Hasta La Gadget!

The Paper Jamz, they have jamz-ed their last — at least for now. Gibson’s won that injunction against WowWee for modeling its 2D toy guitars on famous axes like the Flying V and Les Paul without permission, and since retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy and Target were all named in the lawsuit, they’ll have to pull PaperJamz from their shelves. Or maybe not — the injunction was granted and immediately appealed on the 21st, and we’ve definitely seen PaperJamz for sale in Best Buy stores here and there since then, so it seems like there’s still a chance to grab the super-thin guitars while the lawyers sort it all out. We’d guess WowWee might simply re-think some of the designs to be little less “inspired” by Gibson guitars in the meantime — could the Flying V PaperJamz one day command the same collector attention as a 1970s lawsuit Ibanez, Tokai, or Greco? For humanity’s sake, let’s hope not.

Gibson wins Paper Jamz injunction, retailers ordered to pull stock originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Consider all the things you’ve bought from Amazon, all the things you wanted to, but couldn’t afford to buy from Amazon, all the wildly popular fashions and fads that have gone through that online store’s brief, but torrid history … each of those has now been overshadowed by the mighty sales of the third-generation Kindle. Jeff Bezos and team have today announced that their latest and greatest Kindle has become their bestselling product of all time, thanks in no small part to an aggressive price that’s been “low enough that people don’t have to choose,” as Jeff puts it, between an e-reader and a tablet — they’ve just gone and bought both, apparently. Alas, we’re still no closer to knowing the exact figure of Kindle sales, but who really cares at this point, the thing’s looking like a runaway success.

Continue reading Amazon’s third-gen Kindle is now its best-selling product… of all time!

Amazon’s third-gen Kindle is now its best-selling product… of all time! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 10:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A UK teen named Lamar Johnson has recently plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud. His crime? It seems that he and his band (both in a musical sense and in a “Robin Hood” sense) used stolen credit cards to purchase something like $750,000 worth of their own music from both Amazon and the iTunes Store between January 2008 and June 2009. There’s no telling how much the group would have earned from royalties, and the name of the band hasn’t been disclosed (believe us, we looked), but something tells us that they probably recorded dubstep. Also, something tells us that — since the royalties would have to be paid out to someone with a bank account — this was a painfully easy case for prosecutors to crack. While Johnson will find his sentence tacked onto the 5-year jail term he is currently serving for grievous bodily harm, the rest of his 12 member “band” will have to wait until they appear in court in January to discover their fate.

Update: One of our fine commenters (christianoliff) dug up an article from the Sunday Mercury that discloses a little more info on the perp, including a dashing photo and the name of his MySpace artist page. Apparently his criminal enterprise was more of a 2-step thing.

UK teen buys $750,000 of his own music from iTunes using stolen credit cards (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Any successful business owner knows that one of the most important aspects to any business is branding which goes hand-in-hand with marketing. When a company or product has been successfully branded, people will be able to recognize it and will be more likely to use it because it’s familiar (brand loyalty). Recently the list of the top 100 most powerful brands was released from market research firm Millward Brown Optimor. They interviewed over a million consumers around the World and used that combined with financial data to come up with their list. The results are actually pretty interesting, and 28 of the companies that made the top 100 are related to Tech in one way or another.

Out of all the brands out there, do you have any guesses as to which company topped the list? We were thinking something like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s would top the list because those seem to be two brands that everybody knows. As it turns out, good ole’ Google took the #1 slot. Here’s a look at the top 10 brands, and then we’ll take a look at some of the top Tech companies.

• #1 – Google
• #2 – GE
• #3 – Microsoft
• #4 – Coca-Cola
• #5 – China Mobile
• #6 – IBM
• #7 – Apple
• #8 – McDonald’s
• #9 – Nokia
• #10 – Marlboro

Are any of you surprised that Microsoft was number three on the list and IBM managed to beat out Apple? Joining the ranks of Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and Nokia, other tech companies that made the list include:

• #16 – HP
• #22 – Cisco Systems
• #26 – Oracle
• #27 – Intel
• #41 – Dell
• #51 – BlackBerry
• #61 – Amazon
• #62 – Yahoo!
• #65 – eBay
• #92 – Motorola

It’s hard to believe that Yahoo ranks #62 on the list out of all of those because while Google has come and marched in on their parade, they are still a very popular Search Engine around the World.

Included in the report from company that put this list together was a note about three different emerging trends and one of them is the technology boom. They say, “The technology sector (including mobile operators), which accounted for 28 of the top 100 brands, outperformed all other categories in this year’s BrandZ Ranking, with a brand value growth of $187.5 billion. This is more than half of the Top 100′s total increase.”

Clearly the Technology Sector is booming, but will it last?

Source: News.com

Want to view the complete list? Click here (it’s a PDF).

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Apple still controls 66.3 of the online music market, according to new numbers from analyst firm NPD. Amazon is in second place–a distant second at 13.3 percent of the market, all of this despite an aggressive push from sites like Amazon and Walmart.com to topple iTunes’ strangle hold on the industry.

Among Amazon’s approaches are deep discounts on records, like the new album from Kayne West, which sold for $4.99 its first week–less than half of Apple’s asking price. Great for consumers, but artists seem less than enthused. The Wall Street Journal quotes the Fleet Foxes’ Twitter feed, “Been working for nine months on something that will sell for 3.99 on Amazon MP3. That’s about the price of a whoopie cushion.”

Yowtch.

Apple actually managed to increase its market share in 2010, moving up from 63.2 percent. Amazon increased as well, moving up from 11 percent.