Bringing Podcasts To The People

In the last two weeks, both Melodeo and Pod2mob both weighed in with their plans to make itty-bitty cell phones home to your-podcast-of-choice.

Seattle-based Melodeo wants you to be able not only to stream the casts to your device—which you can do now with both them and Pod2mob, but download and play them at your convenience. Starting in September, you'll be able to do so with Melodeo's Mobilecast, says Stan Sorensen, director of product marketing for the Seattle-based company

Some of you may remember Stan. He did duty in product management for both Exchange Server and SQL Server over at Microsoft for many years. He's the guy who had to fess up to various Yukon slippages and etc.

Within four days of the Mobilcast press release, he said Mobilcast got nearly 5,000 Google search hits, 2,200 of which proceeded to the demo.

Many of the newest cell phones have plenty of memory to store and play appropriately-compressed podcasts, he noted. Melodeo will squeeze a ten to 15 minute podcast int 1.2 to 1.5 megs, he said.

Interestingly, for a guy who had the Microsoft software stack running in his DNA, now he's dealing with a stack of a completely different color. What's Melodeo's infrastructure? Linux, MySQL, and Apache. And the first targeted phones, an array of Nokia modles, run the Symbian client.

Melodeo has other Microsoft linkages beyond Sorensen. Rich Tong, former Microsoft veep now with Ignition partnesr, one of Melodeo's investors, is a board member.