To get “under the hood” of the music streaming service Pandora, we talk to Tom Conrad, the Chief Technology Officer for Pandora. Tom starts with his Apple/Macintosh credibility as the author of a feature that remains part of the Mac OS to this day, then digs in to what makes Pandora tick: the bandwidth necessary to support, “many tens of thousands” of simultaneous users, how they address the challenge of delivering a quality listening experience and the state of the Pandora interface, Recorded live at the MacVoices at Expo featuring Pandora event on Friday night of Macworld Expo, Tim also talks about how they store and back up their collection of over 500,000 tracks (and the CDs’ they came from), delivers some thoughts on where they would like to take Pandora from both the accessibility and interaction perspectives.
