 Personalized Internet radio taking big steps away from PC ·Nov 14, 11:15 AM By Jefferson Graham in USA Today: "Personalized
Internet radio is expanding from the PC
to portable devices. "Redefining" radioPandora attracted 3.3 million Internet listeners in October, according to measurement service
ComScore
Media Metrix. It expanded to Sprint phones in the spring
with a low-key offering that is barely mentioned on Sprint’s website.
AT&T is offering the same low-key approach,
with little marketing on the Web but instead an offer on the phone
itself to sign up. Westergren [left] says the carriers are treading
cautiously to make sure the phones work well with Pandora."‘When you get personalized radio wherever you are, that’s when we’re able to redefine radio,’ Westergren says. "Moving personalized radio off the PC is in its early days. Beyond Pandora and Slacker, SanDisk‘s $149 Sansa Connect player offers Net radio from Yahoo, available anywhere there’s a Wi-Fi connection. Slacker CEO: "WiFi isn’t the way to go"Slacker CEO Dennis Mudd didn’t want to go the WiFi route. Instead, a selection of songs from your favorite artists is
transferred to the Slacker portable player from your PC. New songs
are added every time the player is hooked
up. They are stored on the player,
so you don’t need an Internet connection to listen…"Mudd says… ‘Being connected to WiFi isn’t the way to go. There could be static, or you might lose the signal. This way the music is always there.’ "An ad-supported version of the service is free; $7.95 monthly without ads. The device starts at $199.99 with 2 GB  of
storage (roughly 1,000 songs) and 15 stations, or $249.99 for 4
GB and 25 stations. The entry-level iPod Nano, by comparison, is
$149 and has 4 GB of storage."Why spend the extra bucks?.. The automatic refresh of new songs… Mudd says, ‘Most people end up with the same old playlists to listen to, week after week, because they don’t have the time to do research and get new music.’ "Newsletter [publisher] Hanson [left] says taking Slacker and Pandora away from the computer is a great idea, but, ‘The question is whether they can progress quickly and beat the tsunami of every device and webcaster that’s headed in this direction. Because they won’t be alone a year from now.’" This entire story is available online from USA Today here. share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
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