By Alex Mandossian

Yahoo! made a big announcement recently about its beta release of Yahoo! Podcasts at www.Podcasts.Yahoo.com. 

As an information marketer, my main interest in podcasting has been on monetization and usability.  My goal is to use podcasts to communicate quickly and better with my mentors and students.

Currently, the podcast marketing giant is iTunes because of its ease of use, great media players, and huge podcast directory.  More people own iPods than any other brand of media players, and there′s a very good reason for that. 

Apple is a consumer products company.  They make beautiful media players and put them in beautiful packaging.  ITunes is very easy to use, and you can easily find and download music and podcasts from their directory. 

Yahoo! also has a music store, www.Music.Yahoo.com, known to most people as Yahoo! Music, and now they have a podcast service as well – www.Podcasts.Yahoo.com.  However, there are big differences in the way iTunes and Yahoo! Music delivers their content. 

With iTunes, you can download music for 99 cents a song, and you own the song.  However, music downloaded from iTunes can only be listened to using iTunes software, and the iTunes software must be on your computer or in your iPod media player.

Yahoo! Music is web-based; you don′t have to have Yahoo!′s software on your computer to be able to listen to a song or a podcast.  You can listen to it online or simply download it.

Yahoo! offers an unlimited music package for $5 a month.  Essentially, you are renting the music rather than owning it.  But for only $5 a month, you can listen to as much music as you want and download it to your computer or media player.

By Alex Mandossian

Right now, people can plug a FM broadcaster into their car, attach their media player, and listen on their FM stereo.  With car integration, that′s history. Thirty percent of all cars in 2006 are going to be integrated with some sort of iPod connection. Imagine what is going to happen the year after that.

Ninety-seven million Americans drive to work alone every single morning, and many of them are looking for hard content rather than songs or soft content to listen to.  We have players now that make it easy to listen and a directory that makes it possible, a commerce system that enables it, and some beautiful players that make it fun.

Car integration provides a great market for hard content information providers.  But I believe that the iPod phone is probably even more valuable to information marketers than the iPod dock in automobiles because people carry their phones with them everywhere.  They park their cars in the garage.

Phones are the marketing channel you want to own if you′re going to sell current, live information because they allow for this kind of communication and information sharing.   

When people are driving their cars, they have a lot of down time for listening, but it′s usually not live information.  They are listening to information that has already been recorded and downloaded to a player.  With an iPod phone, they can listen to a live podcast that provides hard content such as information and training.

This is the market I want to dominate.  I want to sell the content and give away the players to bring people into the world of content.  With all these great avenues opening up for podcasting, suddenly the world of podcasting becomes a lot more attractive to consumers.

By Alex Mandossian

Most people don′t want to buy and carry around multiple electronic devices, but most Americans today already have a cell phone.  Now Apple has come out with the iPod phone.   

Although not everyone is going to buy the iPod phone in the next two months, I think that in the next year every phone is going to have some sort of MP3 capability on it, and Apple is going to lead the way.  With a podcast directory of 15,000 podcasts, and sales of 1.8 million songs per day, it′s going to be hard for people not to pick up the iPod phone.

The iPod Nano has added some new features including integration with most of the popular programs including Outlook.  This means that the same group who says, “I don′t want to carry another device,” can use a Nano in place of their PDA.  For those people who don′t want to buy another device, the Nano offers the features of a PDA and an MP3 player.