With phablets finding its way into the dictionary (along with twerking, which….well let’s leave that be), it’s pretty safe to say the hybrid style of devices is here to stay and will continue to be a major part of technology moving forward.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all though, comes the ultimate potential hybrid device, the Pandora.
Billed as a desktop/laptop/tablet hybrid, what separates the Pandora from just about every other similar device is a unique build that doesn’t make it natively comfortable as any of those three devices it can transform into, and instead allows it to truly become work with equal functionality in any form.
Measuring only 9mm thick, this impressive gadget can fold out into a 16:9 widescreen desktop monitor, while and L shape bend turns it into a 13 inch laptop complete with pop up keyboard for the lower half, which can then be folded back to form a Windows 8 powered 13 inch tablet. In any setup, the Pandora sports four speakers, a microphone, front and back cameras, and a flexible battery.
Further details such as the processing power and price are still incoming, so it’s still difficult to measure the full validity of this specific device, but whether or not you consider it to be the future of gadgets, it’s hard to argue that a design of this nature one day will be.
You know somewhere between Pandora’s steady, old reliable model, Spotify’s have it all, take it anywhere incredible features, and various other stations like SHOUTcast covering some of the most obscure music out there, I guess I once felt content saying that the world of internet radio is pretty well covered.
And yet it seems like there is at least one more site out there that thinks that there is still fresh ground to tread in that particular field by catering to this wild idea that instead of a computer algorithm generating music selection, perhaps it would be preferable for human beings to take a stab at it.
That site is called Fuzz and, if you let them, they’d very much like to rock/rap/alternative/classical your world.
How? Well the entire site is made up of user created stations. Members can upload their personal music and create a radio station set to a theme of the music selection, with the built in system mixing the music together for you. Examples include the standards like classic rock or 90’s hip hop, but a quick search reveals more specific stations like classical dinner music or trendy sushi bar. A band search option is available to get you started, but the general idea is to start with music you are familiar with, and expand your interests, and favorite playlists, based on people who like those same bands or songs other available selections. It’s an idea that is automatically handled by computers on other sites, but Fuzz treats it much more like each user is the DJ to their own mix, complete with custom station names, backdrops, and comment and feedback features.
The creator of the site, Jeff Yasuda, has tooled around the internet radio scene for a while, and he and his team simply feel that it is more fun, and rewarding, for people to share music with people and not machines. It’s an idea that was encouraged by Yasuda’s other music app Blip.Fm, which allows people to play the music they’re listening to via Twitter and Facebook. The quiet success of that app has instilled Yasuda with the belief that a site that expands that idea into a full radio station could be a hit. Although, he is certainly aware of the long shot that any internet station is, as he reveals via a cryptic quote in an interview with Bloomberg.com when speaking of the internet radio industry:
“The space is crowded and the graveyard is long, deep and wide,”
So how is the site? While I’m personally still inclined to default to Spotify or Pandora for a kickback and let it play listening experience, Fuzz is infinitely more entertaining to just explore, whether it be for new music, or just to see what obscure and awesome stations people dream up. Though the battle for success, much less supremacy, is one that hasn’t even begun, to me it is indisputable that the basic idea behind Fuzz is a winner. Yasuda and co. are right in their idea that it is much more fun to put people in charge of a music selection, and the difference give Fuzz a personality in its beta stage that even the larger, and more established, stations don’t share.
In fact, even if Fuzz doesn’t take off, it’s that idea that I love, and which I hope ultimately influences other stations to implement something similar. Although, as so many other things in the tech business have proven, sometimes all it really does take is a good idea, and the proper amount of momentum to make it.
Living in New York, I’ve made the increasingly necessary decision to never, ever own a car while in the city. As such I rely on walking and public transportation to get around. It’s certainly an ok option, but I miss driving around on a quiet night with some good friends and just listening to music. While an iPod is nice to have during my commute, there is no music listening experience (outside of a good concert of course) that can recreate how much fun it is to listen to music in the car.
Well unfortunately for lowly pedestrians like me, Ford is now looking to make that experience even better. They call the feature “Just Play” and it was created during the 24 hour “hackathon” at the Facebook campus. Just Play works with Ford’s voice activated Sync feature, and allows you to connect with your smartphone and Facebook app to share music with your friends. So whatever they are listening to, you can listen to as well and vice versa. Ford themselves acknowledge that it’s a “simple idea”, but there is some potential for this to incorporate other applications like Spotify and Pandora to create a driving music community experience that hasn’t really been around since the hey-day of rock on the radio.
We’ve seen Pandora set up partnerships with many of the auto OEMs, so this recent news on the growth of Pandora isn’t surprising.
His baby, the Pandora personalized online radio service, has more than 125 million registered users, a huge jump from 75 million at the same time last year. Pandora has expanded its reach into the car, with 16 alliances — including new ones with Kia and Acura — compared with four car companies this time last year.
Monthly listening, on average per user, is now at 18 hours, and shares of its stock are up 21% this year.
Coming off a successful $2.6 billion IPO in 2011, Pandora founder Westergren says the company is at the “tipping point” of expanding beyond the early adopters into a service that he says will one day be utilized by billions of consumers.
Once they can expand beyond the US, expect growth to accelerate.
I got a bug in my ear to listen to a song from Glee today. Stay with me; I know you want to click away but I promise this post is about streaming services. I looked up the song – an a cappella version of Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ (again, please keep reading) – and was pleasantly surprised to see that MOG had it. I turned it on, turned it up, then realized I should be doing some dishes.
No problem – I’ll fire it up on my phone and run it through a Bluetooth speaker system in the kitchen. There’s just one problem with that – logging into MOG on my phone logged me out on my computer. Come back to the computer later and log back in, go out to get some coffee and log out and in on the phone for the car ride and then back home, log back in, blah blah blah, you get the picture. It’s too much, and it could be so easily solved. Build a feature into both the web app and the iPhone app that allows me to tie my account to my phone so that both can be logged in.
So begins my letter to companies that dream of providing a music streaming service. You absolutely have to make a smooth experience across devices. I’ve been so pleased with MOG that I’ve gone through and deleted a shload of my own digital library, the stuff I just didn’t listen to much or was so ubiquitous I could always get it on MOG (do I really need MP3s of Aerosmith’s Big Ones?). I’m so annoyed with the device situation, though, that I’m ready to jump the MOG ship the moment someone else can do it better.
Another simple thing – make the app more like a music player. I want access to my player all the time from anywhere. I don’t want to have to play a song to see my player, which already has songs queued up by the way. Yes, I could make playlists, but I shouldn’t have to. The whole advantage of the cloud isn’t a cumbersome experience. It’s the opposite. I want your streaming service because I don’t have to keep hundreds of gigs of music around in case my taste changes. I literally dumped 30 gigs of songs last night because the cloud is so convenient. I’d love to dump 30 more.
