Into Tech

There seems to be something of a knee-jerk dislike for “marketing,” as if it’s something to be shunned and has little to do with anything useful in the marketplace. While it’s true that there’s plenty of bad marketing out there, good marketing actually serves a really important function — helping companies determine what the market actually demands, and then delivering products to fill that need (note that, contrary to popular opinion, marketing shouldn’t be about convincing people to buy what they don’t need). This comes up quite often when we discuss things like patents — where we point out where one company was successful in bringing a product to market, whereas another failed (and then resorts to patent lawsuits). Some people brush off such successes as “just marketing,” as if it’s meaningless.

That’s simply incorrect.

Marketing is an important part of the innovation process, in understanding what a market wants and making sure it gets it. If one company has better “marketing,” that means it’s doing a better job getting products out that the market wants. We should be celebrating that, rather than brushing it off as “mere marketing.” This is highlighted by a recent blog post by Matt Asay, where he points to the status of two hyped up open source projects that both have failed (by a wide margin) to live up to the hype: Linspire and Chandler. Linspire was the Linux version that was supposed to take on Windows (it was originally called Lindows, but a lawsuit took care of that). However, it’s now closed down. Chandler, which has been seven years in the making, was supposed to take on Microsoft Exchange, but after Mitch Kapor finally dropped the project, seems to have emerged as a greatly scaled back notepad/task mgmt system. It took them seven years to build that?

Asay points out the basic fact that “mere marketing” is more important than you might think, and brushing it off is often what leads to these kinds of failures:

Perhaps the lesson in both Linspire and Chandler is just how hard it is to build a strong consumer-facing business. For those who pooh-pooh Microsoft’s success as “mere marketing” I have a suggestion: You need to get into this “mere marketing” business. It has a way of driving adoption. It matters.

Engineers like to think they know best, but the market makes the final decision on that — and it often helps to have good marketing paired with those good engineers to make things work on both ends.

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Ever considered how cool it would be to get your own day at a festival and hand-pick your favourite bands for a gig? Ever wondered how much that might cost?

Well we can’t help you with the latter, but we have heard that Microsoft’s latest Xbox promotion is a competition to design a flyposter to promote aforementioned ‘ultimate gig’, the winner of which will then get £50,000 to do just that.

We knew it was coming but now those who have held off on buying an Xbox 360 may be tempted by the new 60GB model arriving on Friday.

Announced last month, the 60GB version will replace the 20GB version and, as predicted, the ‘recommended retail price’ (RRP) will stay the same at £200. Thankfully, you can get it at Play.com for £180. So, triple the storage for the same cash.

The entry level Arcade 360, which has no hard drive but a 256MB memory card [largely pointless] will be priced at £160 - but bizarrely it’s still listed on Play at £200.

Neil Thompson, senior regional director for Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division claimed proudly:

It looks like the process of loading games onto the Xbox 360’s hard disk drive (HDD) is as easy as 1-2-3, at least according to this new video on YouTube.

At E3 last month, Microsoft unveiled the overhauled Dashboard as the ‘The New Xbox Experience’, and here you get to see how the process of copying games to the hard disk drive will work. It looks like the real deal and there’s even the tell-tale, jet engine whine from the Xbox 360 in the background as the copying process begins.

Jump for video.

We’ve never quite understood Nicholas Negroponte’s position when it comes to the $100 Laptop/OLPC/XO (whatever it’s called these days). While the idea behind creating a super cheap, super durable useful computer for children in developing nations is good, Negroponte has always approached the idea as one where only he should be allowed to see that vision through. When other companies decided it might be a good idea and wanted to target that market themselves, Negroponte flipped out and started attacking them for trying to undermine his project.

Sorry, Nicholas, but competition isn’t undermining.

In fact, competition is generally what drives all parties to be better at what they do, in order to fend off the competition. Yet, somehow, the UK’s Times Online has bought into Negroponte’s side of the story and written up an article bashing Microsoft and Intel for trying to “kill” the OLPC. The article is riddled with factual errors and opinion substituting as fact, but the worst is in the central point of the article. The author mistakes companies all aiming for the same market as a nefarious attempt to “kill off” Negroponte’s pet project — as if he has some universal right to the market that no one else can attempt to enter. It also brushes over some simple facts, like the one where many countries have looked at the OLPC and realized it doesn’t really serve their needs just yet. That, if anything, should be even more reason why competition is necessary. It helps create better products that actually serve the needs of people in those markets, rather than just what Negroponte decides they must want in his top-down manner.

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Capturing cassette tapes

Is there a cheap device to copy cassette tapes direct to PC?
Paul Niemiec

JS: You don’t need one. Using the traditional method, all you need is a cassette deck, a cable to connect it to your PC’s sound card, and Audacity software, which you can download free. You can find instructions on the Lifehacker blog. Obviously you will get better sound if you start with a good-quality cassette deck, but for less critical purposes, a Walkman-style portable will do. If you are using a hi-fi cassette deck, the connecting cable will probably have two phono plugs at one end and a 1/8in mini-jack at the other (often called a Y cable). If you’re using a portable device, it will probably have a mini-jack at both ends. For preference, plug it into a line-out on the portable, rather than the headphone socket. If not, turn the volume down or it will be too loud.

Lifehacker suggests digitising the sound using the LAME MP3 encoder. This is a good but “lossy” compression system: it sacrifices some detail to save a lot of storage space. If quality is critical, however, you should capture the sound as a WAV file, and store it using a lossless format such as FLAC. You can still make compressed MP3 or AAC versions for everyday use. The process is basically the same if you buy a specialised recorder such as ION Audio’s Tape2PC deck, except it connects to the PC via a USB port.

An even simpler and cheaper approach is not to use a PC at all. In this case, all you need is an MP3 player that has a direct encoding (line-in) feature, plus a stereo line-in cable (sometimes called a Direct Encoding Cable) costing about a fiver or less. Players with the line-in feature include the Creative Zen V+, iAudio X5, MPIO HD200, iRiver X20 and many more.

Fibre to the home

I live in Bournemouth, which apparently is about to become the UK’s first “fibre city”. We’ve had the offer of free installation, but what’s involved?
Barbara Oldham

JS: Bournemouth will be England’s first “fibre city”; Dundee will be Scotland’s. Basically, H2O plans to deliver 100Mbps broadband by routing fibre-optic cables via the sewer system. It has already wired council offices, the Bournemouth International Centre and Pavilion Theatre. FibreCity will also need to connect to homes, and says this will be done by cutting channels just 20mm wide and 100mm deep to a cable-style box on your wall, so it should not be too disruptive. There is not much info beyond that because FibreCity will only be the carrier. It will sell capacity to cable TV and broadband suppliers etc, who’ll try to sell you their services.

No political comment

Have you tried the Microsoft spellchecker in Outlook Express, on the word “Obama”? Oops.
Martin Saunders

JS: The spellcheckers in Hotmail and Microsoft Office (Outlook Express does not have one) had not been programmed to recognise Obama, and therefore suggested the closest match in their dictionary: Osama. (Next closest is Bema.) Microsoft is fixing it …

Cleaner discs

Have you any advice for cleaning CDs and DVDs?
Denys Vaughan

JS: They are usually best left alone unless they skip or cause other problems. If they need a clean, you can blow the dust off then wipe them down with a damp lint-free cloth. Distilled water and microfibre cloths are recommended. The main thing is to wipe gently from the centre to the edge. If a bit of grit scratches across the disc, the hardware error correction will probably deal with it. If you scratch around the groove, you may lose lots of bits in a row, and the error correction will not be able to cope.

If the disc is so dirty that it needs more than water, isopropyl alcohol is the solvent recommended on the web.

It’s a hard drive

I recently bought a hard disk recorder to timeshift TV. Can I assume the hard disk works like a PC hard disk and needs a periodic clean-up?
Jim Curran

JS: Yes, hard disk recorders work much like PCs running Windows Media Centre or MythTV, and sometimes have defragmentation problems. The manual may offer an “optimise” function such as Sky+ Planner rebuild, which will at least do a tidy-up and could recover some storage space. If you can connect a PC via a USB port, you may be able to see the DVR’s hard disk as an external drive. If it uses the FAT file format, then standard Windows utilities should work on it - but at your own risk! DVR disks are subject to failure, the same as PC hard drives, and should therefore be regarded as temporary storage. Anything you want to keep should be burned to DVD.

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

Apparently there’s a new antitrust law in China that has local software companies scrambling to file suit against Microsoft for violating the law. However, Business Week has a rather pertinent question: if the vast majority of the Microsoft software in use in China is of the “pirated” variety, can Microsoft actually be held responsible for antitrust violations? After all, it’s not directly responsible for that “monopoly” in the first place.

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The concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” was originally based on an experiment by Stanley Milgram where he asked people to try to send a letter to someone totally unconnected to them by passing it from person to person among people they knew. The idea was that, on average, any two random people could be connected within six connections. However, more recently, Milgram’s study had been somewhat discredited. Yet, a new study, coming from Microsoft researchers suggests that six degrees may be fairly accurate. The researchers looked at data on how people use Microsoft’s MSN Instant Messaging software, and discovered that the average chain length to connect any two users on the software was 6.6, and that 78% of all random pairs could be connected in fewer than 7 hops. Of course, what isn’t accounted for is whether or not this has changed in the 40 years since Milgram’s experiment, during which technology may have made connectivity much easier. Also, thanks to things like instant messaging, people who I might have otherwise completely lost touch with are now “permanently” listed as my friends. That’s a bit different than the world in 1967.

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Despite Microsoft previously denying that it’ll be launching an attack on Apple’s iPhone with a Zune phone of its own, it appears as though the rumour might have some substance after all.

According to Zune Scene, a reliable Microsoft ‘insider’ let slip that Nokia is getting involved with the Zune team to produce the hardware for a range of devices looking to steal Apple’s crown.

Ever heard that idea that everyone is an average of six steps away from each person on Earth? It’s called the six degrees of separation theory, and up until recently has been quite difficult to prove.

A study by Microsoft seems to offer some interesting food for thought though, and after ‘looking up’ the addresses of 30 billion instant messages (roughly half of the world’s IM) sent during June 2006 it has revealed some interesting results.