On Wednesday evening, I participated in a panel discussion on "Startups" at the Refresh DC monthly event. Our 5 member panel consisiting of local entreprenuers attempted to enlighten the group of about 60 or attendees on topics such as funding vs. bootstrapping, developing your idea (sharing or secret), when/who to hire, and some "lessons learned". It was an enjoyable time and I hope that we provided some valuable insight to those looking to bring more Web 2.0 opportunities to the area. Thanks to the team at Viget Labs for organizing and moderating the event.

On Thursday evening, Greg Gershman and I were given the opportunity to demo the new Odeo Beta site for the crowd at Tech Cocktail in DC. The event was very well attended and the 1223 Club in DC was packed. Thanks to Frank Gruber (somewhatfrank.com) for putting on a great event and allowing us to showcase.

Starting today, our VP of Products, Josh Kinberg will be hanging out at Podcamp NY for the weekend. This is a packed event and we are looking forward to another opportunity to showcase the new Odeo beta site. If you are at the event, look us up for a demo of the new site and an invite to the private beta.

eric@odeo

If you are new to the beta, feel free to explore the site. Your initial thoughts on the intuitiveness of the site's navigation would be welcome feedback. If you have been with us for awhile, poke around and see if you notice what's new.

Some of the planned enhancements are:

The Channel Page is undergoing revision and will start to show some of the beginnings of the social features. On any channel, you will be able to see who is subscribed, see ratings and comments.

We are moving the "quicklist" from the bottom of the page and placing it as an object in your dashboard.

Speaking of the dashboard, you will notice that right now, there is just a simple subscriptions list. In the next couple weeks, we'll introduce the concept of the dashboard as a central place to manage your media, subscriptions, friend associates, shows that you rated, etc.

As part of the migration of the existing Odeo users / accounts, we are working on updating the audio player widget, creating a video player, moving all of the existing users and their subscriptions as well as all of the feeds currently in the Odeo database.

During April, we are planning on releasing the Odeo Desktop Media Play (OMP), a Windows application that provides the ability to play your odeo content offline on your PC as well as on many popular portable media devices. This is an exciting part of the overall Odeo functionality and will be completely synchronized with your online account allowing you to view, rate and recommend content from either the web browser or the desktop application.

I am sure that there are many more smaller items that I have missed, but this should get you started. The most important part of this blog kickoff is your participation with us to tell us what you like, don't like and the features that you see as core to making Odeo the your favorite place to discover, enjoy and manage your digital media collection.

eric@odeo