Odeo - Evan Williams’ new startup
Evan Williams, who created Pyra Labs, who created Blogger and then sold the service to Google, is starting a new venture that deals with podcasting. Looks like it’s both an e-commerce store for audiofiles and ad marketplace for podcasts:
Odeo plans to base its business on the premise that the explosion of digital audio content has created the need for a central place to find relevant material and that there will also be a need for a market to buy and sell “premium” content in much the style of the eBay online marketplace. Odeo, noting that advertising is already an accepted component of conventional radio, also plans to embed automatically generated audio ads within the downloadable files. And because the files are specifically chosen by the consumer, the company is also hoping that consumers and advertisers might find one another as readily as through the keyword Web search advertisements that are at the heart of Google’s and Yahoo’s businesses.
The company is here, there’s a development blog with sneak-peek screenshot and Evan Williams’ blog post on starting Odeo.