September 19, 2005

32 GB iPod Nanos and a Podcast Directory on Your Phone?

I spent the better part of the day today immersed in the future of digital audio and video at the Digital Hollywood conference here in Santa Monica. I had a few cool chats with some people on the inside of what’s coming down the pipeline next. I had a particularly cool talk with the founder of Melodeo, a company that is bringing you podcasting to mobile phones. You can check out a demo of their “mobilcast” technology here. It’s a pretty cool technology and no doubt represents a part of the future for podcasting.

Speaking of the future, last week Samsung announced that they will be doing a flash memory chip that can hold up to 32 GBs of data. What does that mean? How about the possibility of a 32 GB iPod Nano? How cool would that be? Devices will get smaller and storage capacity will get larger, the latter being particularly relevant as “videocasting” (the video equivalent of podcasting) grows in popularity. Here’s a link to the Samsung announcement:

Samsung to do up 32GB flash memory chip

One final cool thing that I found today. The Digital Hollywood conference that I attended has put some sessions from their Spring confernece online as a free of charge podcast. I think you’ll see this happen for a lot more conferences. It seems that at least once a week a cool conference comes across my desk (like the M Squared conference next week in San Francisco). I certainly don’t have the time or the money to attend all or even most of these. Why shouldn’t they be made available as podcasts? Heck, I bet more than a few people would be willing to pay for that…

Here’s the link to those sessions from the Spring 2005 Digital Hollywood conference.