Intel's "business" store flogs DRM strippers and radio recorders

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 14 May 2009 at 09:33

Intel has set up a new online software store for small businesses - although its selection of software seems distinctly geared towards after-hours entertainment.

The Intel Business Exchange Software Store is billed as "a unique single destination for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to learn about how to address business problems with software".

However, the "special offers" being heavily promoted on the homepage seem to have little or nothing to do with business at all.

One product, called Tunebite Premium 6, claims to "legally and reliably remove audio DRM copy protection from music and audio books". This product proudly bears the "Intel Software Partner" logo.

Radiotracker Premium 5, meanwhile, is a programme that scours internet radio stations for songs of your choice and stores them as MP3 files on your PC.

The final product featured on the homepage is MP3Videoraptor Premium 3, which claims to have "thousands of MP3 music titles from 80 music genres - all in the right format for your mobile phone or Apple iPod!"

The store does include more business-oriented categories, such as "Reporting, Database Management" and "Finance & Accounting", but the consumer-focused titles are the very items Intel said its customers wouldn't have to wade through in an interview with PC Pro.

When asked why business owners should use Intel's Business Exchange rather than the hundreds of other software download stores on the internet, the company's marketing manager, Peter Rohr, told us: "because he doesn't have to mess around with games and consumer titles in which he's not interested."

Intel has, this morning, defended the decision to include consumer titles. "The software you flagged does indeed have a consumer slant to it, and may well be useful for the individual consumer as well as an SMB," the company claims in a statement.

"However, there are many media-oriented SMBs who want to use different elements from the net or radio when they are producing creative content, or looking for materials to feature in campaign ideas."

"Your feedback has proven useful however, and Intel BX is going to look further into the software that is promoted on the site, to avoid precisely the confusion you have alerted us to."

Business resources

Intel says it's providing the store to help draw attention to software produced by its developer community. The company isn't validating the software titles that appear on the store - "except for checking titles are business-oriented", Rohr rather perplexingly claimed - although the company is exploring some kind of quality assurance.

"We are looking into a qualification programme," Rohr told us. "We'll ask them to certify applications with our platform."

Rohr says the store will also provide information and advice for small businesses. "It's more the education and consultancy part that makes an SMB stop at our shop," he claimed.