IBM and Xing Revolutionize the Karaoke Experience Through Collaboration

IBM and Xing Revolutionize the Karaoke Experience Through Collaboration

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that it has collaborated with Xing Incorporated, a subsidiary of the Brother Industries Ltd., to engineer, design and develop two new wireless karaoke portable controllers — “Kyoku-NAVI II” and “Kyoku-NAVIs” — which will be available in Japan from Xing starting in early November. Engineers and designers at both Xing and IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions worked in collaboration at IBM’s Yamato Laboratory to create two kinds of wireless karaoke portable controllers.

Each controller replaces the conventional thick karaoke song catalog, and contains tens of thousands of songs listed by singer, song and category. In the past, to choose a song, karaoke customers had to go through the thick catalogs to find the song he or she wanted to sing, type in a number listed on the catalog to a remote controller and call up a song. The new wireless karaoke portable controllers significantly ease the burden of searching and entering songs with a touch screen panel and various search options. It also allows each customer to register favorite songs respectively.

The new controllers allow non-Japanese speaking customers an option to do a song search in English, Chinese or Korean. For the past 2 years, IBM has been collaborating with Xing, located in Nagoya, Japan, to design and develop karaoke controllers for Xing. IBM contributed its deep technology and engineering expertise, a history of design experience and manufacturing connections to the joint project. A portable form factor, advanced power management, ruggedness and faster search capabilities using IBM DB2 Everyplace (DB2e) — which provides data management services on embedded devices — led Xing to choose IBM to jointly develop these new versions of karaoke portable controllers.

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