Archive for June 17th, 2009

If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes.

On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing, the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Update: As people point out in comments, Roth’s own team did a lot of groundwork before the album hit. Nevertheless, Twitter did play an important role in turning that early interest into iTunes sales.

I Love Rewards, the Canadian operator of employee rewards and sales incentive recognition programs for companies, has secured a $1.6 million ($1.8 million in Canadian dollars) in an extended Series B round from Ontario Venture Capital Fund. These funds add to I Love Reward’s previous Series B funding round in May led by GrandBanks Capital with prior investors JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital participating, bringing the company’s total Series B funding to $7.7 million ($8.7 million in Canadian dollars). The company raised $4 million in Series A funding in 2008 from JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital.

The company says this round of funding will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts. I Love Rewards operates employee rewards and recognition, sales incentive and service award programs for corporations, including Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra and Bell. Rewards are distributed as ‘points’ that are then used by employees to choose brand name reward merchandise (i.e. Apple), experiences (i.e. travel and special events), gift cards and virtual awards (i.e. music downloads).

So now that the iPhone 3.0 launch is in full swing, we’re wondering how it’s going out there. Team Engadget appears to have made it through without any problems, but we’re hearing sporadic reports of Apple’s iTunes activation servers being slammed and potentially some kind of IE security certificate problem on Windows, which is leaving a few people with unusable phones while things get sorted out. Everything work out okay for you?

View Poll

Filed under: Cellphones

How’s the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade going for you? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Looking for something a little more in your HTPC keyboard than just a multitouch trackpad? Then how about a built-in 3D mouse that’ll have you waving the keyboard around at some potential peril to your couch-mates? That’s just one feature of Cideko’s new Air Keyboard, which also packs a pair of gamepad-style shoulder buttons in place of more standard mouse buttons, all the usual; dedicated media control buttons, and a promised range of 50 meters — not to mention a purported battery life of 50 hours. Still no word on a price or release date just yet, unfortunately but it looks like a fully-functional version was on display at Computex earlier this month, so we’re guessing that shouldn’t be too far off now.

[Via technabob]

Filed under: Peripherals

Cideko Air Keyboard doubles as 3D mouse / remote control originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Perhaps our Future Robot Overlords[TM] aren’t planning on decimating the human population after they take over — they might have a good reason to retain a handful of bipedal hominidae. Who knows, really? But we’re betting that if they do, the lucky slave population is going to want to hear some bed-time stories from time to time. To that end, Japanese researchers have developed Ninomiya-kun, a 3.2-foot tall aluminum-framed robot capable of reading aloud from printed material. Developed at Waseda University and recently unveiled at a trade fair in Kitakyushu, the bad boy uses cameras to “read” the text, which it parses with OCR software before synthesizing its voice. As far as we can tell, this thing still sounds like a machine, and it’s vocabulary is somewhat limited (it can currently recognize over 2,000 kanji, hiragana and katakana characters), but researchers are working on a more lifelike voice and a broader vocabulary. After that, the developers would like to unload this thing on elementary schools and old folks homes, whose population won’t find this thing creepy or disconcerting at all, at all. We’re sure of it. Peep the video after the break.

[Via Pink Tentacle]

Continue reading Video: Japanese robot reads aloud from books, whispers vague threats while you sleep

Filed under: Robots

Video: Japanese robot reads aloud from books, whispers vague threats while you sleep originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We’ve received numerous reports of Amazon Associate members in North Carolina receiving emails stating that Amazon is going to have to discontinue the service there due to a pending change the in state’s tax structure. Sometime in the next two weeks, Amazon expects that it will be terminating the service for all North Carolina residents. That will be very bad news for a lot of people who rely on Amazon’s popular affiliate sales program as a source of income.

Here’s the full email:

If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed, you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams.

By one count, Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets.But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages.

Our very own Josh Topolsky will once again be invading America’s airwaves tonight from the set of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and you know he’ll be showing off another hot new toy. (What could it be?) Tune in on your local NBC station at the times listed below, let us know how he’s doing in comments, and make sure to include #joshtops in your tweets!

Oh, and if you missed JT and Jimmy get silly with the Pre back in March (or you just want to relive it), the video’s after the break.

Showtimes:
12:37AM Eastern
11:37PM Central
11:37PM Mountain
12:37AM Pacific

Continue reading Josh is on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Josh is on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing had a strong showing in its second week, according to the latest comScore stats. You can see our analysis of Bing’s success in its first week here. Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.

Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S. increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, which is also 3 percentage points above the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29, and up 1 percentage point from the week of June 2-6, 2009.

Releasing odors in movie theaters to enhance the viewing experience is an idea that’s been around for decades now. Now NTT Communications, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan’s telecommunications behemoth NTT, takes the idea to another level: The company today announced the development of a “fragrance communication” system that makes it possible to send smells over the web.

NTT Communications is currently recruiting monitors for their so-called i-Aroma service, which will go through a test run from mid-July to the end of August. i-Aroma is based on a USB device (15cm tall) that contains six base oils, which are mixed and vaporized depending on the online commands the diffuser receives. As a result, a number of different fragrances will waft from the machine.