Plotting The Trajectory

(from the Social Customer Manifesto, www.socialcustomer.com)

Being that I spend a fair amount of time attempting to read the tea leaves of where particular companies are going, was listening with interest to today’s Daily Source Code podcast, where Adam Curry showed a bit of leg with respect to his new venture, PodShow.com. The PodShow team is addressing three separate groups of users or, if you will, customers of the service — listeners, advertisers and podcasters themselves.

One piece that was connected was with respect to the last group, the podcasters. Remembering back a few weeks ago, around the 26th of January, Adam was talking quite a bit about a technology he was calling the “CastBlaster.”

Adam says, “I’m still working on the CastBlaster I mentioned in the Source Code. I’ve updated the test feed again. This is really cool, I drop an mp3 into a folder on my desktop and the rest happens automagically!”

Let’s go out and take a look at who owns the CastBlaster.com domain. Interesting. It was registered on 8 December 2004 by none other than Adam’s partner in PodShow, Ron Bloom.

Tracing backward, it’s apparent Adam and Ron realized that for their customer base, an easy and trivial method of creating and distributing podcasts was going to be imperative to their success. So, they listened to what they were hearing, and tested it themselves first.

If I were one to wager, I would bet an easy to use facility, and perhaps even an easy to use desktop client or browser plug in based on the CastBlaster concept will be a part of their new venture. What do you think?

The following bit is for everyone listening in on the podcast:

“By the way, if it seems as if my voice has changed a bit since the last time we had a chance to chat, we are currently experimenting with one of the automated speech generation technologies we’ve found. Would love any feedback you might have on this method of distributing information. Thank you!”