AudioBoo, the audio blogging platform and iPhone app that was launched in private beta in January, is now freely available at the App Store. It’s one of 4iP’s first investments – backing Best Before Media’s development of AudioBoo, which lets users create and tag recordings which in effect produce a map of the world tagged with evocative sounds of each place.
Knocking about the AudioBoo.fm site, you can learn about White Day in Japan, listen to a German practising his guitar chords or any number of ‘boos’ that are the AudioBoo equivalent of “Testing, 1, 2, 3…” – and even those are surprisingly addictive.
Mark Rock, founder and CEO of Best Before, says the company will soon roll out plugins to allow WordPress users and other bloggers to embed their boos on their own sites, and will be publishing the API to encourage development of AudioBoo for other phones and mobile operating systems. Ultimately, the vision is for AudioBoo to be available for any internet-connected device that can record audio.
Dan Heaf at 4iP has blogged his hopes that AudioBoo will empower users to better create audio journalism or first person narratives, as well as making it easier to find this type of content on the web. Rock says Best Before is already in talks with a number of regional news organisations who see the potential for the tool in ultra-local news reporting.
The company’s still number crunching to determine the ideal mix of revenue streams; one proposal is a freemium approach where people using the free version would be capped at three minutes’ recording time, while those paying a monthly subscription would be able to record for up to an hour and attach multiple images to each file.
The next release of AudioBoo will allow users to store boos on their phones and cue recordings for later upload.