Microsoft has apologised after suggesting that fans of Amy Winehouse should honour her recent death by downloading a music track to their Zune music players.

A day or so after the 27 year-old singer was found dead, Microsoft UK's official Xbox Twitter channel posted a message saying: "Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking Back to Black over at Zune." The post included a link to download the track.

Whether you liked her music or not, the death of almost anyone is a tragedy, particularly for one so young, and people are a bit sensitive about such an issue. The resultant storm of tweets started to trend on traffic graphs, and some hasty fire-fighting ensued.

"Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse ‘download' tweet seemed purely commercially motivated. Far from the case, we assure you," Microsoft tweeted within an hour of the original post.

However, the idea that Microsoft was motivated by something other than money didn't seem to fly with the Twittersphere, and the news started to spread even further.

"With Amy W's passing, the world has lost a huge talent. Our thoughts are with Amy's family and friends at this very sad time," was the final post from Microsoft on the subject, no doubt reassuring those who were concerned that the original message had been less than respectful.

Sneak reckons they should stop digging before they get to China.

Google may have lost the Nortel auction patent battle with Apple, Microsoft, RIM and a host of other tech firms, but Sneak can't help applauding the way the search firm went about the bidding process, demonstrating its corporate personality as smart, funny and creative.

According to sources who talked to Reuters, all of Google's bids during the auction for some 9,000 odd patents referred to famous mathematical numbers.

The company bid $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128 during the early round, which maths wizzes may recognise as Brun's constant and the Meissel-Mertens constant. Once bidding passed $3bn, Google offered $3,141,592.65, representing the first nine digits of Pi.

The eventual winning bid was $4.5bn at which point Google dropped out, which is strange as it could have bid $6.66bn to really confuse those who argue that the company has lost its way from the 'Don't Be Evil' mantra.

Other companies involved in the bidding were apparently utterly confused by the bids coming from Google, and the source told Reuters that the company was "either supremely confident or bored".

However, Google has a track record of these kinds of shenanigans. When the firm went public in 2004 it looked to raise $2,718,281,828, the value of e multiplied by a billion. Sneak doesn't know what this means, but it sounds jolly smart.

Other details emerged from the source, including the fact that Apple named its consortium Rockstar and went by the name Ranger, which sound like team names made up by the wallies that appear on The Apprentice.