jkOnTheRun » podcasting

10 Minutes with Om, a Short Podcast on Netbooks, Android and VoIP

Kevin C. Tofel — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:31:04 +0000

It’s been a while since I had a chance to chat with Om and it’s been even longer since he’s appeared in a video or audio podcast. Sounds like an opportunity to me, so we sat down and recorded a short podcast this weekend. In under 11 minutes, we quickly share thoughts on netbooks, Android and VoIP.

…

It’s great to see Om returning to non-writing venues and I think he had a good time. So much so, that he’s thinking of pulling in other GigaOM network editors for regular audio chats, which should be a treat. As I mentioned over on GigaOM, this first effort is plain and simple: no intro music and not too long, making it easy to digest. You can listen through the inline player above, or download the 9.9MB file directly here.

Wizzard Media acquires Libsyn

James Kendrick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:31:08 +0000

An announcement was made by Wizzard Media that will impact thousands of podcasters like us MobileTechRoundupers. The company announced it has acquired Liberated Syndication, known to podcasters as Libsyn. The Wizzard announcement states their intent is to improve content monetization and we’ll just have to see what they mean by that. Many podcasters use Libsyn’s free hosting service to dish out their podcasts to subscribers, although high traffic podcasts like MoTR have been paying for the service for quite some time. Here’s hoping they don’t change the service too much, Libsyn has been a rock solid solution for podcasters needing a good host. Full press release after the jump.

Wizzard Creates World’s Largest Podcasting Distribution Network

Company Also Announces Wizzard Media -
A New Division for High Growth Podcasting Business

PITTSBURGH – March 1, 2007 – Wizzard Software (OTCBB: WIZD) today announced that it has signed the final merger agreement for the acquisition of podcasting company Webmayhem, Inc., dba Liberated Syndication, which will create the largest podcasting distribution network in the world. Liberated Syndication (Libsyn), founded in 2004 by four entrepreneurs who posses a unique blend of technical acumen and experience in independent media, currently delivers almost two million audio and video shows per day to millions of consumers around the world.

As the first podcast distribution company to enter the commercial market, Liberated Syndication’s reputation has grown as quickly as its customer base, which now consists of nearly 6,000 independent and commercial producers of radio and television style Internet shows. In the month of January, these podcasting pioneers distributed an estimated 10 million hours of media programming and consistently one-third (33%) of the Top 25 podcasts across all categories in iTunes are Libsyn customers. Libsyn supported the growth of highly popular podcasts such as Tiki Bar TV, Grammar Girl, IndieFeed and Keith & the Girl. Liberated Syndication is also the podcasting service of choice for other high-profile programs such as 2008 presidential candidate Senator John Edwards, and provides custom business podcasting services (LibsynPRO) to many companies including NPR.

“We believe we are the first and only publicly-traded podcast broadcasting company, and now, by joining forces with Liberated Syndication, we are the largest podcasting network in the world,” said Chris Spencer, CEO of Wizzard Software. “Libsyn is considered the de facto leader in the podcasting distribution business and as we introduce our speech technologies to their services, we will be strategically positioned to maximize revenue generation for the shows we broadcast. Advertisers and consumers alike want relevant, focused advertisements, something clearly lacking in today’s digital media offerings, which can be accomplished using our combined technologies and skills.”

Additionally, the Company announced the launch of Wizzard Media (www.wizzardtv), a division for its thriving new media business. The acquisition and newly formed division solidifies Wizzard’s leadership position in the online media market, while creating important opportunities for the monetization of podcasting content – a marketplace necessity that is enormously beneficial to podcasters, advertisers and consumers, yet has not nearly reached its full potential. The new entity currently serves over 60 million downloads a month.

“Wizzard Media will be the catalyst for attracting sponsors and advertising opportunities for the shows we currently broadcast,” said Wizzard Media’s Dave Chekan, co-founder of Liberated Syndication. “Using speech recognition we can now match advertisers with very specific, engaging shows, catering to a wide variety of mainstream and niche markets. Applying our geographical targeting capabilities we can find strong, relevant advertising opportunities for local businesses in addition to national brands, a significant revenue generating opportunity for Wizzard and for our content producers.”

Wizzard first entered the podcasting market by acquiring Switchpod.com in September of 2006, soon followed by the acquisition of Blast Podcast. Switchpod.com currently broadcasts a highly successful podcast for Harvard Extension School – Computer Science, Learn Spanish (which recently hit the 1,000,000 download mark), Rip Curl and many others. Switchpod distributes a top notch collection of classic audio books which rank as some of the most popular educational podcasts on iTunes.

Founded in 1995, Wizzard’s roots are in the speech technology application development market. In the coming months, the Company expects to integrate text-to-speech and speech recognition services into the Wizzard Media Network: Liberated Syndication, Switchpod and Blast Podcast. These new features will provide podcast creators with powerful tools for comprehensive search engine indexing as well as transcription and blogging integration.

Currently, podcasts are enjoyed by consumers around the world while at their computer, while exercising with their iPods, on flights, at the beach, in their cars and with the introduction of Apple TV, while sitting at home in their living room. With the smashing success of the iPod and other MP3 players, consumers can now watch and listen to podcasts where they want, when they want. Podcasting’s ability to reach highly targeted audiences is a very appealing proposition for both national and local advertisers. eMarketer predicted in February 2007 that podcast advertising and sponsorship spending will reach $240M in 2008. As one third of the top podcasts in their respective categories in iTunes are broadcast by a Wizzard Media company, management strongly believes that Wizzard Media is uniquely positioned to capture a significant portion of that projected spending as it works with show producers to fill an estimated 10 millions hours of monthly programming.

Disclaimer: The binding, enforceable merger agreement provides for Wizzard to issue stock and cash to the Webmayhem stockholders in exchange for all outstanding shares of Webmayhem. After the close of this material acquisition, Webmayhem will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Wizzard. Completion of the Webmayhem acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, which will be discussed in a Current Report on Form 8-K that Wizzard will file with the Securities and Exchange Commission no later than Monday, March 5th, 2007.

Apple, iTunes, Apple TV and iPod are all trademarks or trade names owned by Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: APPL)

About Wizzard Media
Wizzard Media is the world’s largest podcasting distribution company. Podcasts are a means for independent and professional content creators to publish audio and video shows for the world to enjoy over the Internet or on mp3 players, such as the Apple iPod. Podcasting is a relatively new phenomenon, but Wizzard Media collectively serves an impressive 60 million podcast downloads per month through media aggregators like Apple’s iTunes and other podcast directories. For more information, please visit www.wizzard.tv. Wizzard Media is a division of Wizzard Software (OTCBB: WIZD), a leader in speech technology development.

Mobility Site Minute podcast: tech news in five minutes

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 15:54:22 +0000

Don’t have time to listen to a lengthy podcast today? No problem; just hit up the new Mobility Site Minute podcast hosted by Chris Leckness. I spoke with Chris on the phone yesterday and he shared his reasons for the new tech podcast. Chris realizes that it can be hard to find the time to listen to a podcast that goes for an hour or more. It’s also time consuming to produce and schedule a podcast with multiple hosts so Chris decided to host a five minute tech podcast by himself.

I just listened to the first two episodes in the time it took to write this post, so if you’re looking for a quick dose of mobile tech news, you’ll want to check this out. Here are direct links to the first two shows; if you’re a Google Reader user like I am now, you can simply stream the brief audio show within the RSS aggregator:

HearHere demos at DEMO

James Kendrick — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 20:43:28 +0000

The DEMO conference was held last week while I was working hard in Boston and one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of the conference is the HearHere podcast searching tool. HearHere lets you type in a search term for something you want to find in a podcast so you can zoom right to the topic that interests you. Take a look at the cool video demo and you’ll see why as a podcaster I am excited about HearHere.

Now I know that our listeners always hang on every word in every podcast but this is still very cool technology because it means that HearHere is converting the speech to text in the background somehow.

Mobility Guys interview Tyler Welch; Microsoft MVP Lead

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:59:22 +0000

Chris, Jack and Steve have a great podcast interview on episode number eight of Mobility Guys. Tyler Welch, a Microsoft MVP lead, answers questions on the Microsoft MVP program, which I found to be extremely interesting. The conversation turns towards DRM as Tyler’s favorite device of late is the iRiver Clix digital audio player. Great stuff and worth the listen!

-kct

Mobility Guys Podcast: must have mobile software and just blame James

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:40:57 +0000

Those Mobility Guys are back with podcast number seven. This ep is great roundtable of must-have software for your mobile device, ranging from utilities to remote connectivity and RSS readers. The best part (in my humble opinion of course) is when James gets completely blamed for Jack’s Motion LS800 purchase! What a troublemaker that James is…. Oh, and speaking of RSS readers, don’t miss Greg Smith as a special guest; he developed one of my favorite mobile RSS readers: FeederReader. Download and check it out…

-kct

Minnesota University uses Tablets and Podcasting for class

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:07:59 +0000

I thought I was cool in college with a scientific calculator (I wasn’t), but Saint Mary’s University really puts me to shame. The school has adopted several mobile technology methods which extend learning far beyond the classroom. SMU just signed a three-year agreement with Tegrity for the Tegrity Campus service that provides the framework for the technology. Faculty will use Tegrity Capture along with a Tablet PC or a Tegrity digital pen and notebook and the class lectures are then made available as podcasts for students to watch and listen to on their iPods. According to students who piloted the system, over two-thirds of them believe that it helped them in the learning process.

I’m all for the time-shifting of the class lectures, but now that they can place-shift them too, I’d expect the local bars and clubs to be quite the centers for educational excellence.

-kct

HHB FlashMic- podcasting in the field made easy

James Kendrick — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 16:06:19 +0000

So you are a budding podcaster, longing to record those bits of brilliance in the field. Maybe conduct interviews of your cat, capture the wit of your neighbors sitting on their back deck. HHB has you covered with the FlashMic, a high-quality microphone with a gig of memory that makes the mic a self-contained recording solution on the run. A recording time of up to 18 hours and a USB port for downloading direct to your PC makes the FlashMic very powerful indeed. It does all this on just 2 AA batteries. Of course, the price of GBP700 may put this out of the budget of most of us.

(HHB via Stuff)

Podcasting for beginners

James Kendrick — Sat, 20 May 2006 15:04:51 +0000

Podcasts are everywhere now that they have a home on the iTunes Music Store but even so there are many people who are unfamiliar with them. I found a great “introduction to podcasts” article from the Irish Times that explains the history and ins and outs of podcasts and podcasting in clear terms. If you have been wanting to find out more about podcasts check out the article, appropriately titled POD PEOPLE.

-jk

AudioBay- podcasting on the Pocket PC

James Kendrick — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 15:06:40 +0000

AcroDesign Technologies Launches New AudioBay, Introducing Podcasting to the Pocket PC

AudioBay offers a complete podcasting solution for Pocket PCs—from recording to hosting

Colchester, VT, USA (March 16, 2006) — AcroDesign Technologies today released the AudioBay Podcasting application for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs. AudioBay provides everything needed to publish a podcast from a Pocket PC. Within a few minutes, users can record a podcast episode using the Pocket PC’s built-in recorder and upload it to the Web over a wireless Internet connection for immediate access by the public.

Podcasting is the preparation and distribution of audio files for download to desktops and digital multimedia players, such as the iPod. AudioBay makes this process simple and mobile: users can record podcasts from anywhere and the software saves the audio in a file and then uploads it to the AcroDesign Technologies’ hosting service. As soon as the podcast is uploaded it will be available to the public as an RSS feed to download and play on desktop PCs or mobile MP3 players.

“We are excited to release the first software to allow mobile users to create and publish podcasts,” said Scott Thibault, president and founder of AcroDesign Technologies. “Podcasting offers a great new way to connect with an audience and has already become a major tool for communication. AudioBay enables anyone to become a broadcaster with their own portable recording studio.”

“AudioBay is an integrated solution that let my students use their Pocket PCs to speak to the world,” said Mark Frydenberg, professor of Bentley College’s intensive Introduction to Information Technology course, where students use Pocket PCs to learn about technology. “Our students served as beta-testers of AudioBay, providing them an opportunity to experiment with podcasting and for AcroDesign to gain valuable feedback about their product.”

AudioBay retails for $24.95 and is available immediately from www.voiceatom.com.

Earthcore now available on the iTunes Music Store

James Kendrick — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:01:17 +0000

Author Scott Sigler first made news when he decided to release his book EarthCore as a weekly podcast last year. Sigler produced the audio book himself and released it a few chapters at a time via podcast and garnered 10,000 subscribers. The innovative author has now achieved a “second first” by putting the audio novel on the iTunes Music Store. The entire 20 episode audio book can be purchased from iTunes for $9.99 and it will be interesting to see how well this sells. It could pave the way for other authors to self-publish in audio format.

(via iPod Observer)

iTunes loses podcasts?

James Kendrick — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:41:45 +0000

Todd Cochrane of GeekNewsCentral posted about some comments he received from several podcasters claiming their shows no longer show up in iTunes searches. I can attest to this as neither the OnTheRun with Tablet PCs nor the jkOnTheRun Audio Edition podcasts are showing up in any iTunes searches as of this past week. The shows were turning up properly in searches until last week when they just dropped off the map. The shows are still available in iTunes but only accessible via a direct link from the outside. It seems to me this goes against the claims Apple made when first launching podcast support in iTunes. Now the only shows that regularly show up in searches are either professional podcasts or commercial ventures. Once again the little guy gets knocked out of circulation which is sad, but usually the case. I’d like to here from other podcasters who have any information to add about this.

Auto-transcribing podcasts?

James Kendrick — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 05:53:39 +0000

I think it would be really cool if someone could come up with a way to automatically derive written transcriptions from podcasts. This would work similar to speech recognition programs but it needs to be speaker independent to be effective, kind of like closed-captioning used by TV stations. The purpose for producing written transcripts would be two-fold- make podcasts available to those in the community who are deaf and unable to access the information shared in the many podcasts now available and to make the shows searchable once the transcripts are published.

I would love to hear from those in a position who have thoughts about possible solutions that could be used from existing technology. I am willing to work with anyone using any of the podcasts I produce as a test case, with the hope of eventually using this on a wide range of podcasts. Please contact me if you have any ideas along these lines, or post a comment here. Let’s see what we can come up with as a community effort.

Please, don’t call them vlogs

James Kendrick — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:40:16 +0000

Now that we are starting to see video podcasts becoming more commonplace there is confusion on what to call them. A term I see used a lot is vlog and I really hope this term doesn’t stick. I mean, how do you pronounce it, vee-log or valog? Either way sounds just plain silly to me. Blog sounds like a real word but vlog never will. Another term that affects me like fingernails on a chalkboard is vblog. We don’t call audio podcasts ablogs so why call videos vblogs? The word just sounds goofy to me. The only term I’ve heard used that sounds OK to me is vidcasts. That kind of fits along with the whole podcast thing and makes sense to me. Of course, I’m open to good alternatives if anyone has some ideas.

jkOnTheRun- My most used applications

James Kendrick — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:43:57 +0000

I get a lot of email and IMs from friends and readers asking which applications I use and recommend to others. In the course of a normal day I tend to use a lot of programs depending on the task at hand so my list is pretty long. I do not use every program every day but each program is important to me when I need it. I figured it a good time to list my most used applications here on jkOnTheRun so here is the list. Not all of these programs are Tablet PC specific so I have indicated the programs that are for those without Tablets. The list is in no particular order so the top of the list is not necessarily more important to me than the bottom. I’m not going to provide links for each of these, Google will find them very quickly.

Outlook/ TEO– I live in Outlook all day for email, schedules, time billing, etc. TEO adds full ink capability to all areas in Outlook and I consider it part of it.
OneNote– the second most used program I have
SnagIt!– simply the best screen capture program on any platform
KnockOut– free utility that kills Outlook and Word instantly if they fail to shut down, which is often
Skype– can you hear me now?
Onfolio– RSS reader and information collection tool, very good
BlogJet– my preferred blogging tool, works with most major blog engines
True Launch Bar– turns the Windows taskbar into something truly useful
Snipping Tool (Experience Pack)– Tablet PC only, captures anything on the screen with the pen
Ink Crossword–Tablet PC only, just what it says
iTunes– my default music player and podcatcher/ player
Adobe Acrobat– I do a lot of work with PDFs
Internet Explorer– Firefox who?
Audacity– free audio recorder, editor and mixer
Zinio– digital magazine reader, one of the best things you can put on a Tablet PC
eReader Pro– ebook reader
FTP Commander– free FTP client
WinDVD– DVD player app
Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator)– good for using those spare resources
MindManager Pro– best mind mapping program on any platform, outstanding on a Tablet PC
Mixcast Live– audio mixer program, best way to record Skype calls
Norton AntiVirus– resource hog but works very well
Outback Plus– back up the entire Outlook/ IE/ Firefox environment with one click
Outlook Express– I use this for my newsgroup program
Quickbooks Premium– professional accounting package
Karen’s Replicator– free directory copy/ replicator program
SkypeHeadset– lets me use my cell phone Bluetooth headset with Skype on my Tablet PC
Sonic RecordNow– came with my dual layer DVD burner, is the only way to record dual layer with this drive
Windows Media Player– version 10
Send to OneNote 2003 (Education Pack)– Tablet PC only, excellent utility for sending stuff to OneNote as background for inking
MS Word– for final drafts
MS PowerPoint– slides, slides, slides
MS Excel– I use this a lot, I spreadsheet everything
ActiveWords– shortcut extraordinaire
Ink Pad for ActiveWords– Tablet PC only, Tabletizes ActiveWords
Time Meter for Outlook– time and billing for consultants, works within Outlook
MS Publisher– I mainly make my business cards with it
Norton PartitionMagic– slice and dice hard drives easily
Perfect Disk– my favorite disk defragger
hdi– little hard disk indicator light that sits in the system tray for those systems lacking one

Apple is trademarking iPodcast

James Kendrick — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 23:39:28 +0000

Apple Insider reported today that Apple has made two filings to tradmark the term “iPodcast”. This might be carrying the trademark / patent thing too far since Apple only recently jumped on the podcast bandwagon but we’ll see. The really cheeky part of the filings are the two descriptions Apple used to apply for the trademark in the US Patent and Trademark Office:

”computers, computer peripherals, hand held computers, computer terminals, personal digital assistants, electronic organizers, electronic notepads, apparatus for recording, transmission and reproduction of sounds, images, or other data; magnetic data carriers.”

“telecommunications services; communication by computer, computer intercommunication; telex, telegram and telephone services; rental, hire and leasing of communications apparatus and of electronic mailboxes; electronic bulletin board services,”