Wizzard going public

Podcasting host Wizzard Media has been approved to be listed on the American Stock Exchange... kind of the minor leagues of stock, but still a good sign for podcasting's growth as a business!

Professional podcast secrets

Ok, I don't know about secrets per se, but Michael Geoghegan is releasing a series of professional podcasting tips over on his blog. I plan to check them out... he's been a pretty big name in the business and assuredly has some interesting things to say.

Apple's offerings: 2008 MacWorld Keynote

I'm blogging this as we go along... here's Apple's new stuff as announced by elJobso this morning in San Francisco:

9:18 AM - Time Capsule, a new network attached storage device that merges the Airport Extreme with a big old hard drive. Wireless backups for your notebooks... $299/$499 (500GB/1TB)

9:22 AM -iPhone and iPod Touch get a a lot of new goodies, most notably the ability to find yourself on a Google map automatically. Nice feature. The Touch will now include a lot of apps from the iPhone, most notably Mail. Weird part? Apple's throwing in a $20 fee for upgrading current Touch owners... kind of surprising there.

9:36 AM - iTunes Store now offers rentals... most surprisingly it includes ALL studios, including Universal. Universal owns NBS and we all remember that they yanked TV shows from the iTunes Store this season. You have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. Movies are all transferable to iPods and iPhones. $2.99 for older titles and $3.99 for new titles. HD is also now available for a buck more.

9:44 AM - Apple TV Take 2 - an upgrade of the current allows movie and TV purchases & rentals from the screen. The YouTube offerings have increased as well (presumably for iPhone owners too). All purchases sync back to your computer. More HD podcasts as well... good news for those of you who jumped on this! Also new: Flickr integration. That's pretty nice... definite upgrades to a product that was coolly received so far. Existing owners get the new software for free, and new units ship in 2 weeks (with a price drop to $229).

10:08 AM - What we've all been waiting for (and by "we" I mean me) - the MacBook Air. Jobs describes it as the world's thinnest notebook... .16 inches thick at its narrowest point, .75 inches at its thickest (!?!). Fits in a manilla envelope. It has a backlit 13" LED display (that's lower power consumption... nice touch). The screen trackpad has multi-touch just like an iPhone too. It can be skinny because it's using iPod hard drives in it. "Ships with 80GB drive, option of 64GB SSD." So, not a notebook for storing a ton of stuff, but they didn't compromise on speed... its got a full Intel Core 2 Duo in there that's slower than the other MacBooks, but it's probably because it's 60% smaller than the ones in the MacBook line.

USB port and a headphone jack on one side, but no internal optical drive. Apple has an interesting new system that allows the MacBook Air to "borrow" an optical drive wirelessly from other Macs on network. External USB drives are available too for the people that need to spin a DVD or CD. 5 hour battery life... this sucker ships in 2 weeks... $1799.

MacWorld keynote tomorrow

What's in store for us tomorrow? The dribbles of rumors suggest some new hardware and perhaps even movie rentals, but the most intriguing bit of info comes from the sneak peeks at banners showing us that "There's something in the air." Lots of speculation from expanded wireless features to (get this) wireless charging of new notebooks. I think I agree with the good folks over at the Apple Blog: "I’m guessing no one really has a clue." We'll see... I plan on skipping a regularly scheduled meeting to follow a bunch of live-bloggers' accounts beginning tomorrow at noon ET/9 PT. Check back here on the blog for thoughts on the revelations...

Wizzard Media: Over 1 billion served

Amazing news today regarding podcasting... Wizzard Media, owner of LibSyn and other hosting platforms announced it served over 1 billion podcasts in 2007. This is (I believe) certified via their partnership with Nielson announced last September, so the numbers aren't inflated - an allegation that has dogged PodShow in the past year, rightly or wrongly. ("Perhaps it too topped a billion but was concerned that no one would believe them," writes Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.)

Rob Walch, Wizzard VP of podcaster relations had this to say to Podcasting News:

There is a lot of misguided talk about podcasting being dead. We just are not seeing it. We continue to see growth in the numbers each month. To us, at least, podcasting keeps growing.
* * *
We hope that 2008 will be the year that advertisers stop thinking of podcasting as an experiment, and start thinking of it as a necessity for every campaign.

Good news all around!

Best of CES

A lot of talk at CES this week about the battle over HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray (hint: go with Blu-Ray, it seems) and a lot of robots. Beyond that, I'd say the best product was one I first heard about on Leo Laporte's show a month ago, that's apparently one of those rare "too good to be true" things that actually delivers.

The Eye-Fi wireless SD card sits in your digital camera like any other storage card. However, it also automatically sends your photos via wi-fi to a host of storage sites like Flickr. Yeah, automatically... no syncing, no looking for that USB cable... nothing. I was skeptical when I first heard of this, but apparently it works like a charm.

Speech recognition meets the law

I am always interested in seeing technology poke its head into legal applications... check out this video where a young attorney figured out how to integrate voice recgonition software with templates for often-used forms he uses in his law practice. Wish I had that ten years ago!

CES this week

The Consumer Electronics Show is this week in Vegas... there's already been a lot said about Bill Gates' last keynote before the assembled masses as Microsoft CEO. The real feature is the new gear that gets announced. I'll filter through the announcements and give some thoughts here this week.