Laith Zraikat

This thing is very fresh, and it's called PANDORA (www.pandora.com)

Pandora is what you could call a web based jukebox with intelligence. In addition to streaming some very good quality music, it can help you find new songs which suit your musical taste.

How do they do it? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than just creating a super smart software. Actually, the software itself is not smart at all, it’s the extensive database of individually reviewed and dissected songs is what helps it understand your musical taste and match it with songs that you might like.

The foundation of this innovation is what the founders call the "Music Genome Project" (http://pandora.com/mgp.shtml) which – simply put - aims at identifying the basic traits "Genes" that make-up a musical piece. Each song is then analyzed individually and classified according to its "Genes".

In addition to giving you suggestions, it will ask you for feedback, which will help it narrow down your musical taste and suggest better songs.

I have tried it, and incredibly, about 90% of songs suggested are things I really liked. Currently the service is free of charge for the first 10 hours of play. After that the yearly subscription is US $36. I am not sure I would want to subscribe just to listen to music, but I would definitely hit Pandora on my way to Amazon.com in hopes of finding more music that I will want to buy.

Amazon and Google should keep an eye on this new company. It will be an extremely handy tool for people shopping or searching for music. Amazon could have a smarter way of suggesting music based on a scientific understanding of people's musical tastes. As for Google, well, Google has always been about simple applications that intelligently organize the world's content, utilizing the internet.