So this Saturday I have to have my final capstone presentation done to get my Master’s Degree in Info. Sys. Mgmt. The Saturday after that the 50-80 page paper is due. I’m going a bit nutty getting it all done. I took a StumbleUpon break and came across this… video? Let me know what you think. I like it!
This is great – for those of you who have had the life-changing experience of owning a TiVo, things just got a lot better. TiVo has added bolean search to their wishlist management.
What this means is that while in the past, you were stuck choosing either to record:
You can now use AND, OR or XOR…which TiVo calls ‘This and that’, ‘This or that’, and ‘This but not that’. So if you’re a big fan of the Mythbusters, and want to see where they pop up elsewhere other than on the show, you can record Mythbusters Wednesday nights, but you can also make a WishList to record shows where the title has the keywords ‘Jaime Hyneman’ AND ‘Adam Savage’.
Other uses for this might be if you’re a NASCAR fan and want just the races. You could choose keyword = ‘NASCAR’ AND category = ‘Auto Racing’. That way, you get the races and none of the NASCAR talk shows.
Or maybe you want all showings where title = ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’ and keyword = ‘Andy Richter’, and nostalgicize about the old days.
A few notes, however: (TiVo this is your homework)
OK, so most IT people I know would rather visit a dentist every day than have to deal with Windows-related issues. There was a time when you could always go to Mac – but am I alone in feeling like the Mac vs. PC commercials are bad for the Macs? I was seriously considering one, but now feel like I don’t want to sign on for fear that I’ll be cast into the iSmug crowd.
There has to be a better way to present the differences between PC and MAc, and I think I’ve found it. So here it is, the barebones facts of Mac vs. PC…presented in awesome 80’s rap-style. Nice.
Back in January, I talked about the possibility of having an iPod-esque device that would enable you to use Pandora while mobile. I called it the PandoraPod, and beleived that it would usher in a new era of profitability for Pandora, a service I’ve come to see as extremely valuable. What I like about them is the algorithm-based music recommendations that allow me to hear new and undiscovered music based on my preferences. I prefer this over “other people that liked this also liked…” because in the latter, you run into the same old stuff over and over again – the system has a tendancy to feed itself.
Today I’m happy to see that along with a very nice site redesign, Pandora has announced that you are now able to use the Pandora service through four different Sprint phones for the very reasonable price of $2.99/month. Yes, along with your Sprint data plan, you are now able to listen to an unlimited amount of new music for the price of 3 songs on iTunes. You can even get a free 30-day trial!
Especially due to the threat of raised rates for internet radio (now coming July 15), I am very glad Pandora has found a way to not only monetize its services, but increase the value of its services by going mobile.
Great job, guys, and I’;ll be happy to see this work out uite well for you. I’ve been pushing for you guys to go mobile, and I sincerely think this will singlehandedly launch Pandora to the top of the internet radio services.
I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this on any of my feeds. It seems like once again the RIAA has done its thing once again, except this time to eradicate internet-based radio. Keep in mind that the extreme rate hikes they’re implementing apply only to internet radio; five times higher than sattellite, and nothing for terrestrial.
I can’t even describe how ridiculous this is to the future of the entire music industry, so I’ll let the long history of educated posts at Techdirt do it for me. Here’s a link to Pandora’s founder on the subject, please digg it up on your way over if you’d like to see a level playing field in this industry. Completely ridiculous – I can’t stand industrial dirtbags putting an extinct business model over fairness, and these guys are reigning kings of that genre.
I’m in charge of purchasing for a large organization, and if you take a walk around any of our facilities, you won’t be able to find one Sony product. Not a CD-R, not an A/V cable, absolutely nothing. The same goes for my This list also holds the oil companies (to as great a degree as I can manage), but that’s a whole other story.
Welcome to #3, RIAA. Be ashamed.
In the meantime, those artists who have sold their souls to RIAA for a monetary profit canjoin the shame party. For everyone else, go ahead and fire up RIAA Radar to make sure you’re not responsible for funding this type of thing. In fact, RIAA Radar just found a new home in my blogroll.
(I’d like to note here that I really am a well-meaning, good-natured guy, but stuff like this really rubs me the wrong way, especially because I know what it’s like to work hard, get something going, and have someone kill it because they’re too lazy to compete at a higher level. [many stories, multiple times...])
Apparently the biggest hit at South-by-Southwest yesterday is the announcement of a new music service like Pandora and Last.fm called Slacker centered around a device very close to what I described in the PandoraPod post I did about two months earlier.
I still believe the concept will be the next big thing, and a potential iPod killer, and apparently BoingBoing, TechDirt and others are starting to believe in it as well. Too bad I have to have a job, I wish I could work on a ubiquitous internet-connected device like the PandoraPod, but with the ability to connect to any of these services.
This brings up a good point. Ideas are cheap, that’s for sure, but what’s a guy to do when he’s got a dozen ideas but also a load of responsibility to be a provider for his household? It’s not too late for me to be an internet/technology revolutionary (I don’t have kids to take care of yet), so what to do?
I’ve started learning Ruby/Rails with a lot of help from Andrew at Teabass (check him out) and the NW Chicago Ruby Users Group. I’ve even lowered my grad class load this semester to get more time to work on learning how to do Rails development. I think that will cover the web-applications side of things, but I’ve been coming up with more and more hardware. Short of flying to Malaysia and asking people at the airport where to go, how does one get a handheld device prototype / production model created? I’m pretty anxious to work on the next generation of product, such as the PandoraPod or my WiMax/Skype RAZR phone. Any ideas?
Anyway, it really is great to have some validation that yes, maybe I am tuned in properly to the way things are going, but in addition to my side project to try and get hired by Google as a future applications visioneer, where do I go from here? Anyone have some good advice?
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.
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!
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