Open your Pandora's Box

A colleague at work sent me to www.pandora.com few weeks ago and I am loving it.

What I like about it, besides the interface is its extremely low latency between the time when my brain says "Put on some music NOW" and the time when the music actually starts playing.

- No Firing up of your media player and navigating to your MP3s
- No Fishing for your iPOD or whatever MP3 gizmo you have and fumbling with its controls or headsets
- or Worse, NO looking for a CD to play and fidgeting with your CDROM drive or Stereo.

Just open your browser and point it to www.pandora.com (of course assuming you already logged into pandora before) and the music just plays instantly (well almost instantly).

If you are not too picky about your music or finicky about playing only your MP3 collection then go ahead and open your pandora's box..at.... www.pandora.com.

Unlike the Greek, Pandora this curiosity won't kill you :-)

ORB

At various times in the past I have used the following tools to both access my media remotely or share them with friends and family.

1. For Audio Broadcast - Shoutcast+Winamp
2. For TV/Video streaming - Microsoft Media Encoder
3. For Photo sharing - Local FTP/Web/File Shares or public photo-shares such as Flickr/Yahoo

But installing and configuring the above tools is not always easy. For a average home user its geeky, technical and can be frustrating especially if you have to configure firewall ports, figure out bandwidth settings, encoders etc. I had always wondered why noone has not yet come up with a single application to do all of the above. Maybe XP should have had a movie broadcaster along with its movie maker. Maybe it was a strategic decision with creating markets for their Media Center PC.
Then about a year or so ago I heard about SlingBox and few weeks ago I even checked it out at the local Radio Shack. Cool little gadget. I got the feeling its well poised to be the next Internet Tivo.

Untill I stumbled across ORB.COM on Scott Hanselman's blog. Its a great alternative to the SlingBox and does all of the above in a sleek software only solution.

Within minutes I had it running and was able to broadcast a movie, webcam, listen to my mp3 collection and view my photos remotely.

Check it out. http://www.orb.com