TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Microsoft says a problem with the internal clock in its 30GB Zune players, related to the leap year, caused the widespread device failures reported earlier today. However, the company says the device should fix itself as the clock shifts to Jan. 1.

"The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year," the company said in a statement. "That being the case, the issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009."

Read on for the complete statement.

I interviewed embattled Count Me In Chief Executive Terry Drayton yesterday at the company's offices in Bellevue. Near the end of the 90-minute discussion, the 48-year-old tech executive said talking about Count Me In's many problems was cathartic.

Drayton -- whose company owes more than 200 youth sports organizations across the country about $5 million -- certainly wanted to tell his side of the story. With public relations executive Mark Firmani by his side, Drayton fielded a wide range of questions -- talking about his weaknesses as an entrepreneur, concern about criminal charges and why he appeared on the recent cover of Seattle Business Monthly. He also talked about the possibility of selling Count Me In's assets, going so far as to say Microsoft should buy them.

To prepare for the interview, I asked affected youth sports directors for questions, I reread the TechFlash blog posts and comment threads and perused emails to me from former Count Me In employees. Read on for extended excerpts.

After 14 months, Peter Quinn is stepping down as executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network next month. The former HouseValues and Western Wireless Executive plans to take a job at the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend.

"My reasons are strictly personal. If there were a way to stay I would," Quinn writes in a blog post. "NWEN is an important cog in the entrepreneurial wheel. It’s mission is an important one and I look forward to watching it continue. I leave with nothing but good wishes for everyone involved. I will miss it."

This is like something out of a science-fiction novel: Users of Microsoft's 30 GB Zune music players are reporting in large numbers that the devices crashed and stopped working, en masse, early this morning.

Users on the Zune.net forums began reporting problems with "frozen"  Zunes around midnight last night. Giving a sense for the magnitude of the problem, one forum thread has attracted more than 1,000 posts. So far, the problem appears to be affecting only the 30 GB Zune models, not those with flash memory or other hard drives.

Update, 2:30 p.m.: See follow-up post: Microsoft blames clock bug for Zune glitches, promises magic fix.

The newsstand that spawned the personal-computer revolution may finally be falling victim to it.

There's a fascinating story in today's Boston Globe about Out of Town News in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. The newspaper reported previously that the company running the newsstand was ending its lease, blaming the shift to online reading.

The new twist is reporter Martin Finucane's confirmation, through Paul Allen, that it's the very place the Microsoft co-founder bought that fateful edition of Popular Electronics more than three decades ago. As the legend goes, that magazine, featuring the early Altair 8800, is what convinced Allen and Bill Gates to start the company.

Amazon.com is ditching the Bill Me Later payment service today.

Speculation had been growing that Amazon would dump Bill Me Later following the company's acquisition by online auction giant eBay a few months ago. Now Amazon has finally pulled the plug on the payment processing service, which does a quick credit check on shoppers and, if approved, allows them to purchase items online and receive a bill in the mail.

One year after Washington state banned text messaging while driving, many motorists are doing their best to follow the law. At least, that's the optimistic way to interpret the data. In reality, many texters are probably just doing their best to avoid getting caught -- and finding that it's not very hard.

The results here could serve as a preview for California, which starts enforcing a similar text-messaging ban tomorrow.

There's one less publicly-traded company from the Pacific Northwest to kick around. Zones Inc. today announced that Chief Executive Firoz Lalji has completed a "going-private transaction" for $7 per share in cash.

Three Alaska sports clubs that are owed money by Count Me In have filed a petition to force the Bellevue online registration company into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage, Campfire USA Alaska Council and Matanuska Soccer Club -- which together say they are owed $174,401 -- filed the involuntary bankruptcy petition Dec. 22.

Embarrassed. Apologetic. Hopeful. Those were just a few of the emotions expressed today by an effusive Terry Drayton as the embattled CEO of Count Me In described how the Bellevue company lost nearly $5 million in registration fees and donations for 220 non-profits and youth sports organizations across the country.

In his first interview since news broke earlier this month about troubles at the online registration company, Drayton apologized for his lack of financial oversight and pledged that he would continue working until the outstanding funds were repaid. He also admitted that the donations and registration fees collected on behalf of youth sports programs were comingled with the operating funds of Count Me In, a mistake that Drayton now fully acknowledges.

Even more illuminating was the admission by Drayton that Count Me In did not keep basic financial records until recently.

"I take responsibility for it -- full stop," said Drayton. Asked how an experienced executive could operate a company for so long without basic accounting procedures in place, Drayton said that he's always been an innovator who focuses on the big picture.

"I suck at details," he said.

The good news keeps piling up for Amazon.com today.

Internet research firm comScore says the number of unique visitors to Amazon sites from Dec. 1 to Dec. 24 -- the height of the holiday shopping season -- surged 7 percent from the corresponding period in 2007, to 76.2 million. Amazon's strong traffic numbers come at a time when overall holiday ecommerce spending was down 3 percent, according to comScore.

Amazon.com's recent pronouncement about the 2008 holiday shopping season being its "best ever" has generated a fair amount of questioning in the media, since the company skimped on providing any meaningful sales data.

But Amazon continues to rack up plaudits. A survey released today by ForeSee Results ranks the company No. 1 among online retailers for shopper satisfaction. Amazon shares the top spot with movie rental company Netflix.

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan today published an insightful analysis of Microsoft's long struggle in the Internet search business. The piece, Tough Love For Microsoft Search, offers a collection of possible remedies for the company in its battle with Google. One of them is particularly timely: Why doesn't the company just make Microsoft.com its primary search brand and portal?

RealNetworks ranks among the worst places to work, somehow even getting a poorer employee satisfaction score than embattled Washington Mutual, according to a survey released this week by Glassdoor.com.

Real, which laid off 7.5 percent of its staff earlier this month, ranked 45th on the Glassdoor list. At least it wasn't DHL, which had the worst employee satisfaction rating. Meanwhile, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser boasted an approval rating of just 27 percent. That was better than WaMu's Alan Fishman, whose approval rating in Glassdoor stood at 0 percent.

Hewlett-Packard, which was a launch partner for Microsoft's Windows Home Server operating system, today announced an expanded HP MediaSmart Server lineup that also works with Apple Mac computers. The new capability is being aimed at homes with both Macs and PCs on their networks. HP says the servers will work with Apple's Time Machine backup software.

How Quickly We Forget: A new Microsoft patent filing outlines an approach to pay-as-you-go computing, in which PC users would be charged depending on which software and hardware elements they use, and how much time they use them. Some of the coverage is skeptical that Microsoft would actually try such a thing, but in fact, the company started testing a similar model a couple years ago with its FlexGo program in emerging markets. [More after the jump.]