NEW YORK & DALLAS - (Business Wire) Coby® Electronics, a leader in portable consumer electronics products designed to fit every lifestyle, and kannuu, Inc.™, the global leader in lookup technology, today announced a strategic alliance that will deliver unprecedented user satisfaction on future versions of select Coby MP3 players bundled with kannuu's proprietary technology. Coby is slated to release the new units at retail stores nationwide in Q3 2008.
In response to the rapidly expanding and competitive digital entertainment market, this strategic partnership reinvents the portable music experience by empowering consumers with immediate access to on-device content. kannuu-enabled Coby devices allow the broadest range of users to make the most of their digital collections with a state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, low-cost solution, which eliminates lengthy searches or scrolls through hundreds or possibly thousands of files.
Using kannuu's Partial Word Completion™ process, the user is presented with four characters that correspond with the MP3 player's control pad. The user inputs the desired file name by choosing from the displayed letters with an easy to control up, down, left, right and center selection. kannuu's indexing capabilities enable the fastest (3x faster than iPod) and most accurate results, regardless of database size. The user-friendly four-way default controller eliminates the need to search by artist, track, album or genre alone. Instead, all matching results are presented with one query alleviating the tedious "track-back" to superfluous menus and settings. By combining browsing and searching into one efficient "find" function, Coby users need not fumble through an A-Z search, or be limited by an auto-complete function. kannuu delivers error-free results and immediate access to desired content with minimal clicks.
"kannuu is a natural partner for us to further enhance Coby's feature-rich MP3 players," said Kenji Higa, R&D Manager, Coby Electronics. "kannuu's technology helps deliver an effortless search experience, which is perfectly ¡®in tune' with our mission to provide consumers with affordable and easy-to-use CE products. The seamless integration of kannuu's new software will help deliver the portable music experience with convenience and simplicity, so users can spend more time enjoying their favorite digital content and less time searching for it."
Fueled by the popularity of its newest line-up, Coby recently expanded its multi-functional MP3 player offerings to include features such as touchpads, touch screens and improved video capability. Incorporating kannuu's industry-leading technology improves the entire search-and-discovery experience with a precisely intuitive user interface and accurate results from multiple field aggregation. The upcoming devices are expected to have a needle-moving impact on customer satisfaction.
"We are excited to partner with Coby," said Sean-Michael Daley, CEO, kannuu, Inc. "With the proliferation of digital content comes the growing need to simplify and accelerate the time-consuming task of searching on the go. Our unmatched lookup technology will give music fans everywhere a better, faster and easier way of accessing their digital libraries, and we are pleased to help Coby ¡®turn up the volume' for consumers."
Portable digital entertainment continues to grow at exponential rates, driving an industrywide essential need for a "best-in-class" on-device user experience. Through this new relationship, Coby and kannuu aim to advance the portable device landscape by offering a complete, top-tier solution designed to improve users' digital media experience.