Not too long ago, Pandora was begging its users for legislative support that it needed to survive. Today, BusinessWeek is talking about Pandora's mobile advertising. The two are not mutually exclusive. BusinessWeek:
Since Pandora launched a mobile edition two years ago, it has signed up 6 million people (total users for mobile and Web versions is 27 million). That has prompted the likes of Best Buy (BBY), Dockers, Target (TGT), and Nike (NKE) to buy ads on Pandora and experiment with what remains a cheap advertising medium—one most companies have yet to figure out. "We've reached a tipping point," says Domino's (DPZ) Pizza advertising executive Rob Weisberg. "Marketers, especially consumer brands, have to take mobile seriously now. You have to be where your customer works, lives, and plays."
This is academic to me, since neither Pandora nor last.fm work on my older phone. On Tuesday I was ruminating on the need to develop applications that work in confined user interfaces. I guess there's one more criterion - will an advertisement fit in the UI?
