Company selling name, website, trade secrets and press contacts in one package on PayPal
Microsoft lifts virtualisation licensing restriction
90-day limit has been stopped in some circumstances
New Zealand's national broadcaster (TVNZ) discriminating against non-Windows users?
Update: It seems that using the gxine plugin, it is possible to view those video streams on Ubuntu anyway. Some people at least got it to work using Epiphany. I can confirm that this does work, but for some reason, it won't work for me with Firefox. ... (more in the full post)
Xero going into PR mode - in the UK
I see New Zealand company Xero is engaging traditional PR for its UK launch.They also try to appeal to the Apple fan base with this press release I found today:
Xero set to make Mac users passionate about online accounting software
Mac users are generally more likely to rave about their computers’ great graphical capability than the business software they can use, but a new online accounting package called Xero (http://www.xero.com/) is out to change all that.
Xero co-founder and UK MD Hamish Edwards says the business has committed Mac users on staff. So when it came to developing the software, making sure Xero worked on Safari was never going to be enough. Xero also had to deliver the intuitive, great looking experience Mac users are used to.
“We are big fans of the Mac experience so we realised there was huge scope to improve the experience small business owners were having inputting and analysing their financial information.”
Katie Lips, Mac-user and social media strategist and Director of Kisky Netmedia (http://www.xero.com/whosusingxero/kiskynetmedia.htm), says Xero has more than delivered.
“We’re always on the lookout for cool new web apps and I find it quite funny that I am so excited about one that does accounting – but I am!
“What I also like about Xero is that it looks good. Not something that you immediately think of as necessary when doing your accounts, but for me it’s so obvious the designers have thought about how people work and what they want to be able to look at. All the ‘headline’ data is there for me to see easily, which is quite often all I want to know.”
As well as presenting key financial data in dashboard format, Edwards says Xero is intuitive in other important ways. It’s as simple to use as a computer game, but also has enough sophistication to prepare a business’ end of year financials.
Says Lips “The best way I can think to describe how happy I am with Xero is I use it all the time. From not even looking at the accounts side of the business I am now using Xero all the time to run invoices, look at the bank statements and all sorts of accounting things I never wanted to know about before. And I am enjoying it.”
As well as running on Safari, Xero also runs on Internet Explorer and Firefox, making collaboration with people using PC-based systems hassle free.
Xero recently expanded its offerings to Apple users with the introduction of Xero for iPhone and iPod Touch. This enables customers to access their accounts information wherever and whenever they need to and it’s available free to all Xero users.
Xero provides small businesses and their advisers with one, up to date, easy to use, instantly accessible set of accounts and business information.
Learn more about how Xero can help you http://www.xero.com/overview/
Test drive Xero https://www.xero.com/signup/
Contact our media and marketing team ukpress@xero.com
While I haven't found this kind of press releases from Xero here in New Zealand, I understand the high profile of their executive team, plus the fact they are a New Zealand-based technology startup, and their proximity to the target user market made things easier - word of mouth spread quickly.
Starting something in another country is a different business though and the traditional PR machine still holds the keys to many doors.
But appealing to the Apple user base in its first reach? Is is a significant number of accountants and small companies using Apple products to run the business - in opposition to doing the business?
In any case, well done going there.
Succesful trial run of FreeviewHD in MythTV!
I have noted earlier in this blog that Mythtv does not work with FreeviewHD due to lack of audio support. Well thanks to work of Paul Kendall (see his site here) and others it is now possible to use Mythtv as a HTPC delivering FreeviewHD. There are a couple of caveats to that of course; a powerfull CPU is required as there is no hardware H.264 accelration, and you have to be prepared to do a little bit of extra work in setting the machine up (not much different with fiddling with codecs with MP or GBPVR though).
So to test it all out with my machine I downloaded the latest version of Mythbuntu (8.04.1) and installed it onto my external hard drive. There are then a few step I had to go through before I could run myth-backend setup:
1) After restarting from the CD to the hard drive, I added the following line to the bottom of /etc/sources.list (open terminal, type 'sudo nano /etc/sources.list'):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/paul-kcbbs/ubuntu hardy main
Then run:
'sudo apt-get update'
'sudo apt-get upgrade'
That will require confirmation and run for a while, after which the machine will be up-to-date with Paul's patches installed.
2) I have a Nova T 500, and according to it's wiki page it requires a cold reboot to be detected. Before this is done though, add the folowing to /etc/modprobe.d/options:
#enable LNA
options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
#disable 2nd tuner suspend
options usbcore autosuspend=-1
Now you are ready to run mythbackend setup and configure the tuners, sources etc. Also a guide will need to be setup somehow, I havn't got around to that yet.
With the configuration basically as above, I scanned in the digital channels to test out performance. With my 2.4GHz single core I could watch just TV1 and TV2, it would start skipping on fast moving scenes. TV3 was a no go.
From here, I plan on swap the CPU and graphics card out and put in my 5200+ X2. With a little bit more tweaking to get dual core being helpful (thanks to the mythtvnz list) hopefully I can get all the channels working. If I can do that, and get a guide loaded for all channels on my test setup I will do a reinstal and move everything over to Mythbuntu :)
Uni holidays are next week so this will be on the backburner with a very busy last week, will post again when I test things further.
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