4 posts tagged “pandora”
Stitcher Launches Personalized Radio iPhone App In Private Beta
Jason Kincaid
16 comments »
Stitcher
,
the personalized streaming radio service, is releasing its native
iPhone application in a limited private beta. The first 100 TechCrunch
readers to submit their email addresses here
will be eligible to participate. Note that you’ll have to submit your
iPhone’s serial number, which is required by Apple’s Ad Hoc beta
program (as is the 100 user limit).
Stitcher can best be described as Pandora
for everything but music, allowing users to compile a playlist of audio
feeds from hundreds of sources, including news sites and radio
stations. The site also employs a small team to read popular blogs and
websites aloud so you can listen to them on the go.
When I first covered Stitcher in May, I wrote that the site’s mobile service had a lot of potential, but that its iPhone web app was slow and clunky (which was more an issue with Mobile Safari than Stitcher).
The demo video below shows that Stitcher’s native app has resolved these issues - there’s no longer any lag when switching stations, and the interface is much cleaner and more intuitive. Once it launches on the App Store, Stitcher will see no shortage of competition from other audio streaming apps including Pandora (one of the most popular apps in the store), AOL Radio, and a number of others.
You can see a demo of the app below. Note that Stitcher is a work in progress, and that the team is still making improvements as it builds up to public release:
iPhone Apps We Like: Pandora
Pandora
for the iPhone is as easy to use as the website. Just type an artist
you want to hear, it will build a radio station of similar songs and
broadcast them in FMish-quality. The picks are usually accurate, but
the science behind picking them is hilarious: The app explained that I
have a soft spot for "boastin' lyrics" and "headnodic beats". Pandora
works well over Wi-Fi, 3G, and even EDGE.
Our own Chris said he played it over EDGE while driving around Southern California and didn't lose signal once. Other pros include album art and allowing you to skip, bookmark and thumbs up/down tracks for better accuracy. While all of these features make Pandora a great app, just thinking about it makes my battery drain. [App Marathon]
credit - gizmondo.com
Pandora Usage Stats Prove It’s iPhone’s Killer App
Jason Kincaid
48 comments »
Pandora’s
internet radio has always been one of those sites that was really cool
in concept, but too inconvenient to ever go mainstream. The service was
long tied to computers only, and while it eventually expanded to
special internet radios and some mobile phones, it still has yet to
become a household name. But with the launch
of Pandora’s new iPhone app last Friday, it looks like the service is
about to hit critical mass. It’s a free, mobile, digital radio station
that only plays music you like and lets you skip the stuff you don’t.
And it rocks.
The personalized music service employs a small army of 50 musicians to create a “Music Genome” that describes each song according to 600 attributes. Listeners input a few of their favorite artists, and the site analyzes the Genome to serve up an endless stream of recommended music.
We introduced the app last Friday, when we called it our “flat out favorite application so far”, and since then it hasn’t failed to impress. Streamed music plays flawlessly over Edge and 3G networks - during a 40 mile drive I didn’t once run into any kind of skipping or static. Even better, the app currently has no advertisements playing, though we can probably expect that to change.
Unsurprisingly, Pandora’s usage stats are overwhelmingly positive. Pandora is currently the fourth most popular free app on iTunes (behind Apple’s Remote, AIM, and WeatherBug), and has reportedly been seeing a new listener every 2 seconds. Usage over the weekend hit an all-time high for the service, with 3.3 million tracks streamed to iPhone listeners alone. Perhaps more impressive is the retention rate of listeners, who are averaging over an hour of listening per day.
If there’s one thing that could kill the service, it’s ads. Pandora is going to need to monetize the app somehow - let’s hope it allows us to pay an upfront fee (say, $10) to avoid the annoying interruptions that have made listening to traditional radio a painful experience.
credit - techcrunch.com
& techmeme.com - 
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Jango and Seeqpod Hope to Monetize Music
, Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 3:00 AM PT Comments (0)
Online music discovery and sharing sites are a dime a dozen, but they still continue to launch. For those watching this phenomenon and wondering why new startups keep entering a crowded — and relatively unprofitable — market, look no further than Kasian Franks, CEO of Seeqpod, and Dan Kaufman, CEO of Jango.
Each CEO sees music as the killer application that will lead their users into more lucrative enterprises. With Jango, which is a cross between an Internet radio station and social network, the business proposition is to license the ability to stream the music as an online radio station (as opposed to striking deals with individual recording companies), build a social network around that streaming music, and then sell targeted ads.
Jango, which launched its beta in December and has raised about $2 million from angels, allows users to type in the name of an artist and immediately hear their songs. A list of additional recommended artists is also provided. The user clicks on each band or singer to create one or several personalized radio stations, and those radio stations are shared among Jango’s users.
Kaufman, who points to services such as Imeem, Last.fm and iLike as places where people can go to find music online, says Jango is more social, and notes that the social component leads to more page views and a targeted space for advertisers. Advertisers on the big social networks don’t know where their ads may appear, he claims, so it’s worth it for certain advertisers — especially those promoting artists — to sign up with Jango. In addition to ad revenue, Jango plans to make money on transaction fees for selling music on the site, and like Internet radio stations Pandora and Slacker, will charge subscription fees for those who want to avoid ads or get access to more features.
Jango’s model is fairly conventional, in that it relies on music to build an ad-supported social network that uses ads to monetize its users. Seeqpod is different — it’s using music as a way to sell its search technology and recommendation engine. The startup, which has raised close to $4.5 million from angels, has exclusively licensed search technology from the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.
Taking a cue from Chinese search giant, Baidu, which has a popular MP3 search function, Franks decided that music was indeed something universal enough to get users to try out the search engine. Visitors to the Seeqpod site see a search box similar to the one at the top of the Google homepage, but also get a list of currently searched-for music that scrolls underneath that box. After the user types in the song for which he is looking, Seeqpod searches for it on the Internet and begins playing it (but not hosting it, so as to avoid legal issues).
Songs related to the search inquiry are also shown as part of Seeqpod’s recommendation capabilities. Franks says Seeqpod plans to add video search and discovery in the future, and to advertise against its results, much like Google does. In a program similar to Google’s AdWords, Seeqpod plans to work with individual artists to show ads on their sites based on music searches and split the revenue from showing the ads. Franks maintains that music is the best way to get user adoption and for Seeqpod to garner the ad revenue associated with a successful search engine. A similar music recommendation site with an eye on larger markets is MyStrands.
“Music is a suberb strategic platform for rolling out services and promotion,” Franks says. “There’s no Powerset or Kosmix here. Consumers don’t care about the search engine; [search engines] are a transition point that enables them to get to another place on the web.”
Both startups are using music as a differentiator to get market share in a crowded space that is dominated by giants: In Jango’s case, music will have to push it past Facebook and MySpace, while Seeqpod has set itself against Google. Consumers may love their tunes, but hitting the right notes with enough of them will be a challenge.
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