Pandora Will Live On, At a Price

With the music industry demanding ever-higher royalty rates for online radio, Pandora’s future has been in jeopardy for some time, but now it seems a workable deal has been struck.

The station is “finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told TechCrunch today. SoundExchange, which collects royalties for rights holders, agreed to a 40 percent to 50 percent reduction in per-song-per-listener rates in exchange for 25 percent of Pandora’s revenue, through 2015.

Notably, that deal is good for other Internet radio stations, so Last.fm and Slacker could also benefit from the agreement.

Some users will end up paying for this change. Anyone who listens to Pandora for more than 40 hours in a given month — that’s roughly a tenth of the user base, says TechCrunch — will have to pay $0.99 cents to keep listening. The premium Pandora One service won’t be subject to the additional charge.

Given that Pandora can get a little repetitive after extended listening, the 40-hour cap is a small concession to make, and even then, a dollar ain’t much. Besides, my sense from other Pandora users is that they’re so enthralled with the concept that tiny trade-offs don’t bother them. Little reminders to click on the player window and an occasional ad are minor inconveniences, well-traded for a virtual DJ that knows all about your musical preferences.

Starbucks Gives Away Ice Cream on Facebook

Starbucks Coffee Company has turned to social media to promote its new ice cream brand. The bean peddler is giving Facebook users complimentary prints of ice cream–provided they install an application to solicit their friends with offers for free Starbucks ice cream.

Starbucks is paying Facebook for ads to promote the application among the social network’s 200 million active users. To be clear, Starbucks is NOT giving away 200 million pints of ice cream; the offer is limited to 20,000 people in the U.S. between now and July 19.

When I installed the application, I was told that there would be no free pints to “surprise a friend” with for about another hour. It did, however, direct me to a Starbucks Web page where I could fill out a form with my personal information to receive a $1 off coupon to redeem at my local grocery store.

Whenever I do something on Facebook, such as install an application, my 500+ ‘friends’ that tune into my event stream are notified. That’s not such a bad reach for Starbucks. In fact, it’s almost viral. If I cared enough about it to send free ice cream to my friends, Starbucks’ frozen concoctions would receive even more exposure.

Could Starbucks become Facebook’s sweet success when it comes to figuring out how to make advertising effective on the service? Starbucks will doubtlessly be monitoring how well its campaign is working.

LucasArts Dusts Off Classic Games

If you’re like me, your fondest memories of LucasArts are rooted in the 1990s, with classic computer games like X-Wing, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Star Wars: Dark Forces.

With any luck, those games will soon be available for purchase again through Valve’s Steam download service. Tomorrow, LucasArts will bring 10 classic games to the service, but none of the ones I mentioned above are among them. Included in the list are Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, LOOM and Star Wars Battlefront II, plus six others. But, the company’s Twitter feed says this is “just the beginning” of plans for the publisher’s back catalog.

Even if you have old CD-ROMs of these games kicking around the house, you may have trouble getting them up and running on today’s machines. Assuming that you can still make it through LucasArts’ authentication hoops — I recall a Star Wars alphabet matching system for X-Wing — you’ll likely need extra software and a bit of technical know-how to experience the games as they were (check out DosBox for your pre-Windows titles).

Indeed, a hassle-free experience might be worth the cost of admission, though it’s worth noting that some of these re-releases will carry paper-form copy protection, but in printable digital files.

It looks like LucasArts doesn’t intend to stop with Steam, either. Apple policy discourages discussion of pre-release App plans, but LucasArts CEO Darrell Rodriguez literally said “wink wink, nod nod” to Joystiq after saying “it would make sense” for the company to release its old adventure games for the iPhone.

I see only good coming from LucasArts’ decision to dip into its back catalog and pushing it on new platforms. It just brings me that much closer to my dream of a multiplayer adaptation of X-Wing or Tie Fighter for one of the three gaming consoles.

5Words for Tuesday, July 7th 2009

Will Firefox go 64-bit?

Pre sales. Good. Or bad?

Twitter, Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Opera CEO: Unite is safe.

Microsoft’s Hohm energy site launches.

More physical phone keyboard debate.

Windows Not-So-Ultimate Edition.

Engadget reviews the BlackBerry Tour.

Extend your camera’s battery life.

“Holiday” Launch for Palm Pre Across Europe

With the Pre an apparent success here in the US, and Palm planning to take on the Canadian market later this year, its next target is Europe. The company announced Tuesday that it had selected O2 to bring the phone to the UK, Ireland, and Germany, and Spain on the Movistar network.

The company calls Europe an important region for Palm. “Since we showed Palm Pre at Mobile World Congress in February, there’s been a great deal of anticipation for an announcement about European availability, and that day is here,” chairman and CEO Jon Rubenstein said.

Since its in Europe, it’s obviously GSM… thinking that we may see the Pre on AT&T or T-Mobile soon too? A point to ponder…

Google Says Bye-Bye to Beta. Good!

“We’re often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta,” begins a post at the Official Google Blog. The post…doesn’t explain why Google loves to label so many things as beta for so long. But it does announce that the company’s taking the bushel of useful apps that make up Google Docs out of beta: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Talk are now officially ready for prime time. The beta labels are coming down today.

It’s easy to figure out why Google’s shedding the beta label: It’s devoting considerable energy to the for-pay version of Google Apps aimed at corporate users. For some of the IT managers who’ll decide to adopt (or avoid) Google Apps, the beta label might as well read this product is a rough draft that shouldn’t be rolled out to large numbers of people unless you want support headaches. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that Google left the beta identifier on a service it was selling to big business for so long.

Google isn’t doing away with its beta labels altogether–Knol, for instance, still sports one. But I wouldn’t object if the company used them sparingly, and only in the old-school sense: for products that have bugs and rough edges which the company intends to eliminate on a set schedule. That was a useful term, but it’s been almost completely devalued.

Once upon a time, Google’s betamania was a fun idiosyncrasy, and it felt like Google was letting the world in on stuff that was exclusive and exciting. But if just about everything is in perpetual public beta, the term has no value. And so many other sites have shamelessly borrowed Google’s approach to beta that it’s no longer entertaining. It’s pretty much redundant.

The Web, by definition, is a great big beta. Come to think of it, life itself is a great big beta…

Here’s more or less incontrovertible proof that Google’s beta label is meaningless: A new Google Labs feature lets you put it back on Gmail if you feel like it. How about other choices, like “Early Alpha” or “Service Pack 11?”

Yahoo Aims to Make Research Easier

Yahoo is adding a new feature to its search engine that it hopes will attract researchers to its product. Called Search Pad, the offering aims it make it easier to capture and organize information culled from search results. The feature could be useful if you spend a lot of time on search engines for research purposes.

The company plans to launch the feature at midnight, so if you want to check it out you’ll have to wait until then.

Essentially Search Pad would detect when a users is performing research, and offer options to save information in a central place. For example when research begins, links and thumbnails to websites are automatically saved. From there, the user can organize the information as they desire. Free-form note taking is also available.

If you see something that you’d like to include on the Search Pad that is not automatically added, drag and drop functionality will allow that, Yahoo says.

From there, if the user wishes to share their notes, printing and e-mail options are offered. Yahoo has also added social networking features, allowing Search Pad information to be shared over social networks such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.

I’m not exactly sure whether Search Pad is a big enough feature to cause any great shift in market share to the #2 search engine, however it is something different. Differentiating yourself is a good thing these days.

Your Questions, AMD’s Answers

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Here's the inaugural edition of a new feature: Technologizer Q&A. We'll give you the opportunity to pose questions to interesting technology companies. First up is chipmaker AMD--many thanks to VP of Advanced Marketing Pat Moorhead for answering these queries.

Got nominations for other companies you'd like answers from? Let me know--I'm lining up subjects for future installments.]

Fernando Garcia asks:

I have always asked the following question. Why is it that AMD will not step up advertising? A good 70% of the consumer public,still does not know what AMD is. I used to work for Best Buy and on the average day, one out of eight persons I would speak to knew what AMD was. Whenever I asked a customer  about processors automatically they would say Intel.

Pat answers:

Simply taking out more advertising does not guarantee a product’s success. I think the best way to answer that is AMD chooses to focus differently. We first focus on making our customers and their channel partners successful by investing in them, not leveraging off their brandsby sandwiching them between AMD logos. We want to invest in our customers’ success. For those people who are specifically focused on the “processor,” we have very high awareness and market directly to end user groups. These include but are not limited to enthusiasts, gamers, DIYers, Fortune 1000 and government decision makers, etc.

Continue reading this story…

I’m an Ex-XM Subscriber

Last week, I was thinking about replacing the XM satellite receiver in my car with my iPhone 3GS.  Now the deed is done: I called XM this afternoon and canceled my service, more than five years after I first became an XM fan. From now on, nearly all the audio I listen to in my car will be piped from my phone. (I do listen to local NPR stations, and may continue to do so via Plain Old FM Radio at least part of the time.)

I enjoyed XM enough over the years that I’m not leaving as an unhappy camper, even though the last couple of years were pretty dang rocky–the service kept raising prices (it now charges $18 a month for what was once $10) and dropping stuff I liked to listen to (Harry Shearer, all of MSNBC). But I don’t want to fiddle with two separate devices in my car, and when I had to make a decision, I opted for the iPhone. It gives me tens of thousands of radio stations for the cost of my AT&T data plan. Plus customizable “radio” from Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker. Plus a bevy of podcasts. Plus audio books. Plus all my own music. Given all that, I’m willing to live with the fact that it’s not as convenient a car radio as my XM Xpress receiver was. Did I mention it also does GPS navigation and lets me make phone calls?

Some folks have reported having trouble canceling satellite radio or being offered cheap or free service as an enticement to keep the account. I had to wait a half hour on hold to speak to a real person, who offered me a $77-a-year deal if I’d reconsider–but one that would only kick in when my current subscription ended next March, and would then extend to March, 2011.

In other words, even though I told him I was canceling because XM was too expensive, he suggested paying the same rate for eight more months, then continuing to pay for another year beyond that. I declined the offer; he canceled my service.

What XM didn’t offer me was the one thing that might have kept me around: An iPhone-only subscription at a competitive price. (The $12.95 Sirius XM wants for online listening is too much given that it’s the same as the base rate for satellite listening, for a lineup that lacks much of the service’s signature programming and has dozens fewer channels.) I’ll bet I’m not the only XM defector who might have stuck around for a decent iPhone plan…and if it ever offers one I might be back. But for now, I’m ex-XM.

I’ll let you know how my iPhone-as-a-car-radio experiment goes. I already know I like the three customized 1960s stations I’ve created with Slacker a lot more than XM’s Sixties on 6…

Nielsen: There’s a Lot of Gaming Going On

With new video game-related purchases flattening over the last few months, we’re starting to hear that the recession is catching up to the industry, but that doesn’t mean people are playing less.

To the contrary, a study by Nielsen found that video gaming, in hours played per week, is bigger than ever. As seen in the graph below, gamers — defined as people who purchase a game in the last six months and play at least an hour per week — are spending an extra two hours playing per week compared to the last two years.

The results appear to corroborate two other recent developments: Used game sales are on the rise (according to industry analyst Michael Pachter and to Nielsen’s own survey results) and new game sales are lower this year than in 2008, according to The NPD Group. For good measure, Nielsen asked its survey respondents how many DVDs they purchased over the last six months and found, unsurprisingly, that the numbers are roughly on par with last year, and lower than those from 2007.

It’s easy to pin these changes on the recession, but as NPD has said for the last couple of months, the first half of 2008 was cluttered with blockbusters, such as Mario Kart Wii and Grand Theft Auto IV. This year’s new releases are weaker in terms of buzz.

But common sense says that blockbusters don’t necessarily make for the best games. In a twist, Nielsen found that 34 percent of people who played more said they liked this year’s games better. This is most true for Playstation 3 owners (41 percent), who are finally getting long-awaited titles such as Killzone 2.

A full examination of how the recession affects gaming would look at playing habits within individual games. Are players milking each title for all its worth or ditching their games halfway through? This sort of data isn’t available in Nielsen’s study, but it’d be interesting to know.

Is Nokia Toast?

Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan has posted a review of Nokia’s iPhone-like N97, with the provocative headline “Nokia N97 Review: Nokia is Doomed.” At first blush, it sounds like he can’t really mean that he thinks Nokia could be headed for extinction. Comic exaggeration, right? But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that the headline’s a perfectly reasonable one. I’m not predicting Nokia’s death myself, but neither do I take it as a given that the company has a long future in the smartphone business.

Matt’s conclusion on the N97 is that it’s a respectable piece of hardware but that its Symbian S60 Fifth Edition operating system and Ovi Store application repository don’t have what it takes to compete with their counterparts on the iPhone. Judging from the time I’ve spent with an N97, he’s right. Cell phones in 2009 are really software/service combos that happen to have hardware wrapped around them, but Nokia is still racing to catch with the modern era–as represented not only by the iPhone but also Google’s Android and Palm’s Pre phone and WebOS software.

Continue reading this story…

5Words for Monday, July 6th 2009

Special “let’s ask questions” edition!

Is the AT&T iPhone illegal?

Is Twitter censoring Trending Topics?

Are iPhone cases causing discoloration?

Is Web video’s future hopeless?

Does Nokia have a future?

Can Michael Arrington do hardware?

Will PayPal crush Amazon payments?

Should businesses unlock their iPhones?

A Netbook for the Price of a Newspaper

JK on the Run’s Kevin Tofel has noticed an eye-popping deal currently being offered by Best Buy: Sign up for a two-year Sprint EVDO contract at sixty bucks a month, and you can buy a Compaq netbook for ninety-nine cents. The netbook goes for $389.99 without a contract, so it’s a discount of a whopping $380.

Except, of course, that it isn’t–you’re on the hook for $1200 over two years in broadband charges, and can’t get out of the contract without paying a penalty. On the other hand, you’re likely to pay sixty bucks a month for wireless broadband even if you don’t buy the Compaq netbook, and Sprint charges after-rebate contract prices of up to $99 for EVDO adapters. Maybe the best way to look at the Compaq is this: It’s an EVDO adapter that happens to have a computer attached to it.

Ultimately, the best way to judge most subsidy deals is to ask yourself what the chances are that you’ll still be happily using the subsidized device and the service in question at the end of the contract. If you can imagine yourself carrying a midrange 2009 netbook and using EVDO through mid-2011–and aren’t worried about being joined at the hip with Sprint for 24 months–it wouldn’t be nuts to consider buying the Compaq. Then again, small computers are going to get a lot cooler over the next couple of years, and 4G data will start to matter; I think the Compaq will start to feel a tad stale by late 2010.

One thing’s for sure: The Sprint offer is more tempting than the equivalent ones from AT&T and Verizon, which bring the price down to $199.99 rather than $0.99.

Full disclosure: I used to insist that I’d never sign another contract again, but I’m currently wed to both AT&T (for an iPhone 3GS) and Verizon (for an EVDO adapter) until 2011.

ABC Does Hulu, I’m Still Passing.

ABC is now officially a Hulu partner, as the network began adding its content to the service. Its hit show Grey’s Anatomy would be the first to be added to the YouTube rival with five episodes. The addition should be no surprise — the two sides announced a deal back in April as we reported here.

It only leaves CBS as the odd major network out here — and we know from the TV.com tiff that its likely you won’t be seeing Big Brother or CSI anytime soon.

According to a blog post on Hulu’s site, additional content is planned to be added each weekday during the summer. A calendar shows the new content (which today is Grey’s), although it doesn’t give a preview of what’s coming. I’d imagine the next few weeks will be filled with ABC content, including episodes of fellow ABC hits Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives and the like.

As I’ve said many times before, I have no intention of using Hulu because of their content usage policies. Once they change, I may consider using the site. Anyone else living life Hulu-free?

iPods With Video Cameras? Sure. iPods With Projectors? I’m Skeptical.

Judging the accuracy of Apple rumors may not be a cakewalk, but one technique is surprisingly effective and obvious: Ask yourself if past Apple history suggests that a rumor sounds like something the company would do. By that measure, the current rumors about iPod Touch and Nano models with built-in video cameras sounds entirely plausible. The iPhone 3GS‘s camera shows Apple has invested in video-recording hardware and software. It’s gradually been turning every iPod except for the screenless Shuffle into a video device. And given that a high percentage of people who want iPods own them by now, Apple could use a strikingly new feature with wide appeal to tempt them to upgrade.

On the other hand, I’d be surprised if concurrent rumors about Apple getting ready to build projectors into iPhones and iPods are the real deal. Projectors may be getting tinier, but they aren’t yet teensy enough to cram into a phone or MP3 player that’s as thin as the ones Apple likes to make. And how often would a real person want to project an image from an iPhone or iPod in the real world? Not all that often, surely. Apple history shows that it’s not all that interested in adding exotic features that won’t be used much, and is almost never the first company to embrace a new technology. (It tends to cheerfully sit on the sidelines while other companies make bleeding-edge products that are noble in their ambitions but frustrating in practice.)

I’m not saying that there will never be Apple handheld devices with built-in projectors, but I don’t think we’re a couple of months away from seeing them. And a couple of months from now is almost certainly when Apple will announce its new lineup of iPods. Any guesses (or wishes) about what the Fall 2009 lineup of iPods will involve?

Sirius XM Says 1 Million Have Downloaded iPhone App

While Sirius XM may not be having much success keeping customers, it seems to be having a good deal of good fortune attracting listeners through its App Store offering, apparently. In the first two weeks of availability, the Sirius XM application has been downloaded 1 million times.

Sirius XM Premium Online is free to download, however it requires a premium subscription to listen. For current Sirius XM customers, that means a $2.99/month extra fee — for non subscribers, that’s $12.99/month.

Regardless, its now the 7th most downloaded app overall, and #1 in the Music category. Lord knows if people are actually shelling out the $13 bucks for the service (I know I wouldn’t), but it’s a respectable showing.