Odeo, a podcast directory founded in 2005 by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame that was acquired by SonicMountain over a year ago, has relaunched with a completely new design and slew of features.

The biggest addition to the site is video. Odeo now features millions of syndicated audio and video episodes aggregated from over 500,000 channels. Odeo has partnered with major content publishers like Revision3 and NextNewNetworks, and Blip.tv to fill its catalog.

Odeo has also improved its social side by enabling users to create profile pages, subscribe to preferred channels, and create playlists. Users can browse by keyword or category to get recommendations, leading to better content discovery. Users can also share content via email or embed it into blogs and social networks.

In addition to the content partnerships, Odeo has joined up with a startup called MatchMine to use its MatchKey service. MatchKey is a partner network that takes users’ preferences and distributes them across a network of sites to enable better personalized recommendations.

Odeo is currently working to bring back an upgraded version Odeo’s Studio, its free in-browser podcast recording service (we weren’t impressed with the old version). Its new development team will also add features like the ability to sync with portable devices and comment on videos and audio files. FireAnt, another podcast directory that competed with Odeo before getting acquired by it, was best-known for its desktop media player. Odeo has plans to bring back this player as well and distribute it as a white-labeled media player for enterprises.

We first covered Odeo in June 2005 when it was still in private beta. After about a year of struggling with competitors (most notably Apple’s iTunes), Williams launched a now-well-known startup, then called Twttr, in July 2006.

In September 2006, Williams bought Odeo back from its investors and started a new company called Obvious. Under Obvious, Williams held both Odeo and Twitter as wholly-owned subsidiaries. Odeo was then put up for sale in February 2007 and sold at a loss to Sonic Mountain a few months later. SonicMountain proceeded to acquire FireAnt and Blogdigger, a blog search engine. Odeo has since raised $2.5 million from private investors, and this is the first improvement we’ve seen since SonicMountain has taken over.

Odeo committed a number of mistakes the first time around, several of them openly admitted by Williams himself. Will Odeo’s new development team learn from these mistakes and guide Odeo to a brighter future? They are entering the video space, which is very competitive and is not as forgiving of mistakes. Best of luck, Odeo.

Odeo has acquired blog search engine BlogDigger for an undisclosed sum.

BlogDigger launched in 2003 as a competitor to the then dominant Technorati, and launched a locally focused search facility in 2005. The site offers standard blog search, and unlike Technorati has constantly focused on its core product.

For the new Odeo (formerly SonicMountain) this is their second acquisition in just over 6 months, having acquired FireAnt in September.

According to a post from Greg Gershman on the BlogDigger blog, Blogdigger’s aggregation and search technology has been integrated into Odeo’s new beta site. Gershman has joined the Odeo team as Vice President of Search and Engineering.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

If you know who FireAnt is, you either love podcasts or you’re a long time reader of this blog. The company built up a cult following in 2005 and 2006 as the podcast directory and player, and competed head on with Evan Williams’ Odeo for mindshare and users.

FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000, they companies will announce today. Not the old Odeo, but Sonic Mountain, which renamed itself Odeo after acquiring it earlier this year. For less than $2 million, Sonic Mountain has now put two of the more well know podcasting brands together under one roof.

The acquired assets include FireAnt’s technology, particularly their desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata. Founder Josh Kinberg joins Odeo to lead product development and integration of the Odeo and FireAnt technology.

Everything will be branded Odeo from here on out, so take a good look at that screenshot. If you are a FireAnt user, it will be changing significantly soon.

Details are just coming out, but New York based SonicMountain, a new startup, has acquired Evan Williams’ Odeo. The announcement will come sometime tomorrow. The price is not being disclosed but is in excess of $1 million, and the deal was all cash.

Odeo was publicly put on sale last February. The company was bought back from investors late last year.

Twitter is no longer part of Odeo, so this will not be included in the acquisition. Twitter and Odeo were both wholly owned subsidiaries of Obvious Corp.

Evan Williams will be working with SonicMountain as an advisor for six months or so.

Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered product Odeo up for sale.  Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October.  The site continues to get respectable traffic and Williams believes he will be able to get a fair price for the whole Odeo package. Williams reports the site saw 684,951 visitors last month, 3,012,921 pageviews and perhaps most importantly these days 1,523,963 Flash plays.

AdSense is reportedly paying for Odeo to survive but that development efforts have stalled since the company launched Twitter, an SMS service that’s a favorite among Bay Area web aficionados.  Another Evan Williams company, AudioBlogger, was shuttered in November.  

People close to Odeo had said that it was changing focus away from the company’s original mission and towards other types of media more than a year ago.  Browser based audio messaging is something that a number of other companies, including Evoca and MyChingo, are also trying to make work.  Much like user generated video – it’s hard to monetize.  SMS services, with money changing hands with every user action, is a different game.  It’s one that allows for a lot of innovation as well; the Twittr team is working on microformats for example.

As for Odeo, Williams says that a putting something up for sale doesn’t have to be a sign of desperation and in fact indicates that the seller believes it has value.  Williams presumably paid more than $5 million for the company when he bought it back from his investors last year.  It will be interesting to see whether anyone wants to spend some good money on it now and what they will do with it.

Odeo as we know it is gone. After announcing itself in February 2005, the company raised a $5 million venture financing with Charles River Ventures and a bevy of angel investors. After a private beta period, the company launched in July 2005.

It’s now a little over a year later and Odeo now faces dozens of competitors, including iTunes. Founder Evan Williams has spoken publicly about the company’s mistakes, has shut down one service and has launched another. If anything, Odeo gives every indication of going sideways.

Instead of a dramatic business change along with a new round of financing, Odeo has kicked out its investors and is going it alone. Evan Williams along with Biz Stone and all other current Odeo employees have created a new company called Obvious Corp. This new company has purchased the assets of Odeo, Inc. (including Odeo and Twitter) from the investors and other shareholders. Evan told me “I decided to buy the assets myself and make Odeo and Twitter part of a new entity with a new structure and new model.”

The buyout price is undisclosed, but is presumably a little more than the $5 million in capital the company raised – Evan says it is “enough for the VCs and angel investors to be made whole (i.e., they get their money back), and the common shareholders (including co-founder Noah Glass) to make a modest gain.”

What’s the new Model? Evan says this:

Everyone I know in the web world either works for one of the Internet giants and wants to be in a startup or is in a startup that wants to be bought by an Internet giant. The grass is always greener, of course, but I believe there’s room for a different model for building and running web properties. Obvious will be a kind of product lab, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. There are many details to be figured out, but the general idea is to simply build and launch things that we want to exist in the world, with a high degree of freedom. And to do so cheaply and quickly, with self-organized teams that can leverage each other’s technology, talents, and traffic. Rather than looking to be acquired, we plan to make money from the services and share it with the people who contribute. Occasionally, it may make sense to spin things out into their own entities, which get outside investment, but the company is not an incubator.

More from Evan in his blog post here.

Our previous coverage of Odeo is here.

Odeo’s Audioblogger, which allowed users to post audio to a blogger.com blog via a telephone call, is being shut down as of November 1 and will enter the DeadPool. Existing files will continue to be hosted.

As much as I’ve questioned Odeo’s ADD business (un)focus in the past (see last paragraph here), I have to say that this is probably a smart move and not necessarily a sign of Odeo’s eventual demise. Odeo says “Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions about what to focus on. And we’ve come to the difficult decision that Audioblogger costs us too much in time and money to continue to run.” Frankly, that makes a lot of sense.

In general we’re seeing a lot of smart and humble moves by Odeo recently, not least of which is Founder Evan Williams’ extremely honest assessment of the company at a recent conference. In our opinion Twttr, which competes with Google owned Dodgeball for attention, should be the next to go as the company focuses on the basics.

Our previous coverage of Odeo is here.

Odeo released a new service today called Twttr, which is a sort of “group send” SMS application. Each person controls their own network of friends. When any of them send a text message to “40404,” all of his or her friends see the message via sms. This launched officially today, and a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night.

People are using it to send messages like “Cleaning my apartment” and “Hungry”. You can also add friends via text message, nudge friends, etc. It really a social network around text messaging – and is very similar to another service called Dodgeball.

Users can also post and view messages on the Twttr website, turn off text messages from certain people, turn off messages altogether, etc. There is also a status widget available that can be placed on a website.

I like the service although I was not able to sign up for it myself (someone added me at the same time I tried to register directly, the result was lockout of my phone number). I’ve been playing around with someone else’s account until I can figure out how to get my number sorted out.

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?

YackPack is one of a growing group of companies (see our recent Odeo post for the list) that is allowing consumers to easily create a quick recording to share with friends.

It’s still in private beta, although you can get a good understanding of the service by watching the how-to video they’ve created.

Barb Dybwad likes the effort YackPack has put into creating a very simple user interface. I agree that a child could use it, but I don’t think the walled-garded functionality will ultimately be popular.

Other minor annoyances with the service: I was forced to give up too much personal information to register (such as my zip code and birth date), you can’t edit a sound file before you send it, and you cannot access the actual sound files you record – they must be listened to at the site.

YackPack plans to provide a free, ad supported service along with a premium option for “well under $10/month“. They are also giving away a limited supply of free microphones.

My patience with Odeo has run out.

The first time I wrote about Odeo was on June 13, 2005. The service actually launched on June 22, about the time that iTunes 4.9 was released and hit the podcasting world like a ton of bricks.

Odeo had tools to listen and sync, and a directory (iTunes, iTunes,and iTunes), but lacked the feature that everyone was looking forward to: the podcast creator. It was the sole feature that made Odeo different from iTunes. Fans eagerly awaited its release.

In the 4-5 months since the product was launched, Apple has released yet another version of iTunes and Podshow raised nearly $9m from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Did Odeo release its studio tool?

No.

Instead, they released a desktop widget.

Last week Odeo did get its studio product out. It’s visually appealing. But it is so feature poor that it’s effectively a non product.

Odeo Studio

Creating a recording is very straightforward. Click a button to record. Click another one to stop. It’s built on Flash.

You can choose to add a picture to the podcast. It can be made public or just shared with friends, including by email. If you share by email, a link is sent to the recipient (v. directly sending a MP3 file).

And…that’s it. Don’t like part of the podcast? You have to start over. No editing tools. No effects. No enhancements. Nothing else whatsoever. All they’ve done is turn on your microphone, turn it off later, and record what happens in between. The guys at slawesome built this in two weeks a couple of months ago. Waxmail did something similar and attached it to Outlook. This has been done already at least twice.

By the way, if you want a free open source editing tool for podcasts, try Audacity. It’s what I use.

Odeo is not an innovator. At best they are a follower. I’m hoping they start building new and interesting podcasting features soon. But for now, even nonprofits are way ahead of them in doing interesting things with audio.

Odeo: What are you going to do to make your product relevant?

The guys at Odeo have just launched a Dashboard widget for mac users who want to listen to their podcasts straight from their desktop. Due to its nature it is OSX Tiger only – even though with Yahoo Widgets it shouldn’t be much work to have something going for Windows too – but if you run it on your machine, make sure you check it out.

It’s always good to see companies embrace new capabilities of operating systems and being creative with them. Also, it is great to see the Odeo guys aren’t sitting down and keep working on cool stuff that us podcasting aficionados can use. Great!

Editor’s Note: We apologize if the following profile lacks our usual excitement and enthusiasm. Odeo is great and works really well. We just have a funny feeling that iTunes 4.9 is going to have a somewhat substantial impact on the podcasting portal market. One thing to note, though, is that iTunes is only most of the online music market, not all of it. Odeo and others can help fill in the gaps.

Company: Odeo

Previous Profile: June 13, 2005 Link

What’s New?

Lots of Odeo beta invites went out today, and TechCrunch received one. We signed up. We did things. Everything worked, except the “create podcast”, which they told us up front wouldn’t work.

In their own words, “Odeo consists of three major parts: A catalog of audio content, of all types, which is constantly being added to. The Odeo Syncr, which let’s you download anything in the catalog (and, optionally, put it on your MP3 player). And creation tools, including the Odeo Studio, which let you publish your own audio content, which will then show up in the catalog. (The creation tools aren’t already for public use yet, though.)”

Key additional information:

- 6.3 meg syncr download (allows easy syncing with mp3 players, auto adding, etc.)
- very hokey welcome message from Biz Stone
- nice tools for finding/searching for podcast “channels” and adding them to your subscription
- “create podcast” features remain unlaunched.
- syncer works great

My wish list – auto delete option after listening to a show (from the mp3 player)

Screen Shots:

Relevant Links:

See previous profile
Import podcast
Odeo blog
Top 40 channels

Tags: odeo, podcasting, web2.0, techcrunch, podcast

Company: Odeo

Location: San Francisco

Status: Private Beta

What is it?

Odeo will be a a podcast service that lets users search, find, and subscribe to podcasts, as well as a tool to create your own podcasts with minimal hardware. Odeo is built on Rails.

In their own words, “Hi. We’re Odeo (pronounced like rodeo). Somewhere in an apartment in San Francisco, we’re making it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod (or whatever MP3-player-type-deal you prefer).”

There isn’t much to see yet because their product is only available via an invitation-only beta. However, there are a couple of people who’ve tested the product and have blogged on it.

From webreakstuff:

“They make it easy to subscribe to audio content of your preference by browsing categories, and check what everybody else is listening to. Additionally, they allow someone to add any show that’s not in the system yet, and if you’re actually the publisher of a current channel, Odeo makes it easy for you to take control and customize it.

Unfortunately the Odeo Studio feature isn’t up yet. Odeo Studio is, and I quote, “A browser-based tool that makes it easy to record and publish. With the Studio, and a cheap microphone (or even the one built into your laptop), you have everything you need.“. Thats interesting, and if they do things right, that may be the feature that gives them the edge I was talking about on my previous post about Odeo and iTunes. We’ll have to wait and see.
I like how the overview page (the entry page to Odeo) lists featured content, the Zeitgeist (what people are listening to right now) and Odeo news.”

It looks like Odeo will also support tagging of content, which will be a crucial way to find good stuff – audio, unlike text, is hard to preview and so metadata is even more necessary.

Screen Shots:

Founders:

Evan Williams (profile) (blog)
Noah Glass (profile) (blog)

Relevant Links:

Odeo blog
NY Times Story
Evhead post on Odeo
Flickr Odeo Pics
Webreakstuff on Odeo
BackDrifter on Odeo
Philipp Lenssen on Odeo
iPodarmy on Odeo