Yodio Launches Beta Audio Publishing and Community Site, Redefines Podcasting for Consumers

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, January 31, 2007; 03:24 AM

At the DEMO 07 conference, Yodio, Inc. unveiled its one-stop audio publishing service and online marketplace -- a Web community for anyone to create, publish, and buy/sell personal audio recordings. Yodio gives meaning to podcasting by enabling consumers to easily record their own 'short-tracks' by phone using Yodio's toll-free service or manually upload their prerecorded MP3 files. Designed to take advantage of speech recognition, Yodio also features three easy-to-use tools for personalizing and packaging Yodio files. Yodio is capitalizing on the recent growth of user-generated content and portable digital media devices (iPods, MP3 players and digital cameras).

"Yodio is to podcasting as Blogger was to blogging -- an easy to use Web application that helped define a new application category. Yodio not only provides best-of-breed features that consumers will love to use, but Yodio has delivered a unique platform for easily creating, capturing and distributing rich media content," says Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO conferences.

Yodio(TM) redefines podcasting by enabling consumers to record personalized audio tracks from any phone, mix with their digital images, and publish high-impact stories to the Web for purchase and download.

"For a majority of consumers, creating podcasts is too difficult. It requires new hardware, software and time. Also missing is an incentive to record and way for consumers to market and monetize their own content. Yodio is unique, fresh and different. Yodio's goal is simple: we want everyone to share their cultural experiences, travel tips, business insight or entertainment (music, comedy, etc) in audio form and post it for others to benefit by saving time and money. Everyone can become a 'citizen journalist' by sharing their tips with the world. And, to someone, somewhere, those tips are worth a small fee," says Clay Loges, Yodio President and CEO.

Today, Yodio demonstrated a suite of features that help consumers get inspired to embrace podcasting and provides a unique social network focused on creating and delivering user-generated audio content:

-- 1-877-MY-YODIO -- a proprietary toll-free recording system that uses speech recognition to recognize the caller, supports custom prompts, captures and converts the audio, and automatically uploads and arranges the recordings on http://www.yodio.com/ to be produced; -- Yodio Audio Products - a set of rich audio recordings that feature a custom player experience which can be distributed in different ways: - Yodiocard(TM) -- a FREE 2 minute audio greeting or profile that can be customized with a photo and either emailed or posted to any HTML-supported websites, such as http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.ebay.com/ or http://www.craigslist.com/; - Yodiocast(TM) -- an unlimited single-track audio recording and image that can be personalized, categorized and priced by the user for download at http://www.yodio.com/; - Yodiotour(TM) -- an unlimited, multi-track audio album with synchronized images that is categorized and personalized by the user for download at http://www.yodio.com/. -- Community Forum -- a rich community for members to discuss, subscribe, and promote Yodio files to be published or new content topics; -- Marketplace -- an innovative stored-value system that enables users to price and download yodiocasts and yodiotours via PayPal(R) and through merchant banks; a micro-payment system handles paying royalty out to content creators.

Yodio doesn't charge for basic audio creation and publishing services. Yodio relies on membership download and audio sponsorship fees. Users can register simply by visiting http://www.yodio.com/.

About Yodio

Yodio is an online destination community for creating and sharing personal audio recordings. Unlike most podcast websites, Yodio features a proprietary audio recording and publishing service that makes it fast, easy, and fun to produce short, high-impact personal audio stories. Yodio also features a rich marketplace where recordings can be rated, streamed or downloaded to most portable devices. The Yodio marketplace includes one of the first micro-payment systems that rewards audio creators with royalty and supports advertising sponsors. For more information, visit http://www.yodio.com/ .

About Demo

The annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring and U.S. Robotics, helping them secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/ .