Filling the Podosphere

A couple of months later Adam Curry was creating a show on the road, literally. On an October morning he was recording a Daily Source Code as he was driving his car. The hum of the tires on the road was broken by a shrill honk of a horn in the background, interrupting Curry as he explained his love for the eighties sounding music of American Heartbreak (the band of Michael Butler, from the Rock and Roll Geek Show podcast).

As he leaned out the car window Adam spoke Dutch to the offending motorist, he laughed, and reported, “Dude, will you check that out, a guy just drove up next to me, and he’s honking his horn and he’s holding his iPod up, and he’s saying I’m listening to the podcast. God damn, I said, I’m recording one right now.” Raymond Poort had recognized Curry as he drove in the traffic and wanted to show his appreciation for the show. It was a fantastic demonstration of how podcasting was spreading.

At the same time, Phillip Torrone had built himself a small cult following of geeks as one of the coauthors on a website dedicated to gadget, gizmos and technology called Engadget (he was also a writer for Popular Science magazine). With Lenn Pryor, who worked for Microsoft, they launched the first Engadget podcast on October 5 that explained how anyone could cheaply start their own show. It was just the type of information needed to encourage a raft of new podcasters.

With many people learning of its value through weblogs, podcasting started a growth spurt. Soon dozens of bloggers, some with plenty of real radio experience, started their own show and the variety exploded.

The traditional media, experienced in keeping an eye on the Internet for items of news, reported on the trend. Business 2.0, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and The New York Times all ran articles comparing it to mediums like weblogs and pirate radio. Fortune and Wired magazines sent reporters to see Adam at his new home in Guildford.

With a growing tide of media exposure, major organizations joined the flurry of new shows. Some major radio stations around the world, like KOMO, WGBH, BBC and Australia’s ABC, made some of their shows available as podcasts.

In January of 2005, two Australians boldly took the plunge and created the first company dedicated to podcasting called The Podcast Network. Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic were the hosts of a popular show called G’day World. When they realized that they were reaching several thousand listeners from their homes in Melbourne and Sydney they decided to create a network of high quality shows; almost like creating a station of podcasts for people to peruse and choose.

(Before you complain Cam, there is a sidebar on TPN, and a review of several of the shows that was to be published in the book.)

A couple of months later, Adam Curry and a Ron Bloom, an entrepreneur who’d known Curry since his days at OnRamp, started a company called Podshow. The intent was to commercialize the podcast movement through marketing and advertising, and they invited several of the most popular shows of the time, like Dawn and Drew, The Rock and Roll Geek Show, and Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang, to take part.
Soon after, Sirius Satellite Radio announced a show that would be hosted by Adam Curry and feature selections from podcasts. The show broadcast every weekday from 6 till 10 pm on channel 148. Podcasting was becoming commercial.

Unknown to many people, Curry was also in discussions with Apple, the company behind iPod and iTunes. In May, just after Steve Jobs announced the soon to be released podcast feature in iTunes, Curry confessed to a conversation.

While in a taxi headed from Phoenix airport to the Hilton hotel, he and Ron Bloom recorded a quick Daily Source Code, confessing the “highlight of the day, was without a doubt, about an hour and a half that we had with Steve Jobs, which was really fun.  Just a private conversation, and that was great.  Of course I can’t tell you everything that we talked about, but I will say that I was able to provide a lot of input.  The number one great piece of input that I was able to feed back was, hey, I want to record on my iPod.  And I can guarantee you that’s going to happen some time in the near future.”

On August 9 2005, the word podcast was added to the Oxford Dictionary.
podcast• noun a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

A day later the news spread that Curry and Bloom’s company Podshow, had recieved $8.85 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Not only were people amazed at the dollar figure, but also with the line up of board members. They included John Doerr and Ray Lane; veterans from technology companies like Intel and Oracle. It was a big deal because the two venture capital companies had previously funded companies like Apple, Netscape, Google, and Amazon.

Today Adam Curry stands at his new podcasting desk, purpose built by his father-in-law, recording a new Daily Source Code. Gold and platinum records hang on the wall reminding visitors of Curry’s days with major media. In a single year he’d helped launch a new audio phenomenon and turn it into a commercial venture. Little of what happened to this point will be scrutinized in the future; it’s what Curry hopes will come of it that will make the difference: a new way for the world to distribute and consume media.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.