Pandora Media, Inc.

Yesterday, our lead editor Mike Rose sidelined me to ask, "Could we tell Siri to control Apple TV?" Just as a thought experiment. After a bit of investigation, I had an answer for him, which was "Yes, you could, but no, you probably don't want to." That's because the degree of hacking necessary to make this happen, versus the actual... Read More

It's January 6th, 2012, and today marks the end of the TUAW Best of 2011 awards. This was a massive undertaking, with 25 separate categories all requiring their own nominations and voting from our readers. We've learned some lessons for next year's event -- start earlier, watch for astroturfing in the nominations, drop some unpopular categories -- and the Best of 2012 will be even better. The editorial staff here at TUAW agreed with many of the reader picks, but we had our own opinions on some others. We want to thank all of the thousands of TUAW readers who took time to consider their favorite accessories and apps, nominate them for an award, and then vote in the competition. Without further ado, here's the full list of winners as well as our picks for the TUAW Best of 2011: Editor picks: 13" and 11" MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro Peripheral or Accessory: OWC Data Doubler and OWC Mercury 6G SSD Editor picks: Magic Trackpad, OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Editor picks: Mophie Juice Pack Air, Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation, iChair Editor picks: Apple Smart Cover, AViiQ Smart Case,Twelve South BookBook, ModulR System, OtterBox Defender Editor picks: Apple TV, iCade, Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Read More

During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for nominations in the TUAW Best of 2011 awards is iPhone music apps. This is a huge area in the App Store, with apps that not only play music, but let you create music as well. This is also the last category for iPhone nominations. Apple's GarageBand (US$4.99) made it to the iPhone this year, turning your favorite phone (or iPod touch) into a music-making maniac. Smule's Magic Guitar (free) and Magic Piano (free) can make you a pocket musician in no time. Listening to music on Pandora (free) or Spotify (free) is easier than ever now, and Clear Channel's iHeartRadio (free) lets you listen to over 800 real radio stations from your iPhone. TUAW wants to hear from you -- what's your favorite iPhone music app? Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon! Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 23, 2011. Read More

We've been covering a lot (a lot!) of iPhone games in this space, but of course there are many other types of apps on the App Store. MusicPound isn't a game -- rather, it's a music discovery app that's designed to compare your music library (on your iPhone, so you'll have to load music on there if you don't sync it usually) with someone else's. The app will give you a "Music Compatibility Rating," as well as chart your most played and favorite songs, and give you some insight on what kinds of music you both listen to. Obviously, the feedback here is mostly just for fun -- you're hopefully not going to keep or ditch a friend based on what this app tells you. But the app can give you some good recommendations based on what kind of music your friends like, and where your libraries intersect and diverge. And of course MusicPound lets you jump into iTunes to fill in any gaps in your library. And the app itself is free, so the price is right. You get three comparisons with your free download, and if you want more, you can do an in-app purchase for just $1.99. MusicPound probably isn't the only music recommendation app you'll use (I really like Pandora and Shazam as well, both apps that I've mentioned before), but with a willing friend in tow, it can add a fun social twist to finding new music. Read More

Like the proverbial genie in the bottle, you can ask a lot of Dragon Go! and have a pretty good chance of the app granting your wish. Dragon Go! is the latest free app from Nuance, creators of Dragon Dictate for the Mac and Dragon Dictation for iOS devices. In this latest app, Nuance has delivered what they consider the next generation of voice search, and after several days of testing I have no reason to doubt it. Here's the deal. Speak just about anything to Dragon Go! and it will try to parse your meaning and bring up the right set of tools to complete your search. Ask for news about Libya, or news about Libya from the New York Times and the app complies. Ask for reservations for 2 at a favorite restaurant and Open Table is queried. Directions from your current location to the nearest hospital will launch Google Maps with the route. Say a product name, like JBL speakers and an Amazon page comes up with the JBL speakers Amazon sells. It gets better. Ask it to play an artist on Pandora, and if you have the app installed it will launch and start playing the artist you asked for. Say "Play the Beatles" and if you have the Beatles on your device the music will play. You can also direct a query to a particular site. I tried "stories about Apple TV on TUAW" and it brought up a list from our website. Then a tough test. I asked to see pictures of obscure character actor Whit Bissell and the images popped up right on cue. Check our gallery. Holy Moly! No app is perfect, and every so often Dragon Go! botched a search, but most questions I asked delivered useful answers. It may seem like the app has a bit of overlap with Siri, which is also powered by Nuance Technology. There is some, but Dragon Go! reaches deeper and takes you to the appropriate place on the web, rather than try to contain the info within the app itself. The sources Dragon Go! is using are displayed at the top of the screen. You can change those sources manually if you want. The default search engine is Google, but Bing and Yahoo! are fine if you'd rather use them. I found Dragon Go! an extraordinarily useful app in day to day use. I can Read More

Music service Pandora is set to introduce its stock to the public tomorrow, becoming one more in a series of social networking and online service companies going with an IPO. Pandora isn't specifically an iOS company, of course, given that its music service runs both through browsers and on a number of platforms. But the company's iOS app has helped its profile. It's consistently stayed one of the top free apps on the App Store. The company's offering 14.7 million shares initially. Pandora's future wasn't ever in actual jeopardy, but certainly the value of the company's app was in question during the lead-up to last week's Apple keynote at WWDC. For a while, iCloud was rumored as being an iTunes streaming service like Pandora, allowing you to listen to your music collection through any iOS device. Those rumors turned out to be untrue so far. iCloud and iTunes Match are only designed to help you sync your iTunes songs across devices, not listen to them remotely. For those whose music collections are too big to fit on an iOS device, Pandora is still one of the main ways to listen to extra music. Read More

Careful watchers of the top charts on the App Store have noticed an interesting trend over the weekend with various apps inexplicably substantially changing position. Previously (and possibly still currently) Apple seemed to use the number of downloads an app had to form both the top free and paid lists. While this method might have made sense originally, gaming these download-only lists has turned into a remarkably profitable enterprise for those that have apps with a large install base which also have a way to push users into downloading other apps. If you've played a freemium game lately that offered some kind of benefit for downloading a completely different game, chances are the developer behind the title you're being incentivized into downloading paid the original developer a bucket full of money for that promotion. For both developers it's a win/win situation, one (often) gets a fat stack of cash while the other gets a massive boost in overall charting position along with all the benefits that includes. The issue with this is that clicking a link in your favorite social farming time sink to get more virtual oats for your virtual cows to download another game creates a top-download list that might not be entirely representative of what people are actually even using for anything more than that download bonus. Google's Android rankings also used to work like this until a recent change that substantially altered the algorithm which resulted in apps like Seesmic [Free] jumping from #39 to #10 while Gowalla [Free] went all the way from #78 to #18. Developers speculated that the cause for these jumps were something referred to as the "sticky factor" which instead of relying only on downloads looks at daily active users, or perhaps factoring in a ratio of daily active users compared to monthly active users. Of course Google hasn't commented on what actually is going on behind the scenes, likely out of fear that this new system will be gamed like the old lists. Apple could potentially to be following suit with a similar algorithm which might explain some recent shifts in the free charts. For instance, Facebook [Free] previously was comfortably floating around the middle of the top 25 for quite some time, and recently shot up to #1. Similarly, Pandora [Free] jumped into the top ten after living in the top 20's for ages. Speculating this has to do with Read More

Hey app, did you just send my personal data or my phone's unique electronic identification number over the internet without my permission? Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are trying to answer this question in an ongoing investigation, the Wall Street Journal reports. The federal probe aims to discover if any apps built for iOS, Android or other smartphones are illegally collecting or transmitting personally identifying information, such as the phone's unique device identifier (UDID), to app makers or third parties without consent from end users. Gathering information that can be used to personally identify an individual without adequately disclosing what data will be collected and how it will be used could violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act designed to prosecute hackers. The investigation, which could continue for months, appears to be in a preliminary phase. In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, the online music service Pandora revealed it had been "served with a subpoena to produce documents in connection with a federal grand jury, which we believe was convened to investigate the information sharing processes of certain popular applications that run on the Apple and Android mobile platforms." The Oakland, CA, company added that it's "not a specific target of the investigation" and believes the subpoenas were issued "on an industry-wide basis to the publishers of numerous other smartphone applications." "They're just doing information-gathering to get a better understanding," Anthony Campiti, creator of Pumpkin Maker, told The Journal after receiving a subpoena. "We're not doing anything wrong and neither is anyone else doing anything wrong." It's unusual for companies to face prosecution for privacy violations, legal experts told The Journal. Although, some think this investigation could lead to criminal charges for numerous companies. "This is a big hammer if the government chooses to use it," Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, told The Journal. The Wall Street Journal appears to have prompted the federal grand-jury investigation with an article it published last December. For the article, the publication tested 101 apps and found that 56 of them sent the phone's UDID to the app developer or a third party without notifying the user. CNET observes the UDID "can be used by third parties to know which apps you download, how frequently you use those apps, and for how long." And a recent lawsuit alleges the UDID data can be combined Read More

This morning I spoke with Jessica Cole from Kanex, a two-year-old company which offers many products that add HDMI capability to your Mac. The current generation of their line adds audio pass-through via HDMI. The offerings range between the iAdapt HDMI V2 (US$29.95), a small box that plugs into Mini DisplayPort and allows you to plug in an HDMI cable, giving you audio support and 1080p video to a TV, projector or anything else with an HDMI input. I was shown the Mini DisplayPort to HDMI 10-foot cable ($44.95), which is sold exclusively at Apple stores and contains a 10-foot HDMI cable so that you don't have to buy and plug in your own. "We're very excited to have our product as an Apple Store exclusive," said Jessica (whose favorite three apps are Facebook, Pandora and Facegoo). The most interesting product that I found was the Kanex XD ($149.99), a magical box that gives you the ability to connect the HDMI output of a Blu-Ray player, PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 and have resolution of up to 1920x1200 appear on your iMac 27". This lets you use your 27" iMac display as a full HD display device. The Kanex HD is controlled by the iMac keyboard. A press of Command-F2 switches the display between the computer and the HDMI device, and both sound and brightness are controlled with the usual keys on the Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard. Read More

  Yesterday, we went over the top 10 free iPhone Apps available on the App Store (the paid apps, too). It was a list of the most downloaded free applications of all time. While it may not always reflect the quality of each App, it does indicate their popularity. That said, there are also plenty of iPad Apps that are getting attention. Here's a List of the most popular:    Pandora on the iPad is great for listening to music while you browse, or catch up on your RSS feeds. You simply search for the artist or music you want to listen to and hit play. There's a lot to listen to on Pandora radio, and it's a free App worth taking a look at. Much like Google Mobile for iPhone, Google mobile for iPad gives you a suite of Google applications within a single iPad App. You can search the internet with pictures and voice, logos and more. Heck, this thing even solves Sudoku puzzles. That's reason enough to check it out.   Check movie showtimes and whats coming both in the theater and to home video. You can check out what's topping in the box office or view trailers for movies if you want to know what they are about. The App also includes Rotten Tomatoes ratings, which helps to give you an idea of how well-received the movie is by critics.   This is always a cool application because it may be the closest we get to seeing some of these places that are way off on the other side of the world. It's okay though. Traveling by plane is kind of a hassle these days, and this is much easier.   If you do like traveling, especially on the road, this may be the App for you. Yelp helps you find restaurants, bars, hotels and gas stations nearby based on your location. Apps like this one quickly become a traveler's best friend in unfamiliar territory.   Like the popular Fandango website, this application allows you to purchase movie tickets online, this time through your iDevice. You can also sort movies by genre, MPAA rating and format (such as IMAX and 3D).    Remote for iPhone has long been a favorite App of ours. When it came to iPad, it got even better, because searching for movies on Apple TV was much faster with a the larger keyboard. Anyone Read More