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?

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Big Laser - Bigger Graffiti

Well ok, so I might not actually NEED a 55mW Green Laser that can hit a target 22 miles away (it’s more light saber than laser pointer,) but if I am ever to pull off an act of urban graffiti like the one in this video, I sure might need some Jedi Knight skills…

Holy Kapow Batman, 40-story building graffiti? Nice. The advertisers side of my brain is already mulling over the possibilities.

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Install Google Talk on Blackberry Pearl 8100

Installing Google Talk on a Blackberry Pearl might be frustratingly difficult unless you know what settings must be in place before you attempt installation.

If you have a Blackberry Pearl 8100 (mine is from Cingular) and try to install Google Talk on the device using the browser that is built into the Pearl then you may have hit a small problem. If you visit the recommended page on the Blackberry site, http://www.blackberry.com/googletalk/, using the built-in browser you might see an error message like this:

Notice
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above is required to download this Instant Messenger.

This web page uses ActiveX controls that work only in Microsoft Internet Explorer. To ensure that Google Talk for BlackBerry devices is correctly downloaded to your BlackBerry, this site is not designed to work with any other Internet browsers.

You also see this message if you use Firefox 2.x on a MacBook Pro. And of course since Microsoft no longer supports IE on the Mac, then you might think “ok I’ll try Safari” but unfortunately that does not work either. For weeks I thought I was simply SOL.

With the launch and increasing popularity of Twitter I was in dire need of a mobile IM solution, so I dug further into the issue. After all I had installed Gmail, Gmaps and Gsearch already…

The simple solution turned out to be located in the Pearl itself. If you have this problem, here’s my solution:
1) In the Pearl, go to: /Settings/Options/Advanced Options/Browser Options/
2) Change the “Default browser configuration” from “MEdia Net” to “Internet Browser”
3) Back out of the settings screen and choose “save” when prompted.

You should now be able to access the download page on the Blackberry site listed above.

That’s it. Yup, simple.

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Apple iReader coming soon

Scoble is blogging again, and it’s about a device coming from Apple in the near future, he’s naming it as the iReader. Apparently it’s a device that will work with the iPhone bluetooth connectivity and will extend the native iPhone capabilities by connecting more devices. Including the iReader. Partners in the project include Amazon, Google and Cingular.

Read more about the amazing discovery over at Scobleizer

Of course it’s already a day later in Australia…

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