Pandora
Fans of listening to internet radio on their Palm Pre will have reason to breath easy today. Pandora (one of the Pre launch partners) whose webOS internet radio app is top-rated on the App Catalog, has been under pressure by SoundExchange to hike their streaming fees to exuberant levels, essentialy forcing Pandora to start charging for their services or close down. They have been looking for a solution for some time now, but to no avail.
However, a deal was reached, in which SoundExchange reduced their per-song-per-listener fee by 40-50%, or collects 25% of total US revenue generated by Pandora; whichever is higher. To compensate, Pandora will now be putting a 40-hour / month listening cap on streaming music, or a $0.99 fee for unlimited listening for the month. Sounds like a good compromise, considering a month’s worth of internet radio costs the same as a single song over iTunes. If you’ve used Pandora before, would you be willing to pay more for internet radio, should they ever hike their fees?
PopCap
If you’ve never played Bejeweled or Zuma before, then you’re probably still playing Snake on your old Nokia. Garth Chouteau, a senior director of Popular mobile software company PopCap Games discussed their future in an interview yesterday, confirming their plans to bring their line of addictive games to the Pre. Here’s what he had to say:
“We have plans to support the Pre, as well as Android. There are games in the works for those devices. But it is certainly a kind of splintering of the market in some ways. I guess what I would say is, we think about platforms or prospective platforms in a couple of ways. One is: is this device right for one or more of our games? Is this the right kind of device for our games? Will it be a fun experience, and frankly as fun as it is on other platforms? And also, what is the audience for this particular device? And then certainly, but certainly not insignificantly, what is the install base?”
This is good news for Pre gamers everywhere, and should give a boost to webOS gaming, which is already growing. Flash support is also expected to augment the webOS games library when it comes to Pre later this year.
