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WaTunes offers free digital distribution for musicians

Talk about a race to the bottom: a week after I pondered which digital music distribution service was cheapest, WaTunes made the question irrelevant by offering digital distribution for free. That's right--for no money down and no cut of the royalties, WaTunes promises to distribute your digital downloads to iTunes, Amazon's MP3 store, Rhapsody, eMusic, and Rhapsody.

So how does the company expect to make money? The answer became clear this week when WaTunes launched its premium-priced service, WaTunes VIP. For $29.95 a year, artists and labels will get distribution to more stores (including the Zune Marketplace), … Read more

Find nearby exercise routes with WalkJogRun

When you're traveling, it's easy to come up with excuses not to exercise, like, "There's nowhere to run near this hotel." The new WalkJogRun Routes app leverages your iPhone's geolocation skills to find routes near you.

How? By tapping WalkJogRun.net's repository of 350,000-plus user-created routes. Just run the app, wait a few seconds for it to hone in on your location, then choose a distance (1 mile, 2 miles, all distances, etc.) to see the routes in your neck of the woods.

The subsequent list tells you the name, length, and … Read more

RouteNote: A cheap way to get your tunes on iTunes

Cheap tools to help independent musicians sell their music online are proliferating like mushrooms after a rainstorm: last month I wrote about Audiolife, which gives bands an online store to sell CDs and merchandise with absolutely no up-front costs (they take a cut of sales as you make them). Since then, Audiolife was kind enough to send me a sample CD and t-shirts, and they look and sound adequately professional--certainly fine for independent musicians on a limited budget, although nobody's going to confuse them with the deluxe version of the latest U2 album.

But Audiolife's download store is … Read more

Garmin gets eco-friendly with new routing option

Garmin's been quite busy at CES 2009, and the show hasn't even officially started yet. In addition to introducing the Garmin Nuvi 885T, Garmin Zumo 660, and the nuMaps Lifetime Map Update Program, the GPS manufacturer announced something called EcoRoute.

EcoRoute brings a new routing option to Garmin Nuvi devices (in addition to faster time and shorter distance) and creates itineraries based on the most fuel-efficient course. You can even select your vehicle type under the "Vehicle profile" option in the Tools menu and enter your car's fuel economy.

Other features include a Fuel Report … Read more

Inrix sees the future of traffic prediction

Former Microsoft spin-off Inrix on Tuesday will launch a new, nationwide traffic-prediction platform.

A new routing service combined with traffic data available for more than 800,000 miles of U.S. roads and location-based information is all part of the Connected Services platform Inrix hopes Web and mobile application developers, gadget makers, and car companies will be driven to adopt.

Inrix CEO Bryan Mistele says he thinks the new platform will lower the barrier to entry for developers and device makers.

"By wrapping it all together, this can do for telematics and navigation what YouTube did for video," … Read more

Route 66 takes the high road

When Crave mentions sat-nav, our beloved readers probably think TomTom, possibly Garmin, or maybe even Navman. But, you guys should probably start adding Route 66 to your mental Rolodex of cool GPS devices.

We've just taken receipt of the trendily named Route 66 Chicago 9000, part of the new line of Route 66 sat-navs announced at CeBIT earlier in the year. The 9000 is the big daddy of the bunch and incorporates a 2GB SD card with detailed European maps, plus an RDS/TMC receiver--the anti-traffic missile of sat-nav warfare.

The unit looks fairly innocuous. Its 4.3-inch screen … Read more