Pandora Everywhere Platform - Prototype Wifi Device
As a long time member of the Pandora listening community I had the pleasure of participating in a Pandora town hall meeting / press event last night at the SF MOMA where the company made a number of significant announcements. I had a front row seat, with Michael Arrington sitting right behind me as he pounded out TechCrunch coverage of the event on his MacBook Pro.
The event kicked off with CEO Tim Westergren providing some really detailed background about how the roots for Pandora are deeply embedded in the Music Genome Project, which Tim and two others began working on roughly 7 years ago.
The town hall meeting format allowed a large number of questions to be asked and answered by Tim, to the delight of the crowd. Some of the answers hinted that changes at Pandora will continue apace, including a discussion about some of the recent music licensing issues faced by online radio station operators as well as potential enhancements to the Pandora service. Recently the company was forced to shut off access to the Pandora service for non-USA listeners, but it sounded like the team was hard at work trying to find a way to provide the Pandora service for rest-of-world audience, potentially with the UK being the next country to regain access. One member of the audience asked about using proxy servers to bypass the new IP filtering that Pandora has put into place, and while Tim spoke to their fiduciary responsibilities to the recording industry, requiring them to attempt to block access until a legal solution was in place, it sounded as if this could be a solution for those outside the US to regain (illegal) access to the Pandora service.
The main announcement of the night focused on the unveiling of the Pandora Everywhere Platform by CTO Tom Conrad. The new platform has been in development for a year as a secret project and will provide the basis for a slew of new possibilities that Pandora can capitalize on in the future.
The Sonos partnership is interesting, but I’ve been streaming Pandora to my home stereo using my Apple Airport Express wifi for months and it works really well for me in my little apartment. The ability to stream Pandora through phones from Sprint was a welcome addition as well, but Techcrunch and others have covered all of the specific product announcements, so go there to read more.
My main interest was with the pre-announcement of a new wifi enabled portable mp3 player that is being developed in conjunction with Zing and Sansa. This rocks and I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these suckers. The product is aimed at the burgeoning metro-wifi services provided by Google and others. It will also take advantage of the coming Wi-MAX services - “WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access (BWA) up to 30 miles (50 km) for fixed stations, and 3 - 10 miles (5 - 15 km) for mobile stations”
After the presentation I asked Tom about the possibilities that a peer-to-peer system might provide to Pandora’s new wifi systems and he was cagey about this, but admitted this might help them reduce their huge bandwidth bills. So let’s all keep an eye on this. If a peer-to-peer system was implemented there are several scenarios where the Pandora music discovery system could be enhanced and I’m going to keep my fingers crossed. Anyone care to speculate about this?
Filed under Internet Audio, Tech Devices, Web 2.0 | Comment (0)Even Laundry Rooms Twitter Now
Even laundry rooms, like this one at Olin College Twitter now, so are you still waiting to create your own Twitter account?
When two washers, two dryers and a condom machine create content autonomously, broadcasting to the world their temporal status, available, unavailable, I smile because we are finally beginning to see a very granular point of view with web content.
Twitter is about “now” time statements. So LaundryRoom needs to continually ping their followers with updates, but they only ping when the status of a machine changes. The machine has a location that must be described in order to find it and the moment in time in which the machine status changes is important because as everyone knows, washing and drying machines are quite popular in large buildings full of students and you need to be on the ball to get a machine before others do. In this regard, Twitter is a great system to connect with a Laundry Room and a group of student followers.
Micro content regarding the status of machines is beginning to show up everywhere, from parking meters to washing machines, so why are humans so slow to adopt a more systematic organizational structure for geo-temporal tagging their own lives? We tag here and we tag there, and some systems add meta data for us, but overall we don’t yet use a uniform system for tagging our daily interactions with technology on a geo-temporal basis. The reason why this is such an important point to understand is because by adding Time and Place to our electronic trails, we can access our personal history and share what we learned on the journey. We might also pull other real or virtual people into conversations if we enable others to see where we are, when we are there. If my phone broadcasts my GPS signal and tells my friends automatically “hey, come visit me at this location”, even if I’m in a virtual world like SecondLife, the possibilities created are interesting to ponder.
So where Dodgeball has mostly failed to live up to the concept, perhaps other newer, simpler, more automated systems of geo-temporal “shouting” which work at a more fundamental web standards level, can gain some traction in the market and help us all connect more. Or we might simply want to wash our clothes and need to know when a machine is available in our dorm without interrupting our PS3 gaming to walk down the hall. I’d like to reserve the next available open machine….. Thanks Twitter.
Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Web 2.0 | Comment (1)
