HD voice applications developer WYDE Voice has partnered with Podference.com to make a hybrid all-in-one conference calling – podcasting – syndicating machine.

The new product merges Podference’s automated podcasting and syndication (RSS, publishing) teleconferencing software with WYDE Voice’s scalable conferencing bridge.

In layman’s terms, the moderator of a conference call wields “full control” of the discussion. The moderator is able to start/stop recording, mute individual participants, and/or change the presentation from group discussion to “lecture” (one speaker) mode. In addition, the product turns the recorded discussion into a podcast which is subsequently shared (syndicated) with its intended audience.

A product like this would be useful for instructors in distance learning settings, in collaborative creative project settings, for virtual meetings, for shareholder calls or corporate training sessions. It would, in any field, be an enexpensive way to gather far-flung participants together, and to make a record of the conversation, for those who could not attend.

This type of device leans more toward the “premium content” end of the podcast creation spectrum, though, distributing the finished episode to a select group of listeners, rather than publishing a podcast feed to be available to anyone in a public audience.

The WYDE Voice podcast product is powerful, but doesn’t come cheaply. Product information discloswes that their VM1000 model starts at $160/port, while the VM3000 is priced at $140/port. The two WYDE Voice models, however can accommodate anywhere from 500 to 10,000 concurrent regular callers or up to 3,000 HD Voice callers. Product specs state that the WYDE Voice appliances “currently support an extensive list of narrowband codecs as well as the Hi-Fidelity Voice codecs such as G.722.2 AMR-WB and iSAC from Global IP Sound. These two 16 bit 16 kHz voice codecs make conversation more natural and clear.”

More information is available at Podconference.com, and at WYDE Voice.

Today’s New York Times profiles a new technology from Hewlett Packard, MagCloud, that enables indie publishers to print small batches of custom magazines.

Individuals and businesses create their custom magazines, and upload them to the MagCloud site in high-resolution PDF format. No money changes hands until MagCloud receives a customer order, and prints out copies at 20 cents/page (plus shipping). Publishers set their per-issue price, and pocket any revenue beyond that base price.

Previously, print runs would need to number in the thousands of copies to justify the significant cost of setting up the traditional offset press, making color separations, and so on. Those traditional magazine printing costs were prohibitive for many small-scale projects and publications that would, at best, have a very niche, very small circulation.

The HP Indigo presses that power this MagCloud initiative can produce any size print run for the same cost, whether one copy or a thousand, and yields full color images on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers that, the MagCloud site boasts, “look awesome.”

Traditional magazine (and newspaper) publishing is in the midst of a rough patch, with rising production costs and declining circulation and flagging advertising revenue. While the per-page production costs of custom MagCloud issues is more expensive than a traditional glossy, the economy of print-as-you-need, pay-as-you-go publishing makes sense for an increasingly specialized, niche print consumer.

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader opened up a similar avenue for self-publishing literary works and non-fiction for audiences outside the mainstream, ordering electronic copies to be “printed” on an as-needed basis, paying self-published authors as readers buy their content. This opportunity to publish a tangible, paper periodical with MagCloud opens up all kinds of possibilities among small niche audiences — the “long tail” that new media people like so much to talk about.

Kind of also makes me want to fire up Adobe Illustrator and make my own magazine, too.

It is April Fools’ Day, and all day long, I have been shocked and scandalized by what I’ve been reading.

• Post-menopausal friends are pregnant.
• Asheville, North Carolina’s Mountain Express is giving up its print edition in favor of an online all-Twitter version.
• Google promises a new user experience for its YouTube viewers involving upside-down images.
• An email from women’s peace group CodePink announces Sarah Palin has joined their antiwar efforts.

Gullible as I am, each of these gave me a “what the –?!?” start.

Not a joke, though, is the discovery that the web series Fred is approaching one million subscribers on YouTube. Silly every day of the year, not just on April 1, Fred features short, goofy videos voiced by what sounds like a chipmunk huffing helium, but is in fact a human young adult named Lucas Cruikshank.

The show has over 980,000 subscribers, and individual episodes have millions of views apiece.

Seems as though I should be kidding you, but this silly piece of fluff has capitalized on viewers’ love of the rdiculous.

Chandima Cumaranatunge has developed a free WordPress plug-in that allows users to incorporate micro video posts into their blogs. The plugin is designed to let you create and update Live blog posts using micro video application 12seconds.tv. The video site 12seconds allows bloggers to use the webcam on their computer or their mobile phone to record (in 12 seconds or less) and post “status updates.”

Once you’ve installed and configured the 12seconds widget with your account info, it will let you “add a sidebar widget to display 12seconds video status updates. For those of you who are familiar with Twitter; 12seconds is like Twitter, but with video instead of text updates. You can also embed the widget in WordPress posts and pages using shortcodes.”

Features:

• Displays the latest video status for a 12seconds user.
• You can choose to display a “skinny” (175 X 290) or “fat” (380 X 440) version of the widget.
• Can navigate to and view previous status updates in the “fat” widget using a thumbnail carousel.
• You can embed the widget in posts and pages using shortcodes.

The sidebar widget itself is essentially a video player. It uses the widget embed code provided by 12seconds.tv. The plugin eliminates the extra steps of copying and pasting embed code, and modifying templates. One can see you this would be a great tool for quick mini blog updates when out in the field: at a conference, on a trip, etc.

It also seems an interesting complement to the Twitter Liveblog plug-in we told you about two days ago, which puts Twitter status updates into your blog feed.

The 12seconds WordPress plug-in is available at Turing Tarpit.

Ben Affleck is the featured guest on the latest episode of media production podcast, “The Rough Cut.” Affleck will participate in a podcast with Avid Technology, maker of software tools for film, video, audio, and broadcast production, discussing his work as a director, producer and editor.

Avid brands include Digidesign, M-Audio, and Sibelius. The Rough Cut podcast features interviews with moviemakers (who use Avid software) about the creative and technical process.

Affleck, may be better known as a film actor (“Daredevil,” “The Sum of All Fears,” “Shakespeare In Love,”) feature film director (“Gone Baby Gone,”) and Oscar-winning screenwriter (for “Good Will Hunting”), than as a documentary filmmaker. But in this podcast interview, Affleck talks about working on his latest project, a documentary called “Gimme Shelter.”

Affleck collaborated with editor Dana Glauberman while documenting his experience in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Affleck directed, co-produced and co-edited the documentary, which was made for the United Nations High Commissions for Refugees, and takes an inside look at the humanitarian crisis in the DR Congo. It has been released and screened at the UN and several cinemas nationwide.

The link to the Affleck podcast episode, the link is here. Other episodes of “The Rough Cut” are available through the podcast feed here.

Photo: via babble.com

Skype is expected Tuesday to release a free iPhone version of its software that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet.  [UPDATE: The application appears to be available Monday evening, but is crashing servers with high download demand.]

In what is perhaps the greatest sentence in tech journalism so far in 2009, the Washington Post hails this iPhone app as bringing “a great waft of flatulence in the face of the [telephone service] carriers and, in one smooth motion, high fives the international community of Skype users.”

Skype is a voice-over-IP telephone calling service that’s free to other Skype users. Calls to landlines and non-Skype mobile phones are billed at an inexpensive rate. Users buy “Skype Out” minutes (or pay a flat rate for all-you-can-talk). Skype uses WiFi to make calls on your iPhone, and CNet says that “call quality will in part be at the mercy and strength of wireless networks”.

The iPhone Skype application will have most of the features and functionality of other mobile versions of the VoIP program. A few additional features take advantage of the iPhone’s unique capabilities, like making an avatar image by snapping a photo in Skype, or choosing a picture from your iPhone camera roll. Another “imperfect” (according to CNet) feature is the capability to answer incoming conference calls. The ability to initiate conference calls isn’t there yet, but is rumored to be added to the iPhone Skype app in an update later.

Even iPod Touch users can use their devices as Skype-enabled telephones, provided they have a set of earphones with an embedded mic available.

CNet has a great overview of the features and limitations of Skype for the iPhone, having been able to meet with the application developers before the app release.

Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. reached a record $23 billion last year, according to the 2008 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Interactive advertising continued to grow, despite downward trends in the overall economy. IAB attributes this to “marketers’ increased recognition of the medium’s value in reaching consumers online,” where consumers are spending more of their time.

2008 revenues hit a record $23.4 billion, a 10.6% increase over 2007. By comparison, other sources indicate weakened advertising spending across all media. The Nielsen Company, for example, reported that U.S. advertising for 2008 was down 2.6%, compared to 2007.

This is the fifth consecutive year of record results for Internet advertising revenues.

From the Whispers and Rumours Department, ClickZ is saying that a mid-April YouTube redesign will prominently feature premium and long-form content — and will segregate the professional videos from the vast storehouse of user-generated content.

ClickZ’s Zachary Rodgers writes:

“According to two sources familiar with Google’s plans for YouTube, the new design will do away with the current navigation scheme — which funnels users into “videos,” “channels,” and “community” categories. That layout will be replaced with a tabbed navigation with clearly defined sections for professional content.

“The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from.

“‘They’re putting up walls between all the UGC stuff, which will live within the video channel,…and the brand safe content,’ said one senior agency exec who was briefed on YouTube’s plans.”

The redesign is rumored to make the YouTube video player look like a Hulu clone, but perhaps with multiple in-episode advertisers like CBS’ online shows. NBC and ABC use an “exclusive,” single-sponsor advertising model.

Additional changes were vaguely hinted at last week when YouTube announced a number of updates and new features on the video site. Last week’s batch of announcements included

• the launch of an educational video resource, YouTube EDU,
• easier login
• easier HD video sharing
• Twitter update capability
• ways to use YouTube as a “social network”
• and better mobile phone-to-YouTube upload capabilities.

There would be a number of potential problems with this rumored separation of user-generated content from sponsored, professional, premium YouTube content. The current library of available TV series on YouTube mostly are oldy-moldy shows from the 1980s. Would advertisers really like to put their money on “MacGyver” reruns? I’m guessing that sponsors will hold out for contemporary shows for promoting their brands.

Another problem with segregating user-generated video is that a lot of what becomes popular on YouTube comes from that vast pool of “amateur” content. Many of the most popular pieces on YouTube are not the slick, well-edited premium videos; they are the quirky, stupid, funny amateur videos, (the ones you might call “viral”) of biting toddlers, evil chipmunks, dancing buffoons, and mascara-smeared emo boys.

It may be impossible for YouTube screeners to determine which of these silly videos will catch the public’s imagination, but to relegate these pieces to the hinterlands is not in YouTube’s best interests.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

UK’s Birmingham City University has announced plans to offer a a master’s degree on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. The University’s MA in Social Media will also explain how to set up blogs and publish podcasts.

“During the course we will consider what people can do on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be used for communication and marketing purposes,” explains course convener Jon Hickman.

“There has been significant interest in the course already, and it will definitely appeal to students looking to go into professions including journalism and PR.”

“Social media is very important for jobs within the marketing and communications sector, as a skill set within other jobs, and as an industry within itself,” adds Hickman.

Earlier in the year radio personality Adam Carolla declared that terrestrial radio is “heading for the sh*tter,” and launched a free daily (Monday – Friday) podcast.

Carolla’s podcast was an immediate success, and he hasn’t looked back.

“We haven’t missed a day yet,” Carolla said. “It’s like dating. If you like me, I’ll like you back. I’ll keep growing the show based on other people’s commitment to it. If people find the show, like the show and want more of the show, then I’ll oblige. If they taper off and don’t show an interest anymore, then I’m not going to show an interest in it anymore.”

“It would feel really hard to go back and do terrestrial radio or even satellite radio,” Carolla said. “I don’t think satellite is in any position to hire new talent these days, and terrestrial radio would feel very limiting after this. My wish, hope and goal is to grow this, so that we have our own show and our own community.”