todbits.tv Episode 3

Hey, live from Edmonton, Alberta, it's TodBits.tv. I'm Tod Maffin. First of all, my apologies to those of you who were trying to get through on the live feed today. Lots of technical problems, which is kind of a pain in the you-know-where. And the camera seems to be moving by itself, and that's because it's fully automated now. We have 12 robotic devices now controlling the camera. Let me bring out one of the robotic— just wheel him out here. This is a Mac unit. Mac is— he's an Android, actually. Mac—

I look very lifelike, though.

You do look very lifelike, I must say. Yeah, the batteries are working really well. And Mac is here in Edmonton. He has a company that does all sorts of podcasts, and we'll talk to Mac in just a second. The only guy that came out tonight, so thank you very much.

Happy to be here.

And of course, none of the technology actually worked for the live broadcast, so we're taping it.

That's what happens when you do demos and live things. It's just not supposed to work. It's a rule.

That's right. It's like Bill Gates gets in front of the, in front of the computer in front of 2,000 people and it crashes. But we've got a beautiful view, you know, downtown Edmonton, and it's just absolutely fantastic. So it's a heck of a lot better than inside where it was dark and all that jazz. So we'll talk to you in just a second about your PodcastBot and the kind of stuff you're doing.

Sounds good.

Awesome. Bell has come out with a new phone. Those of you who are familiar with the LG Chocolate phone, it kind of looks like this except it's not this kind of beautiful cherry color. This is the brand new LG Cherry Chocolate phone. I have no idea how much it costs, maybe even $12,000. I might be over-exaggerating. What's kind of neat, you'll notice that there's not actually any buttons on here, and that's because what you do to get the buttons is you slide it up. Isn't that cool? And then it lights up. Now these little buttons here, where you see them lighting up, the red color, are actually touchscreen functionality. So, and I find it a little touchy. I was actually trying to press the metal part here, but it was working okay. And also they just announced that they're— oh, there's the music store coming up. Little slow, you know, it's like with all of these things I find. Whenever you move from the phone to the browser, do you find this, Mac? It's like it's really slow to kind of get stuff around. Yeah, it's like the microchip is like, "Oh, for God's sake, bring the browser up!" So this one suffers from about the same kind of speed problems, but not a bad phone. Really good quality as far as audio. What's nice is the headset that this comes with is one of the— it's a double-ear headset because they're positioning it really for people who are doing a lot of listening to music. And speaking of music, they just announced today that you can now listen to Sirius Satellite Radio on this. All of the music channels. So CBC Radio 3, and I think there's some other satellite channels, I'm not really sure. But certainly CBC Radio 3. And sadly not CBC Radio 1, it's just the music channels. But what's kind of neat is I was able to order that service online. I just went to the music thing, and it said, "Do you want to pay for it?" And I said, "Duh, sure." It's $8 a month. And I clicked buy, and away I was going, and it sounded great. So you don't need to be in— if you want to listen to satellite radio now, you don't have to be in reception of where the satellite is. Because usually, if you're going to have satellite radio at home, for instance, you need to get a little antenna and you position it. In this case, where's southeast? Over here. You'd actually have to aim it at a specific location. So with this, you don't have to because it's not— even though it's satellite radio, it's not actually taking the feed from the satellite. It's not a satellite receiver in this phone. All it's doing really is it's getting the feed from the satellite to Bell's servers, and then Bell's servers are putting it into your phone. Really good quality audio. And the nice thing also is that when you get a phone call, if you're listening to music, it just automatically pops right up again. That's okay. Hahaha. It's kind of neat watching people try and duck under the camera. It's like, I think they think we're like really on the air, and I have the cheapest possible camera. Anyway, the other thing that came with the phone that neither Mac or I can figure out at all is it came with this little dongle. It's kind of padded on this one side. It's got an LG logo on it. We've tried. For the life of us, we can't figure out what the hell it is.

Aside from a little holder.

Aside from a holder, yeah, I guess. I mean, it's got— I don't even know if there's a place you can hook it into. Is there?

I think there's two little—

Oh, yeah, okay, so there's two little things here. So, I mean, the idea is that you're supposed to be able— Oh, you know what? I think I just figured it out. I think it's— I think it's so that you— I think you put this in here, and then maybe you attach this to something else, like a backpack. I don't know. I was really excited when I saw it, because I thought, "Okay, well this must be some sort of Bluetooth microphone." See, all you have to do is you have the phone— oh, see, I just broke it. You have the phone in your pocket, and all you have to do is like attach this to a button, is what I was thinking. Oh, and did I break it again? Yeah. Anyway, so you attach it to a button, and— thanks, Mac— and wirelessly it would pick up the signal, but I don't know. It doesn't seem to be doing it that way. So that's it for the technology stuff. It kind of sucks. Next week, a couple of things before we talk to Mac about the kind of stuff that he's doing. Next week, another on-location show. Hopefully this one will actually be live. This show is going to be from Kingston, Ontario, talking all about podcasting. Are you going to that? Podcasters Cross Borders?

No, unfortunately.

Man! And also giveaways of all sorts of very cool stuff. I had giveaways here. But unfortunately, because we couldn't do the live show this week, you're not getting anything. Last— no, 2 weeks ago I showed off this power meter where you can attach it to the power meter of your house and monitor in real dollars how much energy you're actually using. That— we're giving that away, and we're also giving away up to 6 CDs. Basically, we'll spin a big wheel, and whatever number shows up, that's how many CDs you get. Come on in! Alright, Max, tell me the name of your company again. I always screw it up. I want— let me try. Parm— Parmesan? Parmageddon?

I think you're hungry. No, Paramagnus.

Paramagnus.

Yeah, it means beyond great, actually. In like Greek and Latin, the two parts, para and magnus.

Awesome!

Yeah.

And now the primarily— now you started this— you started when you were in high school.

Yeah, that's right. I started when I was in high school with a couple buddies who were into computer programming. And it's been going ever since.

And I mean, you've been heavily involved in the podcast scene and the company's main product is podcastspot.com. What's that all about?

Yeah, so podcastspot is a hosting service for podcasters. So if you had some audio or video recorded and you want to put it up on the web so that someone else could download or leave a comment on it, you can come to podcastspot. There's a free account so you can try it out, very inexpensive, starts like $5 a month. Upload your audio or video and we generate the website for you, the RSS feeds, and people can download it. And then we track statistics for you too, which is pretty cool.

And one of the things I know with video podcasting, which is starting to get lots of attention, is you create like the one video podcast, the one video feed, and maybe it's okay for people who watch it on their own computers, you know, maybe you send them a QuickTime stream or something. And then if you want to have like a Windows Media version and an iPod version, you've got to like manually create all of these different versions and all of these different feeds. But your system does that automatically.

Yeah, lots of people want to do that and it takes a lot of time and effort. But yeah, we do it automatically. So, say you're on Windows and you record something in Windows Media and you upload it, you obviously want everyone in iTunes to be able to watch your video, but it doesn't read Windows Media. But our system automatically converts to Windows Media and QuickTime, or MPEG-4 actually, it's H.264 for video, in both large sizes and mobile versions, as well as 3GP for the phone. So if you've got a little cell phone that can play 3GP videos. And then on the audio side, we do Windows Media, and MP3 and Ogg as well.

So, and Ogg?

And Ogg.

Oh, very geeky. Yes, very geeky. Does anyone subscribe at all, or is that just because it's nerdy?

We built it because it's nerdy, because it's geeky. I mean, we get us geek cred, I guess you could call it, right?

Yeah.

But actually, we have a surprising number of downloads for it. I was really amazed when we looked through the stats. Like, you'd think it'd be around 0%. It's not. It's actually higher than that. It's more like 5 or 6%. Wow.

You know, CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, which is one of the first podcasts they had, had an Ogg feed for the longest time. And when we switched and launched a whole bunch of new podcasts, they, uh, we temporarily took the Ogg feed offline and we got tons of complaints.

Oh really?

So yeah, people are really attached to that strange obscure format. So when you say it automatically converts, so do you mean that, that, um, that you upload it first and then you do the conversions on the site and create all the different feeds, or is it literally you just upload the one file and it does everything in the background?

That's it. You upload the one file, it literally does everything in the background, which is nice because even if you wanted to create the conversions yourself, you then have to upload like 6 or 7 files, right?

Right.

Here you do that one upload and everything's created on the fly as they're done. People who have subscribed to say your QuickTime feed will get the QuickTime video. If they're in the Windows Media, they'll get that one. And it happens really automatically. Yeah.

Podcastspot.com?

Podcastspot.com.

How much does it cost?

Well, there's a free account and it gives you 25 megabytes of upload. So we found for audio podcasters, this can last you quite a while actually.

That's right. And that means, that means 25 megs per episode per week in storage per upload per time, or what?

It's 25 megabytes per month. So from now for the next 30 days, you can upload 25 megabytes of stuff to us. Not how many files have we created and are you storing or any of that, just the file that you upload to us. You can do up to 25 megabytes. And then it goes from $5 to $56 a month. The $56 a month plan will give you like 1.6 gigabytes of upload per month. So it's more than enough for video podcasters and stuff.

And how much bandwidth for downloading?

It's unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage. Wow. Yeah, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage. So it's really, really inexpensive.

How do you make money off that? Aren't you being charged for your bandwidth?

Yeah, what we've done though is we figured out a way that— I mean, some podcasters are going to be really popular and they're going to get a lot of downloads, and some are not going to be as popular, right? And also, your new podcast is going to get a lot of downloads, but something you did 2 months ago is going to get very few, right? And so you can pay for different bandwidth and storage options, and they range in price, right? So we put the most expensive ones to host on the cheapest cheapest in quality, but most inexpensive for us. And by doing that, we can kind of, you know, make your podcast, if you're really popular, cost us less. And then the people who don't podcast very much, we make some more money on them, and then we profit on the difference, right?

How much time a day do you spend on it?

Well, lately not as much time.

That's good though. That means it's kind of just running itself and money is coming in.

Yeah, well, there could be more money coming in, so go sign up. But it's like maintenance and things like that. And with our video conversion, it's a really good converter. I mean, we've tested with lots of other competitors and ours is really, really good, but there's so many different parameters for video that almost, you know, once a week someone uploads something and we have a little bit of a glitch and we have to figure it out and fix it.

But how long has the company been around?

The company itself has been around for 7 years, and we've been doing the podcasting thing since the end of 2004.

So I'm just— my math is really bad, but that— you must be like just graduating from university.

That's right, actually had my convocation on Tuesday. Really? Yeah. And I did my degree in 6 years. Normally it's 4, but because I had the company, I, you know, took it a little easier.

And you want to do this? Like, I mean, do you want to do this? Is this what you're going to do coming out of the school, is work on the company, or do you want to get a quote-unquote "real job"?

Yeah, I'm kind of looking for a quote-unquote "real job" right now. Pair of Magnets podcast is running really well. We want to add some new features and stuff like that, but nothing too crazy. So it kind of runs on the side. It'll be like an after-hours project, and I need to make some money, you know. I have to start paying off the student loans.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks a lot for coming out. You're literally the only person to show up tonight. We put it out everywhere, but, um, you know, I have an audience of about 4 people, including my relatives.

4 is better than none.

4 is better than none, and it's a beautiful day out here, so—

You get better quality, nice view, yeah.

Yeah, and air.

And air. Fresh air.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Todd.

Okay, now get out of the scene, because I have to pay you if you are anymore. So that's it for TodBits.tv. Sorry about the Back to Live episode isn't up. Next week, live from Kingston, Ontario, it's going to be all podcasting is the topic, and it's from the podcasters across Borders Convention. That's it for this week. TodBits.tv if you want to comment on the episode. From Edmonton, I'm Tod Maffin. See you next week.