More Insight into Odeo Sale
A few weeks back I was meandering around the Baltimore Craigslist gigs board and came across a posting for a Ruby on Rails position for “a newly funded startup in the Audio/Video Podcasting Arena,” which piqued my interest. The ad states that the startup “will be acquiring a very large presence in the Audio Podcasting space,” and many of the details seemed to point to Odeo, so I was suspicious that Odeo had found a new home. After reading today’s announcement of Odeo’s sale to SonicMountain, it was confirmed.
As for the future plans for Odeo, the ad mentions:
We are going to be enhancing the site with video podcasting and podcast hosting features as well as a patent-pending search system for audio, video and podcast content. The search development is being performed by a company under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and we have used offshore development for the video conversion engine (.mp3, .mp4, .mov, etc) into Flash (.flv), a custom flash player and the CC billing module for hosting and the podcast hosting / management engine.
Sounds interesting; I think there’s definitely room for a more complete solution for podcast hosting and metrics; I currently use a combination of Ourmedia.org, FeedBurner, Podtrac and Performancing Metrics; if there were a way to tie some or all of that together, it would be very interesting.
And very interesting to me is that the contact listed on the ad is based in Baltimore; the question is: Is Odeo coming to Maryland?
Meanwhile, Odeo itself has been stagnating for a while; I use their podcast player widget for a podcast I do with my wife, and despite my best efforts (pinging, etc.), Odeo hasn’t updated in about two months. Hopefully the new owners can revive the site.