Pandora held a very cool “town hall” style meeting yesterday at SF MOMA to introduce a series of new milestones, features, and partnerships all related to its Pandora Everywhere program.
The room was packed with users, press, and bloggers – and overall, it was representative of everything that is good about the new Web economy. It was all about community.
The crowd – plus special guest, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch
I’ve been a big fan of Pandora since its inception and the experience has grown by leaps and bounds over time.
In an impressive and well orchestrated presentation, Pandora introduced partnerships with Sonos and Sprint which brings the world of streaming music into the home (away from the PC) and to cell phones.
Pandora on Sprint is free for the first 30 days – with no obligation – and then costs $2.99 per month on top of your Sprint Power Vision data plan.
And, they didn’t stop there. They pre-announced a deal that will bring Pandora into an upcoming mobile device to be built by SanDisk and powered by Zing. The device is similar to the Sansa Connect device launched last month by Yahoo.
For those of you new to Pandora, it is a new hybrid Internet Radio Station that allows users to create stations around their favorite artists and refines its playlist with a bit of user guided interaction. It starts with the artist you selected, and then applies a unique layer of intelligence to match that style of song to its database to determine the next song it serves. Users can vote whether they like it or don’t care for it and Pandora does the rest.
What I’d like to see is breadth. If you choose one artist – the music DNA needs to offer a greater assortment of music to reduce repetition and also introduce users to new artists.
Either way, Pandora runs on every PC and Mac I own and I have it streaming throughout the house through a wireless setup that only a geek could love. However, with these announcements, you can bet that I’ll be looking at upgrading the home system very soon. As for Sprint, I guess I have to wait for smartphone support.
Notable attendees included:
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