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I’m starting to appreciate the irony of Pandora’s choice in brand.

Pandora is an online music service that has taken an interesting approach to personalized internet radio. They’ve identified over 400 attributes that capture the essence of a given piece of music. I don’t know exactly how this works, but I imagine some of these attributes must include aspects like tempo or major vs minor keys or which instruments were used to create the music. By mapping out the music genome of hundreds of thousands of songs, Pandora is able to create streaming radio stations tailored to your tastes.

Its a pioneering music service that does an incredible job exposing listeners to obscure yet relevant artists. Unfortunately for music aficionados, Pandora seems to be living up to its namesake.

While Pandora (the webcaster) hasn’t necessarily introduced new evils to the world, by attempting to create a truly innovative digital music service, it is calling attention to evils which already exist.

In this case, Pandora’s box is the music industry and when it was open, out came SoundExchange, the Copyright Royalty Board and international music licensing. Here’s a quick recap of two litigious events which have recently besieged this company:

• SoundExchange is the branch of the RIAA which governs radio. They’ve gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to approve a request to increase the royalty which internet radio companies must pay by 300% - 1200%. This rate hike makes most internet radio business models completely unviable. The only option small companies like Pandora have for survival is to strike deals directly with the labels. This something which would almost certainly entail handing over programming control and ruin precisely that which makes Pandora so great. Major labels will either further line their pockets or gain enough control to promote their top 40 stable of artists.

• The beauty of the internet is that it gives anyone instant global distribution for digital content. As word has spread virally about Pandora, listeners from all over the globe have begun tuning in and creating their own custom radio stations. Unfortunately, due to licensing constraints, Pandora is being forced to block access to their service outside of the US. Knowing how fragmented the international licensing landscape is, it could take years before Pandora is able to open its doors back to foreigners.

At the end of the day, its the small, innovative music services and ultimately music fans everywhere that lose.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end here. House Representatives Jay Inslee and Donald Manzullo are introducing the Internet Radio Equality Act which if approved would neutralize the rate hike. SaveNetRadio is a newly formed grassroots coalition of artists, listeners and webcasters with the same goals in mind. Pandora is actively working on acquiring the licenses needed to operate outside of the US.

Much like the Greek myth, Pandora finds that in spite of the tragedy, there’s still something left at the very bottom of the box - hope.

Apparently, all of those super tough interview questions that Google has become infamous for aren’t used when screening designers.

Google always updates the logo on the homepage based on certain holidays. This Valentine’s Day was no exception. Sure enough, when I pulled up their site, the “g” is a chocolate covered strawberry.

But as TechCrunch points out, there’s something amiss. Take a look for yourself:

Maybe its Adobe’s fault for not having a more robust spell checker in Photoshop?

Update: Not to point fingers, but it looks like the typo falls squarely on the shoulders of Dennis Hwang.

Update: I owe Dennis an apology - it turns out that the lack of an “l” was completely intentional.  Most likely, its a reference to a particular line of poetry, “I did but see her passing by, yet I love her till I die.” by Barnabe Googe.

Rather than bore you with more of the same rampant speculation that’s inundating the blogosphere, I thought this might be a great point to step back and send you to a funny assessment of the Apple product life cycle I found a few months back.

I figure we’re right smack in between “Apple’s stock surges” and “The haters offer their assessment.”

Everyone pretty much agrees that mobile music is an interesting experience for the discerning consumer. Its been covered pretty well in the blogosphere, and if there’s any doubt, just look at the 42 million iPods sold to date. However, there a couple of aspects of mobile music that I feel doesn’t get enough focus.

Device Convergence
I can’t believe there’re still pundits advocating that for a truly great mobile music device, it needs to be dedicated solely to music. I have an mp3 player (and a digital camera, for that matter), but I loathe carrying them around. It seems like a no brainer to build a device which offers adequate functionality around the holy grail of audio, video and communication. Even Apple, with their fanatic loyalty to the user experience, has finally realized this simply isn’t the case - the iPod Video has made its debut and the iPhone is imminent.

Unfortunately, a decent convergence device is still years away in my opinion. Yes, even the much vaunted iPhone sounds like it will fail to deliver. Kevin Rose leaked that in order to solve the battery problem, the iPhone will contain two batteries - one for the phone and the other dedicated to the mp3 player. This just smacks of one of my early science fair projects. In an attempt to invent something new, I taped together a spoon and a fork, pointing in opposite directions, and called it a spork (I hadn’t discovered Taco Bell yet). C’mon Jobs, any elementary school kid could tape together a cell phone and an iPod and call it a day. Where’s the true innovation here?

Passive Consumption
For some inexplicable reason, it seems like mobile operators are all jumping on the video bandwagon. First there was VCast, followed quickly by Cingular Video. Everywhere you look, there are startups like MobiTV and GoTV, looking for a slice of the action. When did mobile music start to take a back seat to video?

In my mind, listening to music is simply a better fit for a mobile scenario. Video is great for when you’re sitting down for an extended periods of time and can spare the focus. But how often do you really find yourself in this kind of situation? Consider you’re daily commute. You either drive, which should take up your attention if you’re even remotely responsible, or you take the public transit. The latter does provide some time to consume video while sitting at the stop or on the subway/train/bus, but I’d argue that you’re probably also required to do some walking from stop to stop, which again requires your attention.

In every case outlined above, you could be listening to music without losing focus. The commute was just one example. What about when you’re working, studying, shopping or exercising? Music is equally applicable to all of those scenarios, whereas video would be appropriate for none.

The point is, the wireless industry needs to stop buying into the YouTube hype/hysteria and concentrate on building services that consumers would actually uinse.

Next post: The Case against Mobile Music

Most weekday evenings, you can find me playing pick up soccer at Cal Anderson Field. There’s a great group of guys that play there on a regular basis. In general, its rare that there won’t be at least half a dozen other guys to scrimmage with.

The exception to this rule is when the weather gets shitty. Unfortunately, this winter, the weather in Seattle has been very shitty. Wind storms, torrential rains and even the occasional hail have all conspired to ruin my evening pick up matches. The tricky challenge that I find myself facing is, when is the weather bad enough that nobody (or not enough people) will show up?

My tolerance for inclement weather has increased significantly in the past few years, so I’m perfectly comfortable playing through anything less than thunder and lightning. However, there have been far too many times when I’ve shown up to the soccer field and waited out in the rain for half an hour before realizing nobody else was coming.

So, I’m proposing a feature idea for those sites that facilitate pick up soccer.

Socster does an adequate job. While I was down in Berkeley visiting a friend, I was able to find a game near his house easily enough. However, there’s one killer feature that is blatantly missing - mobile integration. By the time I start worrying about whether guys are going to show up, I’m standing on the field and definitely don’t have PC access.

Based on the demographic that tends to show up to these games - high school athletes on an allowance, college students up to their ears in debt and internationals on an immigrant’s budget - its unlikely the majority will have a data plan, so a WAP site is out of the question.. This leaves us with an SMS approach.

Each major playfield in a given region should be assigned a short code. You can then send a text message indicating which field you’re playing on. I would expect this feature to be used most often when players are actually at the field already, so there’s no need to specify a time. However, if you want to notify people in advance, there should be an option to input a time.

The other critical text message which should be supported is the query. I’d love to be able to send a text message with the field short code, followed by a question mark, and receive a message back outlining the number of guys who will be showing up to that field at what times during that day.

If you think this proposal has merit, feel free to make some noise about it.