Gadgetory

hey guys it's Casey with avert we're here at CES in our studio and in studio with us this morning is Tom Conrad the CTO of Pandora we're to talk about a bunch of music stuff Tom thanks so much for coming by the studio it's great to be here so you told me earlier that this is your tenth CES it is and do they give you like a watch out of a catalog at that point or anything or yeah you get it yeah and you've been working on Pandora for just about ten years yep so take me badly what was what was CES like for you ten years ago when you first showed um let's see we we stayed at the Excalibur wonderful which is very nice I think three of us came we we had a single meeting with a brick and mortar retailer and talking about putting music listening kiosks into their CD Department so yeah we've come a long way since since ten years ago CES and I think you know pandora has evolved a lot of interesting ways since then obviously any tech company over ten years is going to change a lot but can you give us a sense of just like how big the scope is of Pandora on consumer electronic devices yeah I think pandora is on more than a thousand different consumer electronics devices today and you know it's funny I I was looking back at some some some photos that I took that that first CES ten years ago I was like a kid in a candy store you know the first time on the showroom floor and and you know it's amazing the stuff that was on the showroom floor you know ten years ago was you know digital cameras big flat-screen TVs cell phones that were increasingly looking like little computers I mean it's the same exact stuff that's you know on the show floor this year but it feels like the world has changed a lot so I've been kind of thinking but well what's what's driving that sense of change other than the TVs are getting bigger and flatter and or less flat I guess here there this year they're all curved and I think that one of the big transitions is that 10 years ago none of that stuff was connected to the Internet I mean literally the only thing in my life that was connected to the Internet 10 years ago was you know my laptop my personal computer in today like everything on on the show floor is is connected to the Internet every TV every speaker we have a refrigerator that streams Pandora and a jacuzzi that streams Pandora there's a smart vacuum now too so you might want to look into that that's great yeah that's great I'd like to be able to control my vacuum from the office with my smart phone what are we all who wouldn't yeah and and then of course the other thing that's really changed over the course of the 10 years is the services that we use I mean 10 years ago there was no Facebook there was no Twitter there was no Netflix streaming there was no Pandora and so you kind of sum that together I think that least for me that's what's driving the sense of innovation and change and at CES is the Internet connectivity being kind of ubiquitous and and these services that have come along in the context of that ecosystem right and as the Internet gets connected to more devices that creates more opportunities for companies like Pandora to put their services on board at the same time it can create challenges because every implementation is a little bit different but you guys have done a lot of stuff around html5 like can you talk a little bit about what you're doing to try to make all those implementations a little bit easier on yourselves so for the first many many years you know going back six or seven years now in Pandora's history we had a strategy that said like you know let a thousand flowers bloom you know one of the strengths of radio generally is that it's ubiquitously available pandora is gonna you know kind of step into the opportunity to defining what the next generation of radio looks like we have to enjoy that same level of ubiquity and so to get there we developed a SDK and a platform and instead of developer tools and services that would allow a partner to implement Pandora on a television or a connected speaker or set-top box and they you know they build the Pandora client so kind of to our specifications they send us an example we'd run it through a set of certification tests and so forth and and tell them okay go ahead and ship it and they're a bunch of advantages that approach it's meant that we've you know been able to get Pandora into tons of and tons of devices with a relatively modest amount of work on our end the downside is you know there are probably hundreds of Li hundreds of different Pandora implementations that are baked into firmware sitting on devices that will never evolve that will never change occasionally in the worst case they end up looking more like a you know Korean karaoke machine then then the Pandora that we know and love or fortunately that's fairly rare but it occasionally happens and so about 18 months ago we started to think about like what is the next generation of this look like as it becomes more mainstream it becomes increasingly important that we can evolve the experience for our consumers for our advertisers and kind of get back and control the user experience and so we made a bet that web standards things like html5 and WebKit and some of these things would make their way into the consumer electronics world starting first with with televisions and set-top boxes and then migrating to other things and we're either prescient or lucky I think we were just kind of lucky frankly but that's really really happened so we've got a great version of Pandora that's built entirely out of html5 and other web standards that we can target at any devices capable of rendering a webpage and so we chromecast is a great example of that chromecast of course adds the additional kind of wrinkle that your smartphone becomes a really interesting remote control for the content sony has blu-ray players and televisions that have a great html5 engine that runs this native Pandora platform we've demonstrated with Samsung we're working with lots of other players as well which you know accomplishes that goal of putting this back in control of the user experience because every single time one of our listeners activates the Pandora application what's really happening under the covers is the device goes out to the internet says - Pandora's data center what's Pandora today and we can change the answer to that question you know every day if we want to experiment and so just a mess with people sometimes and just a mess right right you know where the reason that's interesting to me is that in the mobile world html5 based apps never really took off right like Facebook famous famously made this huge bet on html5 apps and eventually Mark Zuckerberg said this was a mistake this didn't wait for us went back to native apps why do you think that HTML wow that could be hard to say when you go that fast what anything html5 has been successful for Pandora on all these devices where maybe it native apps seem to be succeeding more in the mobile world you know that's a good question I think one one dimension that at play is that we're just really good at html5 development no I don't know the experience really is indistinguishable from what the native applications on the same platform so there's there's there's no kind of deficit to the user experience and I think in some of the things that have been done in mobile it's really obvious that you're not dealing with a native experience and some of that maybe even comes from the fact that in the mobile environment there's a whole kind of aesthetic to the user experience that's delivered through the native platform in the context of the television we don't really have that you know there's not a set of native user interface elements and things that's consistent across applications and so you're not we don't find ourselves trying to mimic platform behavior through HTML so there's a bit of that I don't know it's working now yeah so it's working let's talk about advertising a little bit advertising normally a boring topic for me personally but I'd read a really interesting story in The Times over the last week about some of the things that you guys are doing around targeting ads of people based on their music preferences and I think that you know most of us think of ourselves as unique little snowflakes but from from what I'm reading the times just by knowing a couple of the things I like you can actually tell a lot about maybe my political preference maybe about where I might like to travel like can you tell me about like some of these insights that you're getting about your listeners just from the music that they're listening to yeah so it's been a really interesting year for us in that dimension you know we've got an incredible team at Pandora whose job it is you know just to make the best playlist in the world so these are data scientists and machine learning experts algorithm guys big data guys like it's a it's a really best in the world kind of team with respect to the the task of personalizing the Pandora listening experience but it turns out that the skills that that group has is are really easily applied against the the data science problem of how do you deliver exactly the right ad to the right user at the right time right song to the raise you at the right time the right add to the raise we're the same great time which is really the goal right we no one wants to put an ad in front of you for product or service that's not interesting to you just like we don't want to put a song in front of you that you don't like and so you know penned or and those a handful of things about you you know um you know when you register you tell us you know the year you were born you tell us the zip code that you live in you tell us your gender and then of course as you interact with the service we've become familiar with your musical preferences as well and it does turn out that the combination of that data a sense of what part of the country you live in and the kind of music that you listen to we can use to extrapolate to lots of interesting things political preference household income ethnicity which allows us to do kind of you know smarter mmm infer to targeting for advertising beyond what you know you might be able to do just from the obvious things that we collect like gender in it and so forth do you ever like try to log in as a 95 year old woman just to see how the ads will change yeah all the time yeah all the time yeah yeah mostly he's pen doors in 95 awesome so I would be really curious to know what you have coming up on the product side this year like it's it's a new year I'm sure you've done a lot of strategic planning over the past couple of months about what you're going to be up to and I'm here to tell you all about it let's just lay out the program I have the whole brother the whole project map that's a few jobs don't exactly well I think one of the things that's it's uh you know that's we're working on here at CES and isn't like a really important sort of dimension of the evolution of Pandora is he's getting Henry into the automotive environment right about half of all radio listening takes place in the car if we're to reinvent radio as a medium like we have to have a really strong presence and automobiles and so we have over the last few years develop really close working relationships with all the major automotive OEMs I think you know more than 20 we're in 130 different automobiles today and I don't mean like you know use the aux cable you know to listen to Pandora bluetooth streaming these are these are custom Pandora implementations where your cell phone provides the data connectivity and actually runs the application but it connects to the dash and all of the user interface is facilitated by the car so if you're in a car that features voice control you'll use your voice to control Pandora if you're in a car that has a touchscreen you use a touchscreen if it's a hardware you know centric environment you use the hardware buttons to control Pandora and so we've done a lot of work to get pandora into that kind of generation of the automotive internet but we're just at the cusp of the second generation which we call the connected car and and the connected car really is the the fulfillment of the vision that we had in 2004 when we started designing and building Pandora which is that like you know everything in your life is going to be connected to the Internet including the automobile that you drive and so we're talking about cars that are fundamentally and constantly connected to the Internet just like your television and your blu-ray player and everything else in your life and what that does is it really makes Pandora appear to FM radio you know there's a FM antenna there's a cellular antenna and so the consumer gets in the car turns the key and you know you know Pandora starts streaming you know right right where you left it when you got out of the car the time and so we're really excited about that but what it means is that it's an entirely new runtime for the application you know in the the first generation scenario we are able to take advantage of the fact of the applications actually running on your cell phone Android or iPhone in this connected car scenario it'll be the cars platform and so what's interesting is that environment is is shaking out to be very webs web standards centric html5 centric as well as we're able to leverage a lot of the investments we've made in that technology platform in the context of the car but there's tons and tons of work going on at Pandora around just just making sure that you know we have best in the world implementations of Pandora and this next generation of connected car scenarios right well cool so a few years from now we'll have self-driving radio in our self-driving cars exactly I wonder exactly Tom thank you so much for coming by the studio thanks super fun all right