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Close the Sale app? Seems like there is an app for everything and now businesses can download an app to their phones, computers, ipads and ipods to assist their sales team in handling customer objections, sales problems, difficulties, and even help with negotiating.

Technology is starting to find very practical applications and not just used for mindless games. Now sales organizations are getting a phone application that will assist them in the sales process? With companies cutting back on budgets, it’s not uncommon to find people lacking the skills to handle real customers, in the real world. Today organizations are seeking new and cost effective training solutions like virtual online training and now apps placed on smart phones to assist their sales teams in being more productive.

This comes at a good time – with customers becoming more sophisticated and the economy increasingly difficult, sales tools like Close the Sale app and virtual sales training may be quite timely. Today, sales people are having to work three times harder for the same money as a year ago.

Tougher economy, plus better educated buyers plus no change in sales ability = serious problem!

Close the Sale App is provides the sales person exactly what to do in any selling situation 24/7. Close the Sale App at Itunes hit top 100 and out of 50,000 available apps and demonstrates the demand for real solutions.

Professional sales people have already called in saying Close the Sale App assisted them in handing a customer objections and difficulties resulting in a sale!

While most business apps have only provided theory this sales tool allows the sales person to scan any of hundreds of selling situations and provides the sales person with a multitude of solutions. This business app is perfect for sales people, sales managers, business owners, entrepreneurs, fund raisers, call centers, advertisement sales, insurance brokers, real estate agents and even job seekers.

Close the Sale offers a free version available now and works on iPhones, iPod Touch and iPads. It comes with 12 different closing scenarios, lots of motivational and instructional video and very current and relevant information on handling today’s better informed customers and tips for closing the sale.

Grant Cardone, NY Times Best Selling Author and International Sales Consultant

Read more: Sales Tools, Iphone, Sales Apps, Grant Cardone, iPhone Apps, Close the Sale, Ipad, Business News

Having an iPad on your nightstand, not such a good idea, if you think about customer service at four am.

On the other hand, got a lot done, also including public service for veterans.

Save me from myself…

Read more: Obsession, Ipad, Technology News

The pricing of digital books by Amazon has finally caught the attention of two U.S. Attorneys, one in Connecticut and the other in Texas.

This may have ramifications around the world in publishing and, to a lesser extent, may affect the prices paid for other intellectual property available online from writing to film or music and even journalism.

For those unaware of the issue, Amazon in fall 2007 began offering bestsellers as e-books on its Kindle for a price of $9.99 each. This was below the cost it paid to book publishers for these works which averaged between $12.99 or $14.99 and vastly beneath that charged by traditional book stores who usually charge customers double what they pay the publishers.
As a temporary loss leader marketing exercise, undercutting rival prices is just another form of healthy competition that’s good for markets.

But when a company like Amazon is in a dominant or monopoly position and sells below its own costs for goods or services the market is destroyed by driving rivals out of business or keeping new entrants at bay. So the U.. Attorneys are looking at whether Amazon’s pricing behavior constitutes a form of market abuse under anti-trust laws called “predatory pricing”.

Amazon has argued that it has helped publishers with its cheap pricing by expanding the e-market.

But the same could have been said by the Robber Barons of old whose predatory pricing ushered in a host of antitrust laws designed to protect markets from monopolism.
Most famous was the price war between gigantic New York Central Railway and the Erie Railroad. The giant began charging only $1 per car for cattle transportation, less than cost, to drive others away from that business so they could eventually jack up prices. Erie did not back off then sued and won its case against NYCR.

Before that, there had been incidents involving other types of rail business where giants sold services below cost, thus driving smaller players into near-bankruptcy, at which time they were snapped up for bargains, a monopoly created and excessive prices were imposed.
A more recent case involved Microsoft’s inclusion of a free web-browser, Internet Explorer, which forced its browser competitor, Netscape, to give away its product and eventually go out of business. Courts ruled in Microsoft’s anti-trust trial that the “bundling” of Internet Explorer with its software was a monopolistic and illegal business practice.

In the case of Amazon, these low digital prices went on for two years until last fall when a handful of big book publishers balked at Amazon’s behavior and responded by delaying sales to Amazon amid evidence these deals severely damaged their book store customers.
Fortunately, they were rescued somewhat when Apple rolled out its iPad early this year and made deals with some of the biggest publishers to sell their books online but at the price Apple or a book store would pay publishers, or $12.99 to $14.99.

This levels the playing field, consumers get choices and writers can get published.
Now Amazon may be headed down the antitrust path like Microsoft or the railways even though Apple has entered the market fearlessly by refusing to play the loss leader game.
But the book business must be examined under an antitrust microscope to protect markets themselves. This will now happen south of the border but also in Canada and Europe where such laws were strengthened in the 1980s.

Read more: Predatory Pricing Investigation; Internet; Amazon; Book Publishing; Music, Technology News

Chinese superstar classical music pianist Lang Lang is a man on a classical music mission.

Already a legend for his Flight of the Bumblebee on an iPad with the San Francisco Symphony, and emerging finally from what seemed like months in the recording studios for his soon-to-be-released Live in Vienna multi-formatted release, Lang Lang is announcing the release of Version 2.0 of his best-selling iPad-only app, Magic Piano.

I’ve had Magic Piano for a few weeks. It’s like playing a piano set up like a video game. Whether you play against others, through the app’s “warp hole,” or alone, using the seductive spiral keyboard, it’s a highly addicting experience. After five minutes, my wife wouldn’t give the iPad back to me!

“The new version has been musically changed,” Lang told me on the phone. “The sound has a more convincing artistic feel to it.” Equally important, the music that’s hot wired into the app is now performed by Lang Lang himself. “A Chopin waltz, Clair de lune by Debussy, a lot of pieces.”

Lang always wanted to create a piano app, but had to wait for the technology to be ready. When he met the people from Smule, developers of Sonic Lighter, Ocarina and Glee, he liked their “cool, creative, very connective apps.” The important thing for Lang was “to create software so that kids could get a taste of what music will be like before they learn the real piano.” And Smule has delivered.

He is not worried by the simplicity and pop culture aspects of the Magic Piano concept. “After all, most kids play with toy cars, but eventually they need a real car. It’s really fun to play with friends, or play alone. There’s even mode that plays automatically. As technology has changed life, so music will improve people’s lives.” And sell a lot of product. Building on sales of 100,000-plus copies of Version 1, the outlook for 2.0 is looking very positive.

No matter how many copies he sells, however, Lang says unequivocally: “I will not give up the real piano.”

So all Lang Lang fans can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Read more: Chopin, Lang Lang, Music Education, iPad Apps, Magic Piano, Debussy, Best Ipad Apps, Ipad, Piano, Arts News

“Black Americans seem to think that their vision of race is the only one that matters. In Canada and England, they don’t have our history and so they view race differently,” says Nelson George, a cultural historian and filmmaker who candidly explores race, sex, parenting, gentrification, internet dating, the current whereabouts of Tupac (he’s in Cuba!), and other hot-button issues in his voyeuristic web series, Left Unsaid.

George, someone I have known and whose work I’ve followed for a decade now, has mastered every kind of creative medium as though life is some endless Exploratorium — songwriting for Kurtis Blow, a play for Q Tip, directing an Emmy Award-winning film starring Queen Latifah, novels, non-fiction, memoirs — and has fallen in love with producing for the web. The Internet’s seemingly limitless possibility is a match for his energy. “Think about it!” he exclaims with a childlike enthusiasm. “Cigarettes and Coffee is a web series! It’s these two people sitting at a table. It’s a web series!”

Using multi-character storylines a la Altman and the conversation-driven heightening of Jarmusch, George wrote, directed, shot, and produced Left Unsaid, with the help of longtime collaborator Nicole Nelch, to ask in the age of over-sharing, when 10% of the world’s population is on Facebook, what are you leaving off your profile?

In Left Unsaid, the answers come out at a luncheon, hosted by a rich divorcee recently relocated to Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, who invites women in the neighborhood she finds interesting, based on their Facebook profiles, over to her home for a party. Once the vino gets flowing and joints passed, the confessions, eye-rolling, diatribes, conspiracy theories, and advice-giving are unstoppable. George, the writer of the hip-hop movement, came up with other once nameless African American artists–including Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Erykah Badu, the Marsalis Brothers, Lorna Simpson–in Ft. Greene, the location and very much a character of this contemporary love letter to a place and time.

“Ft. Greene is this really interesting petri dish of gentrification. Ownership of the community is overwhelmingly white. It’s a white neighborhood but it’s not a white neighborhood…The blacks haven’t been pushed out totally,” says George.

Once upon a time in a disruptive decade known as the eighties, in Ft. Greene, George gave some money to his friend Spike to make his first movie, She’s Gotta Have It, which launched the indie film movement in America, did a favor for his friend Russell Simmons by helping some obnoxious young comedian by the name of Chris Rock write a screenplay, which led to their collaboration on the classic CB4 and then the hair weave industry docu-comedy Good Hair in 2009, wrote The Native Son column for The Village Voice, and at the age of 26 convinced a publisher to let him write the first biography on The King of Pop, which he followed-up this year with Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson.

“I’ve been a historian of culture. I’ve seen the evolution of things, of music, of cinema, of how these things are used,” he says, speaking of the digital revolution that has built and destroyed industries. “It’s one thing to be a young artist, but someone like me who grew up with old media, its really fun for me to think about how the world is being reinvented and ways old middle-aged guys like me can be a part of it,” he says with a smile. “That’s the fun of being a creative person right now. All the people who said you have to do it this way, fuck ‘em. You don’t have to do it this way.”

One way George is harnessing the creative freedom of the web is by finding his collaborators online. He used music from DJs he came across on MySpace in his 2007 Emmy Award-winning HBO film Life Support , based on his sister Andrea’s life living with HIV, starring Queen Latifah, that he wrote and directed. In Left Unsaid, he tapped the musical Brooklyn duo Knewdles and SOS after discovering the MC and violinist on Facebook.

As for the roster of talented actresses who grease his web series script with some improv, they came into the project after George quaintly bumped into many of them in the neighborhood. Chyna Layne, who portrayed Rhonda in the Oscar-sensation Precious, is hilarious as she heatedly argues in the episode Alive in Cuba that Tupac is alive and well on the communist island, a theory put forth by George’s twenty-two year old niece Leigh Amber Barrett. George chose to focus on an all-woman ensemble to explore his feelings about women while recovering from a break-up and because, in his family, he’s surrounded by women.

“In the best of all possible worlds, I’ll be working with these actresses for the next 20 years. We’ll have this little community and come back and do this. The conventional wisdom is, you can’t do that,” he says, adding: “We’ll see.”

Other performances to watch include the sensational British actor Donna Maria, writer-activist-actor Tigist Selam, Everyday People star Bridget Barkan, and ballet-dancer-turned-actor Lisa Ferreira who says in the must-watch episode A Real Sista that she’s been discriminated against more by people of her own color. In response to Megan, a Londoner played by Maria, shrugging off race as a a non-issue where she’s from, actress Charisse Woodall, playing the gentrification-bashing Brooklyner Keisha, scoffs back, “Did the President do some bailout on racism? Must have missed that press conference.”

Premiering Left Unsaid as a feature at the Black Film Festival in Miami in June, George received criticism that it’s too Brooklyn-centric, something he said he did purposefully, with nods to Havana Outpost, Ft. Greene Park and other neighborhood mainstays, to create a time capsule before the Ratner arena wreaks havoc. “Once the arena is built, that will change things, in a bad way. I’m trying to enjoy this moment,” he says.

Continuing with his media-pioneering, George has set his sights on the iPad, by working with a behavioral technologist to figure out how to format his script 79, about a seminal year in hip-hop focusing on his friend Kurtis Blow. He wants to include HD pop-up images for keywords and incorporate actor performances into e-books. “Independent film is in its big crisis – monetizing through subscribers and branding – I think that’s where it’s going to go,” he says of his projects. He’s also producing a play he wrote about the final redemption of Miles Davis starring Q-Tip as the jazz legend, and he’s the spokesperson for BlackAtlas.com, a global travel web series for, as George puts it, The Obama Set.

Just like his old friend Spike recently debuted a Brooklyn-branded Absolut vodka, George advocates being diversified, saying, “Anybody who is staying afloat these days is not doing one thing. People complain about it. Justin Timberlake is making movies and doing commercials. He makes more money on that than touring.”

“You can sit at home and do your thing, but it’s not what the zeitgeist is about to me,” he says. “The multi-hyphenated experiences are what the 20th century is about, and it’s been going on for 30 years.”

George is screening three episodes of Left Unsaid on August 10th at The National Black Theater in Harlem.

Read more: Queen Latifah, Absolut Vodka, Black Film Festival, Kurtis Blow, Cigarettes and Coffee, Nelso George, The Marsalis Brothers, Erykah Badu, Ratner Arena, Spike Lee, Lisa Ferreira, Charisse Woodall, Q Tip, Bridget Barkan, Ipad, Jarmusch, The National Black Theater in Harlem, Tupac, Donna Maria, Tigist Selam, Chris Rock, Robert Altman, Justin Timberlake, Lorna Simpson, Nicole Nelch, Entertainment News

It is not everyday that the U.S. government sides with jailbreakers. But, last week, the Librarian of Congress and Copyright Office did just that. Although the “jailbreaking” involved converting one’s iPhone or other mobile device to allow it to run both mobile service and third-party applications of the consumer’s choice, the new law is no less remarkable than a successful escape from a maximum-security prison. The law marks a decisive victory for American consumers and a firm rejection of attempts to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to achieve market control that copyright law was never meant to protect.

The DMCA was enacted in 1998 at the urging of Hollywood studios and the music industry, which feared piracy of their works on the Internet. The basic theory of the DMCA was simple: copyright holders should get extra legal protection for the technological measures–so called “digital locks”–they use to restrict access to or copying of their copyrighted works. The “anti-circumvention” provision under the DMCA makes it illegal for people to circumvent these digital locks, or to share tools that can be used to unpick the locks protecting copyrighted works.

While the theory of the DMCA was justifiable, in practice it hasn’t worked so well. First, in some areas, such as in music, many industry leaders decided on abandoning digital locks altogether. Ironically, it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs who championed the movement to “open” music files in a now famous Feb. 6, 2007 letter titled, “Thoughts on Music.”

The second failing of the DMCA is more worrisome. As critics feared, the DMCA has the potential of undermining people’s ability to engage in legitimate fair use activities.
What the Copyright Act permits people to do, the DMCA could just as easily forbid by “locking” them out of lawful activities. Even worse, some companies attempted to use the DMCA as a weapon to seek market power over functional items–such as garage door openers and printer cartridges–that copyright law was never meant to protect. As preposterous as it may sound, companies effectively tried to “copyright” their functional devices and business methods through the backdoor of the DMCA.

Luckily, Congress foresaw some of these potential abuses. In enacting the DMCA, Congress set up a rulemaking procedure by which the Librarian of Congress, with consultation with the Register of Copyrights, can create 3-year exemptions to the DMCA anti-circumvention provision. The most recent exemptions, the fourth in the line of rulemakings, are the most significant yet.

Two of the six exemptions deal with mobile phones. The Librarian renewed the 2006 exemption that allows people to circumvent encryption on their phones so they can switch to another cellphone service provider–from AT&T to Verizon, to use the Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters’ specific example. In rejecting Apple’s arguments to use the DMCA to support its exclusive service with AT&T, the Register explained that “mobile phone locks prevent consumers from legally accessing alternative wireless networks with the phone of their choice.”

The “jailbreaking” exemption goes even further in protecting consumer choice. It allows people to circumvent the technological measures on their iPhones or other mobile devices, in order to allow the devices to run third-party software applications of the user’s choice–even against the wishes of Apple or the device manufacturer. By using encryption on the iPhone, Apple tries to stop people from running third-party apps that Apple hasn’t approved. However, the Register again rejected Apple’s arguments that the DMCA should be allowed to facilitate Apple’s restrictive efforts. In this case, the argument for fair use in jailbreaking iPhones was “compelling and consistent with congressional interest in interoperability.”

For many, it may seem confusing to think of iPhone usage as presenting a copyright issue. After all, people are buying the iPhone to use them, not to pirate their software. So what’s the beef? Well, the beef is really over a business tactic, not the protection of copyrighted works. As the Register of Copyrights noted, “the amount of copyrighted work modified in a typical jailbreaking scenario is fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole.” Whether Apple should be allowed to employ restrictive business tactics for its iPhone (or iPad, for that matter) is a much different question than whether Apple should get legal protection under the DMCA for that restrictive end. Put simply, “if Apple sought to restrict the computer programs that could be run on its computers, there would be no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.”

The other key exemption recognized by the Librarian is a “remix” exemption that expands a prior exemption for circumventing the encryption on movies on DVDs, in order to make a fair use of a film. The new “remix” exemption applies not only to “educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors,” as was the case under the previous exemption, but now also to documentary filmmaking and noncommercial videos–the latter class popular among “vidders.” The “remix” exemption is limited, though, to “relatively short portions of motion pictures” for use in creating a new work “for purposes of criticism or commentary.”

These three DMCA exemptions, which were proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, provide an important reminder: the DMCA was enacted to serve the purposes of copyright law, with all of its checks and balances–and not the other way around.

Read more: Iphone, Register of Copyrights, Drm, Apple, Copyright, iPhone Apps, Dmca, Ipad, Technology News

Lonely Planet just released the first of five e-books available on the iPad. Their well-known guides on Great Britain, Italy, Spain, France and Ireland were the first to be published, boasting 3,000 hyperlinks, detailed maps and hundreds of images, according to Gadling.

The content is all stored locally, which means you don’t have to worry about WiFi connectivity or those pesky roaming bills to access data. The guides are now available on Apple’s iBooks store.

WATCH a demo below:

Read more: Video, Lonely Planet Guides, Lonely Planet Ipad, Ipad, Travel News