Podcasting Attracts Startups

The New York Times > Technology > For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting
The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web’s next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city’s Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting – the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

The guys behind Odeo are Evan Williams and Noah Glass, responsible for Blogger and AudioBlogger respectively. Seems like they may be up to something that looks to tie the various pieces of podcasting together, at least that’s what Dave Winer thinks. It is intersting to see all of this energy in this space even as I managed to push out ClassCaster.

Oh, but wait, I haven’t exactly explained ClassCaster yet. Well here’s the pitch: grab a phone, dial a number, record a lecture or an analysis of something for your class, hangup, go to your blog and listen to it. All done with Asterisk, VoicePulse DID, MetaWeblog API, and 67 lines of PERL. It is nice and it works. No it needs a pretty dress:) We’ll tie it to our database and offer it up to CALI members and release the idea into the wild…