“This moment has been a long time in the making,” said Douglas G. Smith, president, Podango. “We have been working hard under the radar to bring podcast solutions to market that we believe will dramatically improve the online and offline experience for the growing number of podcast listeners. We also believe it will greatly enhance monetization opportunities for podcasters and business people looking to leverage the growing podcasting market.”
Podango Services
Services provided by Podango available as a beta include: Castback™— encourages community involvement by providing a simple way for listeners to record their comments about a podcasts and provide it as part of future podcasts. Podcast Surf™— allows podcast listeners to see and interact with their content. Podcast Surf is supported by a Web page that is automatically created as a companion to the podcasts distributed for every station, showing the podcasts related to each day’s programming. The Podcast Surf page contains a transcription of each podcast, relevant links and references for the important names, places, people, terms, sites, and vendors mentioned in a podcast. It also contains instant access to the community forum, Castbacks, and ratings for each podcast. Transcriptions—Text transcriptions of podcasts are provided to Station Directors by Podango to greatly increase visitors from search engines, listening from those visitors, and ease on content usage through links. Marketing—Podango’s marketing services help Station Directors build their audiences through several co-op marketing programs including search engine keyword buys, email programs, affiliate relationships, press releases, blog mentions, natural search engine optimization, sponsor and strategic partner links, and home page spotlighting. Search Engine Optimization—Podango's site structure and marketing helps Station Directors aggregate textual content for Podcast Stations and format it so that search engine spiders give higher page rankings. The overall Podango domain traffic and partner links also add to page rankings.
Advertising—provides the tools to profile audiences, measure listenership, and promote ad spot opportunities to a growing set of advertisers.
The Podango Dashboard—The Dashboard gives Station Directors the key metrics they need to in an easy to understand format. The dashboard is constantly updated with marketing, customer, and revenue metrics that can be displayed in daily, weekly, monthly and annual views. Easy Payment System—handles all the payment side of the business including, collecting revenues, distributions of funds to partnering podcasters, receipts from sponsors, fees from the affiliate program or the payments for traffic generation activities. Payment is a PayPal-style fund distribution system that allows Station Directors to monitor results and activate decisions from the Dashboard.
Podcasting Momentum
Podcasting is a new and exciting market that personalizes the distribution of audio and video information. The term “podcast” comes from combining the terms “iPod,” the name of the world’s most popular MP3 player—the Apple iPod, and the term “broadcast.” Podcasts are delivered or broadcasted to listeners’ personal computers and MP3 devices such as the Apple iPod. The rapid acceptance of digital audio devices like the Apple iPod is rapidly fueling the demand for digital audio music and spoken-word content. Apple has sold over 100 million iPods to date. In addition, Microsoft has just announced entrance into this device market with the upcoming Zune product line being released under the XBox brand. These two giants will increase the pace of the feature and value race further driving acceptance and demand for these devices and therefore the content that is played on them.
About TechCrunch
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About Podango
Podango, a Web 2.0 company, enables rich community conversations by integrating the “live conversations” of blogging and community forums with the rich communication value of audio and video podcasts to create a complete online and offine experience. The company provides a complete platform that allows the creation of podcast stations, independently owned and run by Station Directors who act as guides, to bring together the best podcasts in their focused area of interest and interact and converse with their subscribers. Each station distributes multiple podcasts and includes community intereaction tools to enable an enhanced community conversation. In addition, the listener can tailor the information they subscribe to, via a custom RSS feed, to participate in the information most relevant to them. For more information, visit www.podango.comor email info@podango.com. ###
Contact:
pr@podango.com | 
