2008 October 17

Software4students? Not for us.

University students in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland are the victims of Software4Students and Microsoft disagreements.

The alliance between Software4Students and Microsoft to provide software at discounted prices has been cancelled earlier this week. University students could until now purchase Microsoft licenses with discounts by 80% because of their affiliation with Microsoft and several educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

The retail price for downloading a Microsoft Office Standard 2007 licence at the Microsoft Official Site is £349.99 while Software4Students supplies it for £35.45. The product is posted and the customer receives it to install it in his/her own computer, which avoids any downloading inconvenience.

The reason for this cancellation has not been revealed but a source from Software4Students confirmed by email: “Due to a change in license agreements that was put in place this week, we are temporarily not able to provide the software4students program to third level, further education and higher education students. We are working with Microsoft to resolve this and hope to have a solution in place soon.”

Software4student is a programme designed in 2003 in cooperation with Microsoft and many other software suppliers such as Naace, C2k, Kaspersky and Notion Music. It started providing software to Irish students whose parents could not afford the high prices of these products. The initiative was successful and soon expanded to the rest of the United Kingdom. Around 33.000 schools and colleges have agreements with Software4Students and approximately 18 million students are eligible to purchase their software through this website.

This situation aggravates furthermore the already difficult beginning of the course for the students, who generally do not have much money in their pockets and who this year will have to cope with nothing less than a global financial crisis, besides presentations, dissertations, essays and tests.

Myspace Scams Hit Edinburgh Musicians

Several of Edinburgh’s musicians have lost hundreds of pounds this month through scam artists in “pay to play” online deals.

Working under the pseudo names “Pr-0-motions” and also “Tower Street” the traders are using phishing techniques on networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace inviting bands and solo performers to their sites and offering them “great venues, great crowds”. The “companies” send mailshots to the bands with details of available venues and dates for up coming events.

Gary Shaw of the band “crack in the mirror” said ” it all seemed kosher to me, they invited us because they really liked our sound and said we could be put on their books if we sent them a “small registration fee of £50 direct debit. This guaranteed us at least three gigs in six months.”

After making the payment the bands then received a confirmation email and thanks for payment and within a three days a further email was sent offering a list of venues and dates available in October. Once the musicians selected the dates they could play a further amount of £30 booking fee was required before the venue would be confirmed.

Within days of the supposed gigs all correspondence between the musicians and companies stopped with no confirmation of a final venue or time.

Marc Stevenson of “my friend Johnny” said ” we sent at least thirty emails to these guys in the run up to the night, no response, we even called the phone number on the confirmation page it didn’t even connect, now the website has gone, the Myspace deleted. We want to take legal action obviously but we don’t have anywhere to go from. These guys blatantly don’t get how hard it is for musicians in Scotland.”

According to Myspace terms and conditions “information, materials, products or services provided by other MySpace Members (for instance, in their profile) may, in whole or in part, be unauthorized, impermissible or otherwise violate this Agreement, and MySpace assumes no responsibility or liability for this material. ”

Myspace and Facebook have declined the opportunity to comment at time of print.