Just the thing for a long Wednesday: the Mango song, from the makers of the Badger song.
Thought you could use something else stuck in your head besides “CORP-rate accounts payable, THIS is Gee-NA! JUST a mo-MENT!”
Here’s my design of the PandoraPod. I’d love to see it, would you? I think it could be a hit. Not only does it let you be portable with your audio, but you get the benefits of the Music Genome Project along with you, and an easy way to expand your collection on the go…
Please comment with any suggestions as to what features you’d like to see, etc. I’d love to be doing this type of user experience development, think it’s a good idea? I enjoy creatively making things better, but I’ve basically been in an Admin role in different parts of IT thus far… (Plus, somewhere like San Jose is looking pretty nice right now, as it’s -15F out here in Chicago…)
Product picture:
(Don’t mind the pic, first time on GIMP and using a touchpad…)
Product Description:
Based on the Insignia NS-DA2G, this NS-DA4G-P player boasts the size of an Altoids gum tin, while remaining under a half-inch thick. Offering FM radio, 4GB of mp3 storage, and the Pandora music service, this player offers a superior listening experience, not only by delivering the music you know you love, but finding the music suited to your tastes that you don’t know about, just like Pandora.com! Not only are listeners able to carry their music with them, but they are also able to listen to their Pandora music channels, and even buy-on-the-fly the tracks they like! (DRM free, of course) Price: US$119.99
Product Specs:
Product Accessories:
Menu Structure: (note – new menus are in bold, the rest is the same as the current NS-DA2G)
Afterthought: Ooh! What if it could read the ID3 tags off of your music collection, and build a new channel for you off of a particular Genre or group of selected songs? What about a temporary channel based off of whatever you currently have in the 4GB of storage? Nice!
edit: a few hours after I wrote this, Seagate announced D.A.V.E. Scoble has the inside track on what DAVE is. Check it out, it’s basicaly a generic 10 or 20GB hard drive with USB / WiFi / Bluetooth and an API to make it into whatever you want. If I can get my hands on one, I’ll learn whatever language the API is in, make a PandoraPod prototype (still need to figure out what device will tie into DAVE, and release the code, if it works.
If you haven’t heard by now, Google Image Search has a new interface. All of the technical information is hidden via javascript until you mouse over the image. People have their own opinions about this, but I hate it. Part of the way I qualify an image as useful or not is its dimensions – basically, I’d rather have a 500×500-sized image than a 50×50 of the same thing. To do this now, you have to mouse over every image to check, instead of being able to do it at a glance.
Google really isn’t known for doing these types of ‘do it because we can’ type stylings, and it’s a little disappointing. I understand the desire to have a clean-looking interface, and that maybe the bulk of their users don’t care about the technical data, but at least just grey it out or something, instead of hiding the whole thing.
If you really want to, you can still see Image Search the old way by turning javascript off, but why would you want to do that? Maybe this could become part of a new feature for your google account – so you can choose whether or not to display extended data? Like how WinXP shows tiled view by default in a folder, but you can choose ‘detailed’? Seems like you should probably allow the people to get what they want, instead of forcing one design on everyone…
I rarely post twice in one day, but this is too perfect to not send out on a Friday. The guys over at Woot give some good deals on stuff every now and then, but they’re pretty funny too! Check out the Wootable Awards for CES 2007. For all the work I’m sure some engineer puts into a consumer electronics product, it’s a shame for them to be revealed so poorly by some marketing flunkie.
Ugh, my sides hurt. Check this out, but first think up an excuse about why you’re laughing at work. (or maybe think of a reason why to work where you can’thave a laugh every now and then…? )
CES 2007: The Wootable Awards
[youtube]SPE8vL5hlFA[/youtube]
Here’s a tip I got from Skip Barber Racing School, relating to when you’re driving a stick-shift and going out of control. In racing you drive with both feet, the left does the clutch and brake, and the right does the gas.
It’s hard to prescribe what to do when driving on pure ice like this. The best advice would be to not go out until the plow trucks have had a chance to do their job. If you do have to go out, these two things might keep you from making a bad situation worse, as demonstrated by the person who chose to lay on the gas in the first car. Unpredictable, and decidedly worse than if they would have just locked the brakes and taken the initial hit.
Note: there is a car that later does this. Although they are sliding directly sideways and can’t do anything about it, by sticking with it they took the least abuse from the bad situation they were in.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that the car control techniques taught at Skip Barber Driving/Racing School have to date kept me out of three major accidents, by making it a reflex to avoid other drivers who were driving recklessly, both in weather dry and snowy. I highly recommend them. They’re expensive, but in premiums and deductibles alone, the cost paid off several times over in my case. (and it’s fun)
Well, the Pandora story continues, this time with Techdirt. The headline reads “Pandora Goes With Old Intrusive Ads To Boost Their New Media Product”. That certainly does capture what I’m trying to get across with my past few posts, and I’m glad to see it wasn’t lost on them.
I love Pandora, and although I agree that the current ads are only intrusive to a minor degree, I’m worried about backlash to their service if this pilot program goes into full swing. I ended up writing more than I wanted to in the comments over at Techdirt, but I wanted to share it with my readers as well.
By the way, if you haven’t heard of Techdirt, subscribe to their feed, they’re very good. They’re responsible to a large degree (in addition to my own reasons) why I’ve decided my organization will never buy Sony products, among other things. OK, back to the idea of new media monetization vs. old:
While I agree that it is definitely possible to use “old” advertising methods in the new media, I feel this is artificially placing the required negative aspects of monetization on a media where it’s not required.
A simplified example of this can be seen in the domination of iTunes. By making it “grandma-easy” for iPod owners to get music on their iPods, Apple has boosted their revenue in both the hardware and music sales businesses to a height greater than the sum of these products individually.
Apple could easily make a lot of money by selling ads with the music they sell on iTunes, but they don’t. They instead choose to maintain and grow a great service, and take advantage of the efficiencies in their market to add value to ancillary products.
Overall, I think a worthy goal for a new media company like Pandora is to identify the future market and application of online music early enough to be able to define it themselves, instead of taking a great implementation and trying to apply it to a solution that was the product of limitation.
I’d like to state again that behind *.google.com, Pandora easily comes in second, and I have nothing but hope for them that they will find a way to completely dominate a self-defined market. I feel that all they have to do is choose to do so, and they will be well on their way. I look forward to continuing to broadcast my personalized stream of new music across my office and the adjoining lab.
As Mashable pointed out, I’ve expressed my disappointment in the idea of audio advertising on Pandora, along with a few others. To me, Pandora represents a very pure service, offered for free, that has become one of my favorites out of the hundreds of web services I use on a monthly basis.
In true conversational-web form (otherwise knows as Web 2.0), I wanted to not only express my concern but offer a few suggestions on alternate methods of monetization of the Pandora services in order to keep the audio stream ad-free (or, as I like to say, unpolluted). I think this is important, as it’s not all about firing off your gripes…
Tom Conrad, Pandora’s CTO, commented that “[user] responses are just the kind of thing we need to hear during this period; so thanks for posting about this”. Tom, I value Pandora’s service greatly and agree that Pandora deserves to turn a profit for its wonderful service. Here’s how I see this done without changing its product to something listeners might see as undesirable.
This leads to other mounting fixtures (boombox, desktop cradle, etc.) that also lend themselves to profitability.That’s what I’ve been able to come up with in the last day or so. I encourage other bloggers to post their ideas and link here, or list them in the comments if they don’t have a place to write their thoughts.
Pandora has supplied us with a great service for free. Let’s repay the favor and help create a revenue stream for them. While I agree that ads are the easiest way for monetization, Pandora and similar services can earn a living without resorting to the tactics of the old media. After all, the tactics of the old media are the reason why we have the new media!
Unfortunately, it looks like 2007 has brought a dark cloud over one of my favorite sites, Pandora.com. While you can still get great music tailored to your tastes (and wonderfully based on music characteristics instead of user demographic averaging), it appears that there are now short audio commercials inserted into your audio streams. You are unable to fast-forward past these commercials.
(click thumbnail for larger view)
Advertising on Pandora is nothing new, but in the past it has been non-invasive. I much prefer the static ads on the page, and even admire the different stylesheets they would use to match the page’s color scheme to the ad. It gave a nice ‘branded’ look to the Pandora page, and in effect labeled the advertiser as the nice people who were bringing you such great music at no cost, monetary or otherwise.
However, now (as seen in the picture) short commercials are now playing in the audio stream, as in this case here for McDonald’s Dollar Value menu. This change has the opposite effect – I now know exactly who is keeping me from hearing my music, both visually and via audio, and casts a negative light on both Pandora and the advertiser.
Please Pandora, no more audio advertising! Keep the (audio) stream unpolluted!
edit: I’ve posted a few alternative ideas for Pandora. Please check them out and let me know what you think!
Making short- and long-term goals are something I’ve always believed in. I’m not a big fan of just wandering through life, it makes me feel like I’m lacking direction. Like many people, I need the sense of accomplishment to feel like I’m doing something with my life.
I’ve started using 43things.com to organize my goals, and for 2007 I’m making the resolution to accomplish at least the top ten items on my list. I currently have 18 things on there, but Here’s a little more detail on the top ten:
1. Get a Master’s Degree – I’m currently enrolled at the Keller Graduate School of Management. January 8 will be my 4th semester towards a Master’s degree in Information Systems Management. It’s very interesting, they basically teach you how to be a CIO. Good stuff.
2. Learn Ruby on Rails – I got a Barnes & Nobles gift card for Christmas, and picked up a Ruby/Rails book. I hope to know what I’m doing by the end of January.
3. Build a website with 1 million users – the user base may take a while, but I have several ideas I’d like to explore that have great potential to not only be successful, but to be a positive influence on my own community. I’ll tak about them later in the year.
4. Get my MCSE – I know, the MCSE is basically a joke these days. The knowledge is very valuable though, so it’s a shame that so many people just study for the test, get the certification, and then are complete yahoos in their own jobs, giving the cert a bad name.
5. Work for Google – I know some people have problems with Google, but I think that although there might never be a perfect company to work for, you need to find the company that is perfect for you. For me, the more I learn about Google, the more it’s like reading about myself. Since no-one else comes close, Google’s it for me.
6/7. Reduce my bills/get out of debt – I’ve already switched over to efficient lighting/heating, it’s about time to call up the credit card and phone companies again to try and get a lower rate. Eventually this will let me only owe money on my house. There’s a long way to go, but I hope to pay off a $14K car loan plus about $5K in credit cars by the end of 2007.
8. Watch a space shuttle launch – Soon there won’t be any to see, and I’ve always wanted to do it. Besides, it’s a good excuse to get down to Florida too.
9. Drink more water – I think I overdid it yesterday (3 liters in a few hours), but I got a water bottle for Christmas, and I’m going to try to drink the proper amount of water from now on. I always feel so tired when I don’t, so I don’t know why I dehydrate myself.
10. Golf under 90 – I originally picked up golf two years ago when the Director of IS had been hired by the CIO, his golf buddy. A $150K/year job. I’ve since left that company for a new job, and don’t see golf as a meal ticket, but I’m still golfing because I started liking it. The thing I like most about golf these days is that you HAVE to be relaxed to play it well. It’s more about controlling yourself and letting go than anything else I’ve done, and I like it!
Well, that’s the top 10. Hopefully I’ll do all of these in 2007, and have time left over to get to the rest of my constantly-growing list.
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