Busy evening on the podcasting front: first came the inaugural show of a new weekly podcast, TalkCrunch. Given the highly recognizable brand, you won’t be surprised to listen to the audio extension of TechCrunch. The first show is about events and calendars, and you can subscribe to the feed here.

The second piece of news that I am delighted to relay is the Series A funding of PodTech.net, the podcast production company of John Furrier: the company just raised $5.5M (!!!) from US Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. Over the past year, John has tirelessly recorded and produced hundreds of shows with entrepreneurs, VCs, lawyers and senior executives – creating a market and a business model for himself and his growing team on both the consumer and the corporate side. It is not common for VC investments to get into content creation – traditionally a space where revenue multiples don’t exceed 3 … Read more »

MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako published a piece (free sub req’d) about podcast advertising, out of which a few nuggets of information are worth noting:

Podshow claims to have reached in Q405 their 2006 revenue target of $300 to $400K, and predicts sales in the millions of dollars this year. There seems to be a consensus that there’s money to be made by recycling established media in the podcast world, too. Michael Greeson, president of the Diffusion Group of Dallas, pointed out that NPR recorded 4 million downloads in the first two months it offered podcasts. Last summer, Greeson issued a research report projecting nearly 60 million people in the United States will be listening to podcasts by 2010. The report also estimated 15.5 million portable players would be sold last year; the tally was closer to 22 million. Cameron Reilly, the founder of the Podcast Network of Australia, is achieving between $40 and $100 cost-per-thousand on his podcasts, but … Read more »

Following the post of my buddy Rodrigo, and the rather acid comment I left there, I thought that I should spend some more time trying out Odeo. My initial 5 minutes on the product two days ago led me to think that it was a lot of hype and not much functionality – especially given that the podcast production bit is not available yet (more power to Eric Rice and audioblog.com).

I decided to try Odeo on my Tablet PC, which is running Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. Because of the automatic synchronization of WM10 playlists with my "scoblephone", the SMT5600, Odeo performs similarly to other iPodder implementations – except for the tagging aspect.The social networking functionality (i.e the ability to connect to friends and see what their subscriptions are) is definitely not straightforward to use, since I had to guess the usernames that my usual contacts (Ross, David,…) … Read more »