IBM and Xing, a subsidiary of the Brother Industries, have developed two new wireless karaoke portable controllers – “Kyoku-NAVI II” and “Kyoku-NAVIs”.

Engineers and designers at both Xing and IBM 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. 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.

Xing is a pioneer in introducing the new business model in distributing karaoke music content via the network in Japan. The company has been at the forefront in bringing new services and solutions to help karaoke bars and restaurants improve business efficiencies and customer satisfaction.

To make the karaoke experience more enjoyable for customers, the controllers offer a wide array of search functions, such as “history search” which displays a list of songs selected from the same controller in the past, “at-that-time search” which displays songs in a chronological order from a keyword, such as buzz word and news, “album-single search” which allows users to search by viewing CD jacket images, and “this-song-is-amazing search” which allows a partial video preview.

The remote controller feature of Kyoku-NAVIs allows karaoke customers to select a song by name, by artist or from several genres from the controller’s screen wirelessly. In addition, karaoke customers can access a variety of content such as promotional videos and information on sports through the controller’s screen. Kyoku-NAVI II has all of the above features and also allows karaoke customers to order food and drink from its touch screen. Both controllers are shock resistant and water-proof. The new controllers allow non-Japanese speaking customers an option to do a song search in English, Chinese or Korean.

To enhance scalability and stability, a wireless LAN is incorporated into the new controllers, a first for the karaoke industry, allowing high speed transmission of songs and data in volume.

“Kyoku-NAVI II” and “Kyoku-NAVIs” will be available in Japan from Xing starting in early November.