ipadio iPhone app opening screenFor the first time, iPhone users can choose to live stream audio to their own web site or pre-record up to 60 minutes of audio and upload it later. Callers also have the option to use SpinVox voice to text conversion to produce title, tags and a transcript, plus all of the things you’d expect including adding photos from the phone, geolocating the call and automatically integrating with social media (Twitter, Facebook) and popular blogging platforms. Listeners can subscribe to each “channel” as a podcast in iTunes, within an ipadio account, via RSS or even old fashioned email. IPod Touch users can of course record and publish via ipadio.
Dr Mark K Smith, CEO of ipadio, says, “From the day we launched, ipadio’s iPhone users let us know in no uncertain terms that audio quality is paramount to them, and so here we are – up to 60 minutes call time at high quality. But we’ve decided not to stop there, and we hope that optional SpinVox conversion plus all of the rich functionality that can be managed from the web account will make ipadio a valuable addition to the serious blogger’s toolset. In fact, several bloggers and journalists are setting their ipadio accounts to “private” and then embedding them to their own sites along with a more detailed article, so they never appear on ipadio.com at all. That’s fine with us, and gives ipadians ultimate control over their audio content. Along with moderation it’s just the functionality that many journalists are looking for.”
On uploading a call, users have the option to leave their title, tags and description to SpinVox, or to type these manually. In practice, most callers are running a quick test and then leaving things to SpinVox, as the results are great. If the odd word is missed, it’s easy to edit the text either in the iPhone app or through an account on ipadio.com.
As well as signposting the content, the SpinVox conversion will make the phlogs (phone blogs) easy for search engines to find. With the new app, users can call ipadio whilst on the road and appear in the search results before arriving home.
Ipadio’s commercial service introduces workflow process (moderation, group access and distribution, database integration of calls), additional in-call functionality (in-call polling, “call push”) to meet each company’s exact requirement. Ipadio has already announced its partnership with The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award to collect audio assessments.
Since its first live use during a yacht race from the mid-Atlantic in November 2008, ipadio has pioneered the live audio-to-web market. Its ease-of-use and responsiveness to users has found favour with organisations and individuals as diverse as government, media companies, sports championships, travel companies, tourist boards, charity campaigners and fundraisers, bloggers and comedians.