Odeo, a podcast directory founded in 2005 by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame that was acquired by SonicMountain over a year ago, has relaunched with a completely new design and slew of features. The biggest addition to the site is video. Odeo now features millions of syndicated audio and video episodes aggregated from over 500,000 channels. Odeo has partnered with major content publishers like Revision3 and NextNewNetworks, and Blip.tv to fill its catalog. Odeo has also improved its social side by enabling users to create profile pages, subscribe to preferred channels, and create playlists. Users can browse by keyword or category to get recommendations, leading to better content discovery. Users can also share content via email or embed it into blogs and social networks. → Read More
If you know who FireAnt is, you either love podcasts or you’re a long time reader of this blog. The company built up a cult following in 2005 and 2006 as the podcast directory and player, and competed head on with Evan Williams’ Odeo for mindshare and users. FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000, they companies will announce today. Not the old Odeo, but Sonic Mountain, which renamed itself Odeo after acquiring it earlier this year. For less than $2 million, Sonic Mountain has now put two of the more well know podcasting brands together under one roof. The acquired assets include FireAnt’s technology, particularly their desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata. Founder Josh Kinberg joins Odeo to lead product development and integration of the Odeo and FireAnt technology. Everything will be branded Odeo from here on out, so take a good look at that screenshot. If you are a FireAnt user, it will be changing significantly soon. → Read More
FireAnt released some impressive and beautiful software earlier today. The company first launched in January 2005 with a downloadable Mac client that allowed users to aggregate video blog content and watch and/or download it to a device. A Windows client was relased in May 2005, which includes the ability to transcode video from the original source into the specific formats needed for different devices. Until now, the FireAnt site was basically where you went to download the client. Today FireAnt released new versions of the clients. But they also released a website service that is totally awesome. The FireAnt site is now a full videoblogging directory that allows users to tag and rate videoblogs, subscribe to feeds and queue them up for watching or downloading. You can also watch any videoblog directly on the website in its original file format (this last point is important). The website and clients fully syncronize, so any videoblogs added or removed from your que on the site will automatically sync up with the client (users may use the website at work, and have the client installed at home along with their PSP, video iPod or other device). The result is an extremely versatile, file-type-agnostic videoblogging ecosystem. A tool like this was needed to allow videoblogging to expand to more users. FireAnt works closely with other videoblogging services like Mefeedia (a directory and aggregator) and Blip.tv (a service which, among other things, provides a great platform for videobloggers to host their content) to ensure that they are all launching compatible platform and application services. This coopetition is good for the industry. Let’s see how long it can last. FireAnt has relocated from New York to San Francisco. Joshua Kinberg and Jay Dedman are the founders (there are seven or so employees now). Jay also worked with Mefeedia founder Peter Van Dijk to form the first video blogging email list before either company was founded. They are now tracking nearly 5,000 legitimate video blogs…up from only a handful a year ago. → Read More
