened its data center in Lenoir back in 2008. And as I reported here last month, Apple is considering doubling the size of its Maiden data center operations.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center

According to Catawba County Geospatial Information Services, Apple owns a little over 70 acres across the street from the 183-acre parcel on which its 500,000-square-foot data center is being built (click on image above to enlarge). That land was purchased in July of last year, but for what purpose?

The scuttlebutt around Maiden is that the company intends to use it for office space. But that seems about as likely as Apple using it to build some Jobsian theme park.

A more plausible explanation is that this parcel, too, will be used for data center space. As I reported last week, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling the size of its Maiden data center operations, and architectural renderings posted to a Catawba County, N.C., Flickr page that show two structures side by side suggest this may have been the plan all along.

But these renderings don’t account for this newly discovered 70-acre parcel, and they were drawn up just a few weeks before Apple signed the deed on it. Which raises the question: Are Apple’s plans for the cloud so grand and its road map so clear that the company has already set the stage for further data center expansion by buying this lot across the street?

Below, parcel information for all of Apple’s recent land purchases in Maiden (click to enlarge).

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?

A quick update on Apple’s Maiden, N.C., data center and my post last week reporting that the company was considering doubling its size. Over the weekend, N.C. realtor Bill Wagenseller shot some new aerial video of the site that shows additional construction underway behind the current data center, which would seem to support that claim.

It’s worth noting that doubling the 500,000-square-foot space may have been Apple’s plan all along. Photos posted to a Catawba County, N.C., Flickr page and labled “Apple_Maiden-07-06-2009-114″ and “Apple_Maiden-07-06-2009-115″ show architectural renderings of the Maiden, N.C., facility with one and two data center structures (click on image below to enlarge).

An alternate theory being batted around here and at MacRumors, as well: The data center in the video above is actually just 250,000 square feet, and the construction occuring next to it is the beginnings of a second identical structure that would bring the total square footage of data center space to that 500,000-square-foot number. Again, just a theory. I’ll ask around and update here if I discover anything more.

(Thanks Bill, Allie)

[Image credit: Catawba County/ Flickr]

Why exclude Windows users? That’s not clear. Perhaps it has something to do with the Live HTTP Streaming standard Apple will use to deliver the broadcast. Perhaps the company is conducting a limited test of widescale HTML 5 video streaming. Another theory: Apple (AAPL) wants to test out the server capacity at its new North Carolina data center.

Either way, it’s hard to view this as a purposeful snub to Windows users. This isn’t exactly an event that they’d likely be clamoring to see–though I’m sure we’ll hear shouts of outrage. Presumably most folks that would drop everything on a workday morning to watch video of an Apple press event are already using Apple hardware.

Could the social group-buying space get any frothier?

Well, yes, it could.

After the recent $135 million funding of Groupon that valued the Chicago start-up at upwards of an eye-popping $1 billion, rival LivingSocial announced to today that it had raised a more modest $14 million in a Series C round.

The Washington, D.C. start-up had raised $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month ago. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated the valuation for LivingSocial is several hundred million dollars now.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution are also participating.

Ironically, Case’s former No. 2 at AOL (AOL), Ted Leonsis has been an early investor in Groupon.

LivingSocial said it will use the new pile of cash to expand to dozens of new markets, adding it was launching four new cities now: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia.

It now operates in 18 cities across the country.

For those in Silicon Valley who do not consider these prices for all these social e-commerce sites high at all, BoomTown is here to tell you that in the real world the figure is not actually modest, except in comparison.

But LivingSocial will need every penny if it is to compete with Groupon and a growing spate of competitors in the local space, much as is also happening in the social status update arena.

The local outcome for most will inevitably be a sale to a big Internet company like Amazon (AMZN).

Or oblivion, especially since so many similar offerings makes the whole market confusing for both local businesses and customers

In general, most offer a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of products and services–from spas to skydiving–in dozens of U.S. cities, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, the idea is use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If a deal reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, these services sell vouchers to the consumers and collect a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

The plus for many small businesses is to get a crack at a lot of new consumers–think of it as social networking lead-generation.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones, Mercata, received $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

No matter in 2010!

That’s due to the VC frenzy going on, spurred by winner-take-all theories–Groupon, for example, got most of its recent mountain of cash from champion Russian overspenders, Digital Sky Technologies.

However it turns out, here is LivingSocial’s official press release:

LivingSocial Raises $14 Million Series C Round Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Launches in Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia

Company Also Begins Offering Hyperlocal Deals in Seattle Area–Users Can Now Get Deals Even Closer to their Homes

$14 Million Round Comes on Heels of $25 Million Series B Announcement Last Month

Washington D.C., April 29, 2010–LivingSocial, the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals and top Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five, today announced that it has completed a $14 million Series C round of venture funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating. Because of the rapid growth, and high user demand, LivingSocial will use the capital infusion to expand into additional markets–bringing Deals to dozens more cities throughout the U.S. in 2010. This additional funding comes on the heels of the company’s recent $25 million Series B round announced last month.

“We’ve known and admired the LivingSocial team for a long time, and I have bought many of their terrific local offers. They’ve done an excellent job of growing their user base through smart media buying and excellent knowledge of social channels and virality,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “With this financing round, LivingSocial is very well positioned to bring their great offers to even more people.”

LivingSocial is also launching its Deals program in four new markets: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. This brings LivingSocial live in 18 cities across the country with major plans to expand to dozens of markets throughout the year.

“We’re constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial. “We’re really excited to introduce LivingSocial to Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia to continue generating huge savings for our users and even bigger returns for our merchants.”

LivingSocial users throughout the country saved an average of more than $32 each in March, and have saved tens of millions of dollars since the launch of Deals in 2009. By signing up for LivingSocial’s free daily online service, people are saving an average of 50-70% at their favorite places, such as the hottest local restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels, and other local attractions.

Because LivingSocial wants to give consumers more availability to the program, the company is launching hyperlocal deals for the Seattle area. Now consumers in areas like Tacoma and Bellevue will start getting deals targeted to their location, in addition to Seattle proper. Hyperlocal deals not only help more consumers explore new things in their city, but these deals also provide merchants with a greater opportunity to reach local audiences on the LivingSocial Deals platform.

LivingSocial is now live in 18 markets including: Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Raleigh Durham, Denver, San Diego, the San Fernando Valley, Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. Dozens of additional cities are expected to roll out in the coming months. For more information or to sign up your city, go to http://livingsocial.com.

The facility, which is nearly five times the size of Apple’s giant data center in Newark, Calif., isn’t exactly pretty, but as far as efforts to house 500,000 square feet of data center space in a single building go, it’s pretty impressive. And it does have a bit of Area 51 about it, particularly since Apple (AAPL) hasn’t yet revealed its true purpose. That said, it’s most likely related to some infrastructure-intensive cloud-computing initiative.

For Dell (DELL), which has closed its factories in Ireland and North Carolina this year, this move is one more step toward its goal of slashing $4 billion from its annual operating costs by early 2011. Said company spokesman David Frink: “[This] is part of our ongoing effort to become more efficient. The intent is to leverage the capabilities of (third-party manufacturers) so we can direct our resources to other areas of our supply chain so we can innovate and add value.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• There Once Was a Man Named Dell, Who Told 1,900 Workers “Go to Hell,” Redux
• There Once Was a Man Named Dell, Who Told 1,900 Workers “Go To Hell”…

The closures, which will see Sony Ericsson’s North American headquarters moved to Atlanta, will result in the loss of some 2,000 jobs. This a little more than a year after the joint venture’s last big round of layoffs, part of a companywide cost-cutting plan that also left about 2,000 people unemployed.