Opening Pandora’s Music Box

It seems I am on my computer way too much; such is life for a high tech entrepreneur, the modern day office worker, or just a plain old geek. I login first thing in the morning and logout the last thing at night. I use my computer for work, personal communications, finances, and entertainment. The family television set has been put in the closet and we don’t have a stereo system hooked up in the house. My computer and my wife’s laptop have replaced television and radio. The 22” Wide Screen monitor I treated myself to - much to my wife’s displeasure - is now one of the smartest purchases I have made lately but I “really should have gotten the bigger one”.

My family relies on NetFlix, Comedy Central, and a variety of video content sites for our audio/visual experience. For music I have a dedicated hard drive with ripped CD’s and purchased downloaded music. I can queue up quite a bit of music – but I am limited to the music I own. When I am focused on work I want music to suit my mood without having to think about it. Rather than sorting through my collection and making a play list, I want to have mood or setting based selection of music like radio but with a focus on my musical tastes and preferences and without commercial and DJ interruptions.

Of all the online music listening options available the one I use the most; the one I have set as a “home page tab” in IE7; the one that keeps me from closing my web browser is online music broadcaster Pandora® (http://www.pandora.com/). The folks at Pandora® and The Music Genome Project® have put together a rich music portal that blends radio and social networking with an emphasis on delivering songs I want (and many I didn’t know I wanted) to my desktop. No commercials – no interruptions. Like radio I can select Stations to listen to based on tastes. As with the social networks I can share my Stations with other listeners and look for people with similar tastes in music.

I can’t describe what Pandora is any better than the people at Pandora, so here is the FAQ from their site:

Q: What is Pandora?

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you'll love.
It's powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.
Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the musical universe.”

“complex musical DNA” is an accurate description in trying define tastes in music. There is a great deal of information that we process to define our likes and dislikes for most anything in life. Music has many facets as do moods. For Pandora to have the intelligence to cross reference a massive database of music, tastes, and preferences and find songs that I will probably like is pretty cool. After experiencing the day-in-day-out use of the site I swear it alters mood based on the time of day. Melodic and instrumental in the morning and a little more up tempo in the afternoon. It also pushes my musical boundaries by testing the waters with different artists. I can tell Pandora what I like, what I don’t like, and it will respond accordingly.

What’s really cool about the service is I have found many artists I would not have found otherwise. I am learning about musicians and bands from years ago that I never came across as well as new artists breaking onto the music scene. With a click I can read a bio of the artist, see a catalog of their work, and hear samples of their music. If I like what I hear there are convenient links to Amazon and iTunes. I have purchased more music this year than in the last two years combined and my Amazon Wish List keeps growing. Pandora is the ultimate online music station and store.

When I first came upon Pandora in February of this year I was hooked instantly. By searching for a favorite Artist or Song I want to hear I have started my first Station. For the ease of use and the great user experience I was willing to pay up to $10 per month for the service. Upon reading the FAQ’s I found out it was only $36 per year without advertising and with additional benefits. My initial thought was “Why pay, I’ll never see the ads. The music will just play in the back ground.” Wrong.

Why am I wrong about not seeing the advertising? Because I am drawn back to the site by curiosity – I want to know more about the artist or I want to rate the song. I keep going back and in the process my mind is being imprinted by very well done ads whether I like it or not. I tend to block out quite a bit of marketing and advertising, but the nature of this site causes a very high imprint rate which is what the advertisers want. After six months of daily eyeball hits to the site I can recall the names of their top advertisers.

I still haven’t forked over the $36 and I’d like to think it is probably better for the company if I don’t. Pandora’s effectiveness imprinting ads in my mind should create very high demand for their web real estate while at the same time delivering a very high quality online music service. IMHO the folks at Pandora have created high standards and value for delivery of music and advertising in a Web 2.0 environment. When you open this Pandora’s Box a world of music escapes and engulfs you.

by Fred H. Dyste

Meeting: Second Life - User-created Content - Social Networks

Paca Nathan from HeadCase labs gave a great talk at softec last week about Social Networks focusing on Second Life and Facebook. One great point he made was that we are in a good physical location to take advantage of the collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood in the emerging 3D social media and machinima space. These social 3D worlds are being designed by architects, scripted by programmers and animated by artist. He though that Cal Poly has a unique advantage to be a leader in Virtual Worlds because of their strong Architecture and CS departments.

If you missed the meeting you can watch the video here:



Paco has also posted his slides, notes and links on the HeadCase blog.

Pictures as usual are up on the softec photo gallery.

Serious Fun Games

I'm an mechanical engineer by training and I used to spend hundreds of hours simulating load on virtual mechanical parts using finite element analysis. It was great I could try various permutations of length, width, tapers etc to optimize the load bearing capacity of the part and minimize the amount of material needed. I didn't have to build 50 different parts and test them in a lab. I learned many things in the simulations and after a while I intuitively knew where to start and was able to optimize the parts in 2 or 3 passes.

That's the power of games, you can simulate complex (economic, organizational, etc) models and have real humans run through the system to test your designs . We can tap massive player pools we can leverage the collective actions to understand if the models work or don't work. As we send new people through these models they can walk out with a better understanding of the whole system. Another advantage games provide over just learning from life experience is that we can do time compression in games. What if we make a simulation of our projected human population growths and current resource consumption patterns and have it run a 10X speed in Second Life. That would have an impact on the players, how would they react, how would the work together to solve this collective problem?

I've always been interested in social and political editorial in the media (e.g The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show and Colbert Report). Often humor is the best tool for analyzing our society and politics. Historically Lampoon cartoons have been a very effective political tool. How about games with some of these models and a political/social editorial edge?

I think Serious Fun Games is an untapped market and could help us understand our systems better.

Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games) wants to

harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining.

Check out his interview on the Colbert Report:



The rest of the article is here:

Game On Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report

I'm pretty jazzed about what Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ian Bogost is up to these days with his Persuasive Games consulting/development project (see my review of Food Import Folly). Okay, you pick up his latest book (also called Persuasive Games) and it's still a little heavy with the theory (though it does drop most of the unnecessary in-crowd jargon that plagued his prior uber-treatise, Unit Operations). But its hook? Fascinating. Bogost wants to harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining. Get over your Puritan-esque pleasure-guilt -- having fun while learning is hardly "entertaining yourself to death," (where studying socio-politically irrelevant nobodies like Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is). How about a game that deals with China's treasury bond threats against the U.S. dollar? The international political and economic factors post-global catastrophe in terms of responsibility, cooperation, bureaucracy, and aid management? Cultural collisions (and compromises) when global economies collide?

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