VentureBeat

Internet radio site Pandora announced tonight the launch of a new service for mobile phones, finally taking the popular music site beyond its core internet audience.

Pandora’s site is a favorite among music lovers: It lets you discover new music based on your tastes and create custom playlists. However, until now, it hadn’t offered a decent mobile service — which raised questions about how it plans to maintain its edge, given the emergence of the Apple iPhone and others, such as Microsoft’s Zune.

Now you use it on your Sprint phone. Clumsily called the Pandora Everywhere Platform, it also integrates with a music-streaming hardware system made by Sonos, designed for home entertainment systems — and soon, with a new wifi-connected portable music player powered by another startup, Zing.

Pandora claims around 7 million users, and no doubt some of them will like the service. However, the move to hardware does put it in competition with the iPod and the iPhone, raising questions about the uptake; in fact, Sprint’s involvement suggests that this is an also-ran move on the part of the carrier, in reaction to AT&T’s 5-year deal with Apple.

Indeed, this has the signs of being hurried. At a product launch presentation tonight, the company said the deal was wrapped up over the over the last week and a half. Maybe Pandora’s cave to the record labels earlier this month made the company look like a less risky partner: As we reported, Pandora recently agreed to their demand that it block foreign listeners due to the difficulty in enforcing US-based licensing agreements abroad.

The Oakland, Calif. company is a classic start-up story that will be helped by these new partnerships. The service is a great way to find new music that you’ve never heard of. However, as mentioned, we have to wonder if these additional ways of accessing Pandora will be so valuable that people will choose to use it in addition to (or even instead of) iTunes.

The company is also losing money, despite running display advertising on the web. These services are a new revenue stream. The Sprint service is free for the first 30 days, then costs then costs $2.99 per month on top of a Sprint Power Vision data plan.

Updated

A recent internal review by Apple concluded chief executive Steve Jobs didn’t do anything wrong even though he knew about the back-dated stock options. The review suggested Jobs didn’t appreciate the full consequences of what he was doing.

However, that doesn’t seem to square with fresh reports suggesting Jobs is strongly aware of the significance of back-dating, and has been for some time. John Heilemann in New York Magazine, reveals Steve Jobs pressured Apple’s board to reprice stock options as early as 1997:

Or so Jobs told Time magazine that August: “To restore morale, Jobs says, he went to the mat with the [Apple] board to lower the price of incentive stock options,” the magazine reported. “When the board members resisted, he pushed for their resignations.”

This revelation follows other troubling evidence that Jobs benefited from repriced options over time. A lawsuit filed last week, alleges, for example that from 1997 to 2004, five of seven grants by Pixar (where Jobs was owner and board member) were recorded at the lowest possible price within the months they were granted, and four of the seven were recorded at the lowest price within the fiscal years.

And at Apple, he exchanged his option for 10 million shares of restricted stock in Apple, netting $300 million in profit on stock sales on March 19, 2006, just a day after the Wall Street Journal first reported evidence of widespread backdating among U.S. corporations, the lawsuit points out.

Finally, even the impartiality of Apple’s internal review has come into question: Members of the special committee that oversaw the investigation — and more broadly, the board itself — have multiple potential conflicts of interest, the Merc points out.

What do VentureBeat readers think? How do you balance the tremendous benefits we get from having Jobs stay at Apple and continue to enrich our lives with things like the iPod (and iPhone, if it lives up to its hype), and the need for justice that lawsuits and — likely further investigations - are clamoring for?

(Illustration by Demetrios Psillos)

iLike.com, the iPod-compatible social networking and music discovery company we raved about previously has raised $13.3 million in financing from Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster will own a 25 percent stake in the company.

This makes a lot of sense for both sides. iLike needs cash to expand, and Ticketmaster is more than an investor. Ticketmaster will provide iLike users information about events where their favorite bands are playing, and then sell them tickets. Presumably, this is good for users, though to be honest, we’re always irked when Ticketmaster is the only way a venue offers tickets, because the fees are inevitably high.

Ticketmaster is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, which has been upgrading its efforts to merge its various properties at Ask City with local maps, events and reviews .

Ticketmaster’s investment includes an agreement to let engage iLike consumers “with deeply-integrated music and event discovery services intended to drive ticket sales,” according to the company’s announcement, to be released tomorrow.

Previous investors in iLike include Khosla Ventures and Bob Pittman.