Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > March > 15 > Entry
SXSW panel: ‘How Pandora Navigated the Smart Phone Seas’
Time: 12:30 p.m. Monday
Panelists: Pandora CTO and head of product Tom Conrad, with moderator Mark Phillip of Are You Watching This?!
The gist: Conrad gave a history of how Pandora dramatically gained popularity when it began developing for smart phones.
Pandora knew that it wanted to go mobile because most music-listening doesn’t take place when people are sitting in front of a computer.
Pandora became available for feature phones like the Motorola Razr, but growth was slow. There were lots of incompatibilities, monthly fees hurt growth and customers for the phones weren’t necessarily looking for Web content.
Things changed when Pandora became available for the iPhone. Within hours of the App Store launch, more people were listening than on iPhones than on feature phones. Similar success followed on the Blackberry, Palm and Android (Conrad says his infamous “I need Android like a hole in the head” quote was dead wrong.)
Coming soon: Conrad says we’ll soon be able to control Pandora from our car dashboards.
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