Enlarge / Pandora 4.0: the new look Pandora Here comes Pandora 4.0, a big remake of the music service’s mobile listening environment. If you are a Pandora fan, get ready for expanded playlist, station-making, lyric-reading, personal profile, and social networking power on your smartphone. The new service creates a “unifying” experience across web and mobile devices, the company proclaims. It also represents about six or seven years of planning, thinking, and development for the outfit. Back in 2005, iPhone and Android mobile gadgets were gleams in the eye of Apple and Google. Pandora, however, was transforming radio and music distribution with its sophisticated “genome” powered song recommendation algorithm. Millions of users were clicking thumbs up or down to millions of tunes on, well, millions of Pandora channels. By 2007, Pandora was a huge hit. It was, however, mostly a desktop computer hit. “We started thinking about creating a mobile service in 2004,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told us in an interview. “We wanted to unify the Pandora experience.” That meant an experience that was easy from the start, that allowed users to individualize their environment and get more of what they wanted, and that was “ubiquitously available.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
