Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I want to take a moment to congratulate Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Rabble, and the rest on the launch of their new podcasting service, Odeo. I was fortunate enough to have gotten an early demo of their work, and I remain excited about it despite the recent entry of a certain larger player into their market (opinions here are my own, by the way). Here’s why:

• They’re working at the forefront of a really interesting space (at least to me): hybrid web/desktop applications. What they’ve created is mostly a web app, but it also has a desktop component that gets your podcast queue into iTunes. I think combinations like that are going to be increasingly common, and it will be interesting to see how web services like Odeo experiment with desktop integration.
• They’re very strong on the content creation side, and their whole goal is to make podcast publishing as uncomplicated as weblog publishing. Essentially, they’re trying to do for podcasting what Blogger did for weblogging: provide a simple, lowest common denominator, cross-platform publishing mechanism. To this end, they’ve built a recording studio that actually runs right in the browser and streams right to their server. I kid you not.
• They’ve also got some other intriguing ideas that I think could eventually make their service very attractive to content creators, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to mention them here (I’m perhaps a little too well trained in the “loose lips sink ships” department).
• The people who run it are really cool. Ev and Noah are both entrepreneurs in the best sense of the word: they’re adventurous, agile, very open to new ideas, and willing to take a very public approach to product development. For this reason, I expect to see Odeo change quickly as the medium evolves (Rabble’s post today seems to confirm this).

It may seem like Apple’s announcement of podcasting support in iTunes 4.9 makes them a competitor, but my hope (without knowing much about the implementation) is that it will actually make things easier for Odeo and allow them to concentrate on their core strengths. I’ll certainly be interested to see how things develop once iTunes 4.9 is out and Odeo has expanded beyond the initial round of invites!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.