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Those listening to music online are probably familiar with Pandora.  The popular and fast growing company has been a pioneer in net radio.   On Thursday, they announced a mobile version of their highly personalized service will be available via AT&T Wireless on select phones.

Pandora’s traditional offering is built around an extremely sophisticated personalization engine.  Drawn from what was called the Music Genome Project, Pandora analyzes and catalog songs by as many as 400 musical attributes.  All that data is then correlated against music a listener’s likes and dislikes in order to build a profile and stream comparable music.  If I like music by Eric Clapton, B.B. King and The Rolling Stones, for example, Pandora’s engine will recognize the underlying blues riffs, they’ll recognize whether the songs are up tempo, or slow, whether acoustic or electric.  Then, when the song’s I’ve chosen are done playing, Pandora will play something similar – maybe something from the Allman Brother’s, or Buddy Guy.  They will recommend music my patterns suggest I might like. Click to Read More

In February 2006, notable executives from Internet companies and Telecom giants converged on Capital Hill to lobby to consider revising a ten year old Telecom bill.   The issue at stake was the concept of Net Neutrality, a divisive idea suggesting that all internet content (regardless of format) should be treated equally.   

On one side of the debate fell Internet and software companies.  Businesses like Google and Yahoo wanted to insure that all websites – from blog to portal, could be accessed equally.  Even more so, they wanted legislation that would protect different types of content like video, or music, or the technologies that deliver them (like Peer to Peer) from arbitrary exclusion.  Their goal was to insure nothing was singled out and taxed by the ISP’s who control the supply pipeline, the network infrastructure over which Internet traffic flows.  The software and Internet companies wanted to insure their content would always flow freely without tax or toll.

The Telecom companies, on the other side of the stage, wanted the freedom of an unregulated market.  Click to Read More

MTV Networks (Viacom) may own game developer Harmonix, and they may be working with Electronic Arts on the heavily hyped Rock Band game, but those relationships won’t preclude MTVN from working with other game companies too. There’s no conflict, especially when it comes to advertising on their TV stations.

Monday, MTVN and rival game publisher Ubisoft struck a substantial promotional deal to advertise Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed title. Beginning November 7th, ads and even two minute "sneak peak" trailers of the game will run on Comedy Central and Spike. Click to Read More

It is the story of the day. Scan the headlines and everywhere that touches technology has a tidbit on the subject. The mysterious G-phone, a myth as exotic as an udumbara flower and as circulated as a chain email has finally been revealed. The urban myth quashed.

Today, Google revealed as widely expected there will not be (at least for now or the near future) a Google branded cell phone; no gPhone to challenge the iPhone. Instead, Google has been applying its considerable software development skills to the development of a next generation open-source mobile operating system platform. Engineers with analog and cellular design experience were there for optimization, for marrying software to hardware, not to reinvent the phone itself.

Andy Rubin, head of Google’s mobile platforms said unequivocally, "we’re not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build [it]."

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You can’t call a two horse race until both horses have crossed the finish line. 

When Netflix released earnings about a week ago, things looked good, surprisingly good,  but a comparative assessment with movie rental competitor Blockbuster was missing.  Absent that comparison it was impossible to say whether Netflix gained ground individually, or the movie rental business did well as a whole.

After the close of markets Thursday, Blockbuster released their earnings.  Now the asterisk can come off Netflix’ returns.  The results are in.   It’s official.  In the battle for movie rental dollars, investors can officially chalk the quarter up as a win for Netflix and a loss for Blockbuster.  

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Sometimes bad news is actually good news in disguise. That the case at game publisher Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS). Thursday, EA released their earnings report for the 2nd quarter 2007. Relative to the same quarter last year revenue was down and earnings went from the black to the red but the bad news was good, really.

EA posted a net loss of 62cents a share ($195m) on revenue of $640m but a significant part of the loss was due to changes in accounting practices regarding revenue recognition. Click to Read More

The period leading up the the Thanksgiving holiday tends to be among the quieter times for venture investments but plenty of checks are getting written. In fact, despite an increasingly crowded market and lack of new "disruptive" technologies, Internet video remains hot. mDialog and Vitrue are among the slate who’ve gotten new capital. Here’s a roundup of five recent deals.

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