New Netflix app ready for Kindle Fire and Nook, but not iPad

The great tech horse race of 2011 pits the iPad, that thoroughbred of tablet computers, against a pair of new lightweight fillies, the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook. 

But this year, the race may not be decided by horsepower alone. Indeed, in the run-up to the frenzied holiday buying season, the Android manufacturers are focusing less on their devices' technical prowess, and more on the kinds of things that people can do with them.

Last week, Amazon announced that the Kindle Fire will feature a "Lending Library" that will let paying users borrow a limited selection of books. Then Amazon pushed Hulu Plus, saying the for-pay TV and movie rental service would also be available on its Kindle Fire, along with music apps Pandora and Rhapsody.

And now, not to be left behind, Netflix is joining the party, announcing a revamped tablet app now available for the Fire and the Nook.

But not for the iPad. That version will arrive "in the coming weeks," the company said.

"It's nothing more than a timing issue," wrote Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey in an email, explaining that the Android release was timed to coincide with the Kindle Fire and Nook releases this week, and that there was no favoritism involved. "Netflix is agnostic on platforms -– no preferences or priorities," he wrote.

Still, that means iPad owners will have to be content with the older version of the Netflix app. Swasey did not reply to a question about whether the new version of the iPad app would be available by holiday buying time.

The new app, which Android users can download now, fits twice as many movies on the screen as the earlier version, and lets users easily swipe through many categories of films and TV shows, as well as begin streaming videos directly from within the app.

Check this space for continuing handicapping of the tablet derby.

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Image: The new Netflix app for Android.  Credit: Netflix

Roku 2 comes in 3 flavors, plays Angry Birds with Wii-like remote

Roku has sold more than 1 million of its TV set-top boxes, with the main attraction being Netflix streaming. But with the new Roku 2 device, the Saratoga, Calif., company is betting on another hugely popular item for its killer app -- Angry Birds.

The Rovio-built game has been sold more than 200 million times across different smartphones and tablets, and Roku is hoping it'll cause more consumers to pick up a Roku 2, which was released on Tuesday in three different models and price points, ranging from $59.99 to $99.99.

So, how does one play Angry Birds on a little black box (that looks a lot like the Apple TV) that fits in the palm of a hand? With a bluetooth motion-sensing remote (that works a lot like the Nintendo Wii remote).

The top-of-the-line version of the Roku 2, known as the Roku 2 XS, sells for $100 and includes the motion control remote and a copy of Angry Birds already downloaded and ready to play, as well as USB and ethernet ports not available on the cheaper models.

The $79.99 Roku 2 XD's bragging right is the ability to play 1080p full-high-definition video, which its more expensive sibling can do too.

And then there is the $59.99 Roku 2 HD, which is limited to playing back 720p resolution video.

All three of the boxes use an Internet connection to tap into Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video on Demand, Pandora Internet radio, Vimeo and nearly 300 other "channels," the company said on its website.

But the big news here is still casual gaming, said Anthony Wood, Roku's CEO, in a blog post.

"Angry Birds is just the beginning," Wood said. "Between now and Christmas you'll see the games selection on Roku grow dramatically. My goal is to grow Roku into a major low-cost family oriented gaming platform, with games in the $5 range rather than $30 range.

"Just like Netflix is shaking up the video world, and Pandora is shaking up radio, Angry Birds and their friends are shaking up the gaming establishment. We're trying to help as best we can."

Rumors have been circulating for months that the next version of the Apple TV could add games too. It'll also be interesting to see how the Boxee Box responds to casual gaming on the Roku.

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Images: (Top) The Roku 2 and (bottom) the Roku 2's motion-sensing remote. Credit: Roku

Spotify live in U.S.; a vision realized for Sean Parker of Napster fame

Spotify in now playing in the U.S.

The online music service, hugely popular in Europe, is now live in the States. But to start using Spotify, users need to be invited in -- a very Google-esque move. Well, that is unless you're willing to sign up and pay for Spotify.

The music-streaming service has been expected for more than a year now as Spotify had to reach agreements with record labels over licensing rights to songs on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

But now that it's here and launched, it's the realization of a vision for tech investor Sean Parker, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Parker, who was an early employee at both Napster (back when it was a file-sharing service) and Facebook (the world's largest social-networking service), sits on Spotify's board of directors and is a managing partner at the Founders Fund venture capital firm.

"For a decade I have waited for a music service that could rekindle my excitement about music by enabling music to be shared freely across the world -- all the while empowering artists to reap the economic benefits of selling their music," Parker wrote on his Facebook wall Thursday, according to the Financial Times.

The service has three tiers of membership based on what is often referred to as a "freemium" model with both a free, ad-supported option and paid subscriptions as well, which Los Angeles Times reporter Alex Pham breaks down on our sister blog Pop & Hiss:

The free tier will let users listen to the company's catalog of more than 15 million songs from a computer connection for six months. After that, free users will be capped at 10 hours a month and up to five spins for any particular song.

Spotify's paid tiers include a plan for $4.99 a month that will let users listen without ads, and another for $9.99 a month that allows users to access music from a smartphone such as an iPhone, Android, Palm or Windows 7 device.

Spotify's main competitors in the U.S. include services like Pandora, a free music-streaming service that groups music by genre or artist, and Last.fm, a streaming music recommendation service. And, of course, Apple's iTunes, which is the biggest online music store. Apple charges by the song or the album and is looking to battle challengers with its coming iCloud service, which will allow users to stream music they've already purchased.

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Image: (Top) Spotify's desktop app running on a laptop. Credit: Spotify/YouTube

Photo: (Bottom) Founders Fund Managing Partner Sean Parker attends the eG8 forum in Paris May 25, 2011. Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Nook Color Android update adds Angry Birds, Nook Friends social network

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color gained a few new features on Monday that push the device more into the classification of a tablet computer and not simply another e-reader.

Among the additions is a store for buying applications, which Barnes & Noble is calling Nook Apps; apps for email, calendars and contacts; support for Adobe Air and Flash; and a new Nook social networking app.

One thing that isn't changing, however, is the price -- $249 for the 7-inch touch-screen device, which features 8GB of storage.

The updates come as the Nook Color is being switched over to a newer version of Google's Android operating system, called Froyo. Unlike the Honeycomb software, which was designed specifically to run on tablets, Froyo was designed for phones but is on many tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

But while the Nook Color can now run Android Froyo, it won't be running all Android apps. Instead, Barnes & Noble is asking developers to optimize their apps for the Nook Color and submit them through the Nook Apps store, rather than simply allowing users to download apps from the Android Market.

As of Monday, 125 apps were available in the Nook Apps store, including Angry Birds, one of the more popular games available on tablets and smartphones nowadays. Other apps include Pandora Internet radio, the game Uno, the cooking app Epicurious and the as-seen-on-iPad news app Pulse.

Barnes & Noble is also taking a stab at building its own social network among Nook users called Nook Friends.

Using a Nook Friends app, Nook users can see what their friends are reading, read reviews of books, loan books to each other, share quotes from a book, list their progress in a book and recommend a title to a buddy.

In another nod to social networking, Nook users can now "like" titles in the device's bookstore app, with the liking showing up on a person's Facebook page.

The Nook Color updates, which are free, are being pushed to users via Wi-Fi beginning this week or available for manual download at www.nookcolor.com/update.

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Image: Angry Birds running on a Nook Color tablet from Barnes & Noble. Credit: Barnes & Noble

Pandora's Android app gathers personal info, report says

Now even listening to tunes may unwittingly leak personal info.

Pandora, a free Internet radio service that streams and recommends songs, has an app for Android phones that finds, gathers and transmits "mass quantities" of personal data to advertising agencies, according to Veracode, an application security company that analyzed the app.

The personal information includes: your birthday, gender, postal code, a phone's unique device ID and even your GPS coordinates, according to Veracode.

"In isolation some of this data is uninteresting, but when compiled into a single unifying picture, it can provide some significant insight into a person's life," concluded Veracode researcher Tyler Shields in a Tuesday blog post.

Shields suggested that a person's current location, coupled with their gender, age and IP address, can be compiled "to determine who someone is, what they do for a living, who they associate with and any number of other traits about them."

While Pandora does request some personal information to customize music streams for users, Veracode said the music service was also sending data, possibly without even knowing it, to advertisers.

"The application developers may not even be aware of the privacy violations they are introducing by using third-party advertising libraries," he said. "They may merely think they are getting [the agreed amount] per ad impression, not that the ad library is leaking significant information about the user."

Veracode discovered that the Pandora app for Android was "integrated" into five advertising libraries, including AdMarvel, AdMob, comScore, Google.Ads and Medialets. In some cases, an ad library attempted to "capture GPS location information on a continuous looping mechanism," Shields said.

"I don't know about you, but that feels a little Orwellian to me," he wrote.

While apps that collect personal data to target ads and sell products is nothing new, they may come under increasing scrutiny as lawmakers look into how such information is collected, used and tracked.

Pandora revealed Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it had been subpoenaed to turn over documents by a federal grand jury investigating how personal data is shared among smartphone applications.

The music service was not "a specific target of the investigation" and subpoenas were handed out "on an industry wide basis," the filing said.

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Photo: An Android phone running the Pandora app. Credit: Pandora

 

 

Pandora says regulators are scrutinizing privacy and data security on mobile apps

Pandora Media, maker of the popular Internet radio service, said it had been served with with a subpoena from a federal grand jury that is probing how personal data are shared among smartphone applications.

The disclosure, first reported by Bloomberg, came in documents that Pandora filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing, in the form of an amendment to the company's plans for an initial public offering, said the grand jury had been convened to "investigate the information sharing processes of certain popular applications that run on the Apple and Android mobile platforms."

The Oakland, Calif., company said it was told that it was "not a specific target of the investigation," and that "similar subpoenas were issued on an industrywide basis to the publishers of numerous other smartphone applications."

Pandora and other apps collect information on users -- including their locations, preferences and socio-economic backgrounds -- to help them sell products and send targeted ads.

Although such practices are commonplace, they may be called into question as federal regulators and lawmakers voice privacy concerns over how such information is tracked and shared. Here's a paragraph in the filing about how Pandora could be affected:

In particular, government regulators have proposed “do not track” mechanisms, and requirements that users affirmatively “opt-in” to certain types of data collection that, if enacted into law or adopted by self-regulatory bodies or as part of industry standards, could significantly hinder our ability to collect and use data relating to listeners. Restrictions on our ability to collect, access and harness listener data, or to use or disclose listener data or any profiles that we develop using such data, would in turn limit our ability to stream personalized music content to our listeners and offer targeted advertising opportunities to our advertising customers, each of which are critical to the success of our business.

Regulators are starting to devote more attention to mobile devices and the applications that run on them as consumers increasingly access the Internet through smartphones and tablets. Pandora, for example, has 80 million listeners, the majority of whom use the streaming music service via cellphones such as the iPhone.

-- Alex Pham

Pandora files for $100-million IPO with hopes of turning a profit

Pandora, the popular streaming radio service, is going public and hoping that doing so will help the company post a profit for the first time.

The Times' Alex Pham has the full story over on our sister blog, Company Town. As Pham reports:

Pandora Media Inc., an Internet streaming radio service used by more than 80 million listeners, announced plans Friday to sell shares in an initial public offering this year.

After years of struggling for survival, the Oakland, Calif., company is finally on the verge of breaking even and sees the offering as a way to raise $100 million to grow its business.

Pandora, which has a catalog of 800,000 songs from more than 80,000 artists, has roughly half the market for Internet radio in 2010, according to a study published in November by Ando Media. Though the service is wildly popular, it has yet to make a profit.

In its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pandora reported a $16.8-million loss on $55.1 million in revenue for its fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2010. From Feb. 1, 2010 through Oct. 31, Pandora narrowed its losses to $300,000 on $90.1 million in revenue.

Because Pandora is largely a free service, only about 10% of its revenue came from subscriptions and other paid services. The vast majority of the company's revenue came from advertising.

In January, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Pandora Chief Executive Tim Westergren looked forward to issuing the company's IPO, saying:

We've been through a long road to get here. This company should have been dead long ago. But now I can be more ambitious about what we can accomplish. It's surreal.

Pandora delivers its Internet radio service online via Web browsers and through apps on smart phones and tablets. The free service also generates playlists based on a users' musical tastes and songs they've played before.

To read the rest of the story on Pandora's first offering of public stock, head over to Company Town and read Pham's complete report.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: Pandora Media founder and CEO Tim Westergren in 2009. Credit: Ryan Anson / Bloomberg News

Consumer Electronics Show: Pandora's Tim Westergren on car connectivity, smartphones and a potential IPO

 

 

As major automakers took the stage one after the other at CES, it wasn’t just their sweeping vehicle connectivity plans that made them sound like a broken record.  It was the constant reference to Pandora.

The Internet radio company, led by founder Tim Westergren, will offer its services through smartphones integrated into infotainment designs from Ford, Toyota, BMW and several other car companies.

Westergren still remembers talks several years ago with the automakers gaining “no momentum,” when the focus was all on spiffy navigation technology.

But then smartphones such as the iPhone emerged and the market for Pandora “just went berserk” and the audience doubled, he said at the electronics show in Las Vegas. The company’s music platform is now accessible from more than 200 devices.

Once users started plugging various gadgets into their vehicle auxiliary jacks, automakers finally perked up and took notice.

“The phones changed the whole equation,” Westergren said, sitting in a Ford Mustang, which will access Pandora through the AppLink feature. “Now, if you want to be a radio service, that’s half the market. It feels like we’ve reached critical mass.”

Catering to customized radio listeners as they drive is now a “huge priority” for Pandora, where “a quarter of the staff is chasing cars right now,” he said.

“We’re kind of in execution  mode right now,” Westergren said. “We want to be in every single car on every single phone.”

Well, maybe every car but, Westergren himself listens to his favorite Ben Folds channel on his iPhone and iPad while taking public transportation.

Looking forward, he said he might consider taking the company public.

“We’ve been through a long road to get here,” he said. “This company should have been dead long ago. But now I can be more ambitious about what we can accomplish. It’s surreal.”

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Photo: Pandora head Tim Westergren at CES. Credit: Tiffany Hsu

Consumer Electronics Show: Livio puts Pandora in a new box

At the Consumer Electronics Show, there are more ways to listen to your music than there are screaming teens at a Justin Bieber concert. One of them is the Livio Radio featuring Pandora. 

The Livio Radio looks similar to other high-end radios, but it has one big difference: There is no radio inside. The Livio Radio is strictly for Pandora and Internet radio stations.

For $150 to $200, you can have all of your Pandora stations as well as more than 42,000 Internet radio streams anywhere you can get a Wi-Fi signal, or an ethernet cable and an Internet connection. You can even give a thumbs up or down to songs as they come up.

So if your Wi-Fi signal reaches your patio but your speaker cable doesn't, grab your Livio Radio and bring your tunes outside. 

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CES: Toyota Entune and BMW ConnectedDrive telematics systems

Toyota drivers could soon buy movie tickets and make restaurant reservations from their in-car navigation system, the automaker said Tuesday at CES.

The Entune multimedia telematics system will show up this year in several Toyota models and will also feature sophisticated software that can recognize voices speaking naturally instead of just simple commands.

Users will have to download the Entune mobile application and then link up the Bluetooth on their phones with their cars, Toyota said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Then, drivers will be able to access music through Pandora and Clear Channel’s iheartradio app. They’ll also be able to check out MovieTickets.com, Microsoft’s Bing search engine and OpenTable’s reservation service.

And that’s on top of real-time and crowd-sourced traffic updates from INRIX as well as fuel prices, weather, stocks and sports. Ford, which updated its Sync in-car technology at last year's CES, will make its presentation at this year's show on Friday.

But that’s not all from the telematics front at this week’s show. QNX, which contributed software to Entune, also said Tuesday that it was pairing with BMW on its ConnectedDrive system. 

Featured on the showroom floor in a zippy BMW Z4 Roadster sports car, ConnectedDrive will show calendar entries and contact lists on a display.

QNX, a subsidiary of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, will also power a function that allows BMW drivers to listen to e-mails and text messages while driving instead of handling their phones.

"The driver will be able to seamlessly receive information and respond without taking their eyes off the road," said Derek Kuhn, vice president of sales and marketing for QNX, in an interview. "Whatever you can imagine is possible with smart phones, we can now deliver a lot of that integration in cars."

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Photo (bottom): BMW Z4 Roadster. Credit: Karen Tapia-Andersen/Los Angeles Times