Frank Gruber (Somewhatfrank TV), the organizer of Tech Cocktail in DC last week, has posted up some video of an interview with our own Greg Gershman. Enjoy.
It's a busy several days for the team at Odeo. On Wednesday evening, I participated in a panel discussion on "Startups" at the Refresh DC monthly event. Our 5 member panel consisiting of local entreprenuers attempted to enlighten the group of about 60 or attendees on topics such as funding vs. bootstrapping, developing your idea (sharing or secret), when/who to hire, and some "lessons learned". It was an enjoyable time and I hope that we provided some valuable insight to those looking to bring more Web 2.0 opportunities to the area. Thanks to the team at Viget Labs for organizing and moderating the event.
On Thursday evening, Greg Gershman and I were given the opportunity to demo the new Odeo Beta site for the crowd at Tech Cocktail in DC. The event was very well attended and the 1223 Club in DC was packed. Thanks to Frank Gruber (somewhatfrank.com) for putting on a great event and allowing us to showcase.
Starting today, our VP of Products, Josh Kinberg will be hanging out at Podcamp NY for the weekend. This is a packed event and we are looking forward to another opportunity to showcase the new Odeo beta site. If you are at the event, look us up for a demo of the new site and an invite to the private beta.
Just a quick entry to show you a screenshot of the video players that are under development.
In about 2-3 weeks, we will have a custom player for flash, quicktime and silverlight based video content complete with share, embed, etc. functionality.
For many of you, it's been a long, frustrating wait for the Studio's audio recording feature to be fixed and the upload process stabilized. Now, thanks to the diligent efforts of Greg and Caffo (from the Odeo team), it's now back online.
I am happy to report that we identified both the problem with random uploads not completing and also the recording bug. Of course, there could yet be something that we missed. Please, if you use the Studio and have issues, do not hesitate to open a ticket and/or drop an email to me.
Many beta testers of the new site have asked "where's the Studio?". For the near term, the Studio will exist as a micro site as it is now while our longer term plan is to embed the Studio functions directly into the new site with specific customizations for producers vs. viewers. Also planned for refresh is the "sendmeamessage" and hellodeo.com functions into the set of tools that allow viewers and producers to interact.
Since pictures speak louder than words, I thought that I would just post a quick blog to show producers what they will be capable of doing in the new Odeo site. The customization below took all of 15-20 min and I am sure that someone with more artistic talent will be able to do even more.
In addition to editing the website link, show description, thumbnail image, copyright, etc. you can also customize the look of your page. Your options are: 1) Upload a 920x90 banner 2) Choose from 6 pre-defined background/text/link color templates or 3) Create your own custom colors with HTML color codes
Here's a shot of an unclaimed, raw channel:
With just a few minutes of work (I used a color dropper to pull colors from the images), your page could look something like this:
It's been a little while since I've posted an update about the progress on the new Odeo site. The team here at Odeo has been extremely busy and pressing hard to launch the new site very soon. One thing that our existing users should find comforting -- the new site is based on a completely new architecture and the crawler/indexer is much more robust system. The feed update issues that have plagued us with the existing system will shortly be a thing of the past.
On to the good stuff...
As we are getting closer to completion of many of the core features of the site, we have started to extend beta invites to more and more users. Over the past week, we granted about 1000 invites to the new site and we expect to continue this process throughout the month. If you haven't registered, get your invite by following the link on the old site, if you have already registered but haven't been granted access, hang in there and watch your inbox.
I wanted to show a couple shots of some of the recent progress that we have been making on the site. There are two major improvements that I wanted to show since the last update. First, the revised search page. Now, when you type in a search term that appears in the podcast show title, you will get that show listed in the top section and where the search term exists in an episode description, you will be shown specific episodes results. This is very handy for finding all of the shows by a particular producer. (ex. - NPR, CNET, ESPN, ABC, etc).
The other exciting news is the beginning of the "Dashboard" concept. This is our first iteration and provides the beginning of an "activity stream" for your subscriptions. As features develop within the site, more types of updates will be added and the ability to subscribe to your activity stream and get updates in real time via services such as Twitter are also planned. Below is a snaphot of my dashboard on the new site.
Finally, we are getting ready to deploy the new audio player within the site and the first of the updated player widgets. Here's a shot of the new audio player:
The next majore milestone is the migration of the existing user accounts/subscriptions into the new database and the implementation and testing of the migration of existing channel links so that when we do cut over, your exsting channel links will still work and your user account preferences will be preserved.
Thanks again for all of your support for Odeo. We are very excited about the new site and I can't wait to finally get it into production.
We are excited to announce the acquisition of blog search engine Blogdigger! Blogdigger was one of the first sites to build a search engine for blogs by aggregating content from RSS feeds. Greg has been working with us as a consultant during the design and development phase of Odeo's new website and we are excited to have Blogdigger's technology powering Odeo's search and content aggregation engine. More importantly, we are happy that Greg has chosen to join our team as Vice President of Search and Engineering.
In addition to his engineering background, Greg (along with his wife Penny) are avid podcasters; Greg is also a Baltimore native, which is good as it helps Odeo build up our east coast/DC presence in addition to our west coast team.
Be sure to check out Odeo's new beta site as we prepare to launch the new site in April.
