It’s been quite a while since my last blog post.  In fact, over the past few months, I haven’t even been able to be very active on the Forums either.

What have we been up to?  Quite a lot!

US Infomercial

The main thing that has been occupying my time, since the beginning of this year, actually, is the production of a 30-minute infomercial on Little Reader, for the US market.  I’m happy to announce that it’s just been launched, and we just finished our first week of test airings!  As we continue to make adjustments to the show and re-test it, those of you in the US and Canada might see the show on and off over the next few months.

For those of you interested to see the show, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmKyiTGvSp4

(This is an edited version with repeated segments removed.)

I also talked about the testimonials that we got from parents in this Forum thread:

http://forum.brillkids.com/little-reader/the-little-reader-testimonial-project!/

Little Musician

As many of you may know, we started beta testing of Little Musician a few months back.  Since then, we’ve continued to add more features to it based on your feedback, and most importantly, we’ve been working on putting together a curriculum that takes you by the hand and guides you what you show to your child each day.  This is especially crucial for parents who have little or no music background.

There are many enhancements that have been added, but the 2 main features you will see are:

- Rhythm syllables – ie., Ta, Ta-ah, Ti, Tika, etc.

- Customizable icons to replace note heads – Similar to how you can use all sorts of icons instead of dots in Little Math, you can now use your own icons instead of the note heads too!

Little Reader

We’re very excited with what we’ve been doing with Little Reader. In the next major update (tentatively called “v3″), you will see new features including:

- Child Profiles – Keep track of different children’s progress

- Game mode – Show different words and have your child choose the correct one

- Split Audio – Audio files can be split so that each phoneme, syllable or word can be sounded out separately

- Course Creator – Edit our curricula, and create your own course!

For full details, see my Forum post here:

http://forum.brillkids.com/little-reader/little-reader-v3-0-look-what’s-coming-next!/

Little Reader Touch for iPad

We will soon be launching our iPad version of Little Reader, called Little Reader Touch (“LRT”).

LRT is designed to be the iPad companion to Little Reader for the PC, so that existing LR users can play back their lessons using the iPad instead of the PC.  This is similar to how the BrillKids Presentation Binder Set also allows you to teach your child away from the PC and in the comfort of your living room.

The functions of LRT are currently still limited, so you still have to rely on the PC version to do many things such as editing lessons.

Further details on what this means for existing LR users will be announced in due course.

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Feel free to discuss this blog post in the comments here or in this Forum post:
http://forum.brillkids.com/announcements/what-have-we-been-up-to-at-brillkids/

KL Wong is the Founder and CEO of BrillKids, and also father of Felicity, aged 6. He can be contacted at KL(at)brillkids(dot)com.