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I was watching Bloomberg this past weekend, and one of the founders of Pandora was being interviewed on their weekend “Venture” program venue.   The description got me hook, line, and sinker – it’s the first App I have that makes the (faster) “Wireless” capability of an iPhone really make the App better ( I am not a “Gamer” on the iPhone ).  I downloaded it on my iPhone within the hour.

I would call Pandora the “e-Harmony” on steroids of Internet Radio.  They would call themselves “the Music Genome” project.  Everyday, 50 musicians are showing up, putting on a headset, and listening to music and turning the song into a code of 400 standardized attributes of a given song ( style, melody, loudness, … ).  It takes about 15 minutes to “code” (rate the attributes) a non Classical song.  It takes 60+ minute to codify the attributes of a Classical song.  Those attributes are then put into the “matching” software which determines the delivery of music to the consumer.  They have an inventory of 750,000 songs, with 10,000 additional each week.

The Pluses -

• Multiple personalized radio stations that are geared to your likes ( does not use Collaborative matching logic in the Personalization algorithms.  Ie, just because “Sam” also liked the song you liked, doesn’t mean that you will hear songs similar to what Sam likes ).  It’s all about the “G”  ( Genome that is ).

Related “Buys” ( I can’t resist the predictive drag / impact on other devices / gadgets ):

• The “iHome” radios.  Right now, I’m listening to my Wolfgang Mozart Pandora station.  It selects and plays songs that have a similar “genome” to Mozart.  It plays just what I like when I want to listen to Classical music.  The radio hardware that can plug in an iPhone or an iPod Touch will now be playing streaming high quality Internet Radio rather than “carefully collected and purchased” music on the device itself
• Demand for Wireless bandwidth

Releated Sells

• Music Purchases.  While Pandora does make it easy to purchase (via iTunes) a song being played, I have yet to purchase one because the “genome” personalization and tailoring is SO good.  Why buy when another one that I will like is just around the corner.  Only if I am in a location without High Speed Wireless access will I be playing music off the device itself.  There is cerainly fewer purchases in the future with this particular consumer ( yours truly )
• Commercial Radio.  The third boom on the commercial radio market.  The amount of time I spend listening to commercial radio is down already as a result of having an iPod / iPhone along with a good set of headphones ( thank you Bose ).   But I was still listening to commercial radio at times for variety.   I’d say the amount of Commercial radio time is cut in half again as a result of having Pandora ( I get both music that I like due to the “genome” approach, but also get variety ( variety by station, and the ability to create many stations ( Mozart, Benoit, Pink floyd, … ) ) ).   The first boom was satellite radio.  The second was the iPod and later iPhone.  The third boom is Pandora.  If devices / adapters come out so I can stream Pandora in my Car ( and can have broadband / wide area wireless connectivity ), even time with commercial radio in the car will be dramatically reduced. 
• Potentially home wireless providers.  My data usage is going to skyrocket again.  I was already a fairly heavy data user with email / calendaring / web-site accesses ( including large VMWare image downloads measured in the GB ) / children that are online gamers / and now Internet TV, the data usage for streaming music in the home will add even more to that.  With an “all you can eat” pricing model, if everyone turned the existing commercial radiowave usage into wireless Internet access - would it erode their margins by having to beef up their infrastructure or the requirements for supporting the number of simultaneous wireless access devices within a given household?   

I do not normally comment or blog on national or social issues, but the person who has been accurately predicting oil prices ( “80 before I’m 80″ is a famous quote he made on CNBC in November 2007 ) displayed a sense of leadership recently that struck a chord with me.

$1 billion a day plus of lost national wealth ( a run rate of $700 billion a year recently ), General Motors at less than $10 a share ( having not much more net worth than what GE recently paid to acquire ”The Weather Channel” ), Ford at less than $5/share, and Ethanol (from Corn) – they don’t have an emoticon to capture my thoughts on the negative energy efficiency of that program ( it uses more energy to produce than it provides - did you know they use Natural Gas to produce it?  Oil to move it from one location to another?  ).

I’m not saying I agree with everything that his plan advocates.  I do not have any financial interest in any of his companies.  I do admire his leadership and intelligence.

If interested in reading about his plan:

I used to use the SNAGIT software tool periodically the past 3 - 5 years when doing software development and needing to leverage an existing image on the web.  When I was doing web work, I tended to do a cut/paste and then manipulate and work within the Macromedia Fireworks.

Now that I am doing a mix of software development, web development, and presentation creation, I find myself using SNAGIT more and more for productivity.  It’s ability to “understand” application destination sources and targets ( like Internet Explorer, MS Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, … ), I find it taking 10% of the time it used too when I want to “mashup” and/or manipulate content ( a portion of a powerpoint slide, an image, … combining pieces into a new content item ).  I believe this is the first blog entry I’v done on a product since starting to Blog in 2004, but SNAGIT saved me so much time today ( and made the results better )

How many times do “less time” and “better quality” come together?  With SNAGIT, it does.  If you have not tried an image / content capture utility, I recommend giving SNAGIT at try.  I believe I bought mine at $39.95, I see it is $49.95 presently.  Perhaps I got it on special?  Either way, the productivity to me just today makes makes it worth that much to me when I was writing some new Business Processes using BPEL Process Manager, and then documenting ( in Word and Powerpoint ) what they  does.  I now find myself using it at least weekly, usually several times a week.

I recommend the investment.  You can check SNAGIT out here.  It’s available as a free 30 day trial download.  The usability on it has increased so much through these “source” / “target” application adapter like architecture, that I bought it earlier this year, and have been more productive since.

FWIW – your mileage may vary – but this one is one of those tools that ( to me ) falls in the “jewel” category.