Pandora

Who should be more frightened? The NFL? Or the networks that recently paid $17.6 billion for the TV rights to pro football over the next eight years? Let's call it a dead heat. If they have any sense of history--baseball's history anyway--they both should be terrified. This decade began with the most stunning and unexpected TV contract signed by a sports league. CBS paid $1.06 billion to televise baseball for four years. ESPN kicked in another $400 million for its piece of the action.

Paula Pierce, 31, lead singer and founder of The Pandoras, a Los Angeles all-girl rock quartet. The group was noted for its intensity and rawness, which emulated the musical style of punk bands. Among their better known recordings was the album "Stop Pretending" in 1986. In Hollywood on Saturday of causes yet to be determined, said a Los Angeles County coroner's spokesman.

Speaking to a room full of technology executives and policymakers, Pandora founder Tim Westergren pitched his online radio service as a ladder into the middle class for working musicians. This was the same Westergren who has drawn intense flak from artists and labels for urging Congress to adopt a less generous formula for the royalties webcasters such as Pandora pay. Congress held hearings last fall on the bill Westergren is championing (the " Internet Radio Fairness Act ")

Shares of Pandora Media plummeted as much as 21% on Friday after word leaked out that Apple has been in discussions with record labels to launch a competing streaming radio service. Apple's proposed online service, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, would have the potential to disrupt both Internet and traditional radio providers. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is seeking a more flexible type of music license from the record labels than the one Pandora has. It would allow Apple to select whatever song it wants to play next and tailor selections based on albums in listeners' iTunes music libraries, according two industry executives with knowledge of Apple's plans for the service.

Internet radio company Pandora Media's losses tripled in its second quarter but investors didn't seem to mind as they pushed the company's shares up nearly 12% immediately after its financial report was released Wednesday afternoon. Instead, Wall Street focused on Pandora's revenue, which jumped 51% from a year earlier to $101.3 million in the quarter ended July 31. Analysts had expected the Oakland, Calif., company to post $100.4 million in sales. Losses of $5.4 million for the quarter were three times last year's loss of $1.8 million, weighed down by growing music licensing and marketing costs.

Pandora Media Inc., the online-radio company, gained on its first day of trading as investors raced to benefit from the biggest surge in Internet share sales since the dot-com boom a decade ago. The Oakland company rose 8.9 percent in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol P. It sold 14.7 million shares yesterday at $16 apiece, raising $234.9 million in its initial public offering. That was above the top of the range of $10 to $12. Investors are flocking to technology IPOs after professional-networking website LinkedIn Corp.

Pandora Media Inc., an Internet streaming radio service used by more than 80 million listeners, is planning to launch an initial public offering this year. After years of struggling for survival, the Oakland, Calif., company is on the verge of breaking even and sees the offering as an opportunity to raise $100 million in order to grow its business. In its prospectus filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pandora reported a $16.8-million loss on $55.2 million in revenue for its fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2010.

Art direction "Avatar" Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg (art direction); Kim Sinclair (set decoration) Pandora, the unspoiled alien world at the heart of "Avatar," provided moviegoers with some of the year's biggest wow moments. The movie's mix of digital and traditional sets -- all of which were rendered in 3-D -- was regarded by many as a technological triumph. Carter, who was previously nominated in this category for "Forrest Gump" in 1995, saved his most heartfelt thanks for the film's director.

Darrell Kenyatta Evers remembers vividly the night his father, Medgar Evers, was killed. "My sister and my brother and my mother were watching TV, sitting on the bed," he said. The date was June 12, 1963. The family was at home in Jackson, Miss., watching President John F. Kennedy talk about a "moral crisis" in America, explaining to the country the precepts that would become the Civil Rights Act a year later.

With a low price and hefty specs, the Nexus 10 seems like a special tablet, on paper. But when you put it to the test, you're likely to find that the high-end Google tablet is worth the price though not something you would brag about to friends. The Nexus 10 is the flagship high-end Android tablet of the season. It has a starting price of $399 for a 16-gigabyte model and features a 10-inch screen with a 2,560 by 1,600 pixel resolution and 300 pixels per inch density. It sounds like a better deal than what you get from Apple for its $499 16 GB, 9.7-inch iPad, which has a 2,048 by 1,536 resolution and 264 ppi. But once in use, the Nexus 10 does feel like its worth about $100 less than its Apple rival.