Sarah West at Westminster College sent over this interesting article on podcasting in higher education.  The article reads a little like a whitepaper but the content is interesting. Podcasting is changing the face of education. In the next year, Westminster will be introducing an interesting podcast initiative in the online education space. Stay tuned for more details.

Speaking of education, Podango is sponsoring the 2007 TechED event being held on March 25th through 28th at the Ontario Conference Center. We’ll have more details on this show as it approaches.  

We want to thank the guys at Culture Catch for their hospitality and for allowing us to exhibit at the Culture Catch Salon in San Francisco. We had a great time and met a lot of great people.

Culture Catch will be exhibiting at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Podango will be there with Culture Catch as well (more info to come on that). We’re excited to hang out with you guys again.

Click here for pictures of Mac World and the Culture Catch Salon.

by Lee Gibbons, CEO

Having just returned home from Macworld 2007, I have to tell you, I had a blast, learned a ton, and came home with serious gadget envy! What a great show! I met some wonderful new friends, had great meetings with some amazingly loyal and fun old friends, and sat through another jaw-dropping Steve Jobs keynote. The iPhone rocks! I want one so badly I cry every time my phone rings. It is really going to change the way we think about phones, and I think it is just the beginning of this paradigmatic shift.

I, of course, didn’t get my hands on “the phone, ” but David Pogue did. He is a great journalist and does a super job of describing the phone in his NYT blog post.

Check it out! You will want one, too. Keep your Kleenex handy!

by Lee Gibbons, CEO

I am going to do a little recommending from time to time, when I find content on Podango that i feel is really worth some extra attention. There is a terrific interview on Roger Merrill’s Leadership Place station titled, Marketing Without Trust: Stephen M. R. Covey with Steve Rubel, Senior VP, Edelman, the largest independent, global PR firm.

If you have interest in new media and marketing, you definitely want to check it out here.

if you find pop culture interesting, as I do, you will also want to check out the new Culture Catch Arts & Entertainment station that we have launched during Macworld, here. Dusty, Richard, welcome to Podango!

by Lee Gibbons, CEO

If you haven’t seen Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness, please do.

by Lee Gibbons, CEO

With the coming of a new year, there invariably comes introspection and self assessment. Did the passing year hold in it the fulfillment of what was hoped and anticipated at the beginning of the prior year? As I look back over this past year, I marvel at the things that have transpired. This post will, while striving for brevity, enumerate a few of the things accomplished in ‘06 and look ahead to ‘07.

In ‘06, Doug and I quit our day jobs and formed Podango. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the many top podcasters who coached and taught us so much about what Podango need to be and not be in order to succeed.

We formed a remarkable team of professionals who are visionary and scrappy enough to be called top flight entrepreneurs and who also possess the business savvy and execution of seasoned information and entertainment industry professionals. I feel so fortunate to be surrounded by such excellence.

The early part of the year was all about figuring out who and what we wanted Podango to be. By mid summer, we had a solid nucleus of developers and plans for a September launch at The Podcasting and Portable Media Expo. The build out of version 1 of the site was adequate for a successful launch, and the Podcasting Unconference launch event could not have gone better. We got “crunched” by Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch guys twice and picked up by some bloggers and podcasters who have become true and honest friends, whose voices, both spoken and written, have continued to spur us on and challenge us to improve.

The measurable result is that by year end, we have signed far more stations than our initial forecasts called for, and continue to get requests from leading podcasters to learn more and sign up as station directors. We look forward to seeing some of them come on board in the new year. Stay tuned for these announcements on the News tab and highlighting of them here in this Blog.

The recent formal establishment of a strategic advisor relationship with Scott Bourne is a great example of the type of quality alliances we began to put in place toward the end of the year and that we will continue to foster in the new year.

Looking forward, ‘07 will be the year of our adolescence and growth. We will add new, maturing features that put us in the hunt as far as the podcasting industry having good reason to consider Podango as a key resource in the delivery of their content. You will see new and unique podcasting models and revenue generation opportunities that we look forward to extending to the thousands of capable and exciting podcasters who may benefit from these new tools and capabilities.

We will also continue to be aggressive in our business development efforts. Most importantly, the Podango family will continue to grow: We will add more exciting, entertaining, and educational stations, driven by passionate thought leaders within niche markets. We will also continue to grow our terrific team. As of the first week of January, we are adding Lisa Johnson and Dave Brady, two proven players, who will help us on the marketing and software development fronts. We welcome them and feel like they continue the standard of excellence we have insisted upon in every hire we have made to date.

Finally, you will also see a change to this blog. We are going to invite any of our employees who wish to blog to post here.They will post about their particular view point on Podango, new media, podcasting, vidcasting, advertising, etc. It should be fun. We have some really interesting people whose voices, we expect, will add significantly to the authenticity, quality and volume of usefule information you will continue to receive when you follow our blog. We love what Dave Sifrey and the team at Technorati have done with their blog, and we will gradually be adjusting our blog to be that cool and functional with our own twist. Any suggestings you have for how to make it better, please post comments.

Well, I don’t want to get too longe winded here. I hope you sense the excitement Doug and I feel as this new year begins.

And, with that bit of grateful swagger and humble hope, we set off on 2007, and we wish you a very…

Happy New Year!