Episode 33 of the PodLeaders show
My guest on Podleaders today is Alex Laats. Alex is the president of PodZinger. PodZinger has unique speech to text technology which is used to index and make searchable the full text of audio and video podcasts. Up until now PodZinger has only been indexing english language audio and video but it has now begun indexing Spanish language podcasts as well.
Here are all the questions I asked Alex and the times I asked them during the interview:
Can you start off with a little bit of background on who you are and how you got to be president of PodZinger? - 0:44
Can you tell us what PodZinger is? - 1:24
You are obviously not going to answer this but I’ll ask it anyway, how do you go about converting audio to text? - 2:45
What is PodZinger’s connection with BBN? - 5:05
What is the business model for PodZinger and how are you hoping to make money? - 5:39
You mentioned doing a search on PodLeaders, how would that work? - 8:52
How many podcast series has PodZinger indexed? - 12:41
It doesn’t work in Firefox on the Mac, is this something you are working on? - 13:15
You have an announcement about launching PodZinger in another language. - 14:16
You mentioned September 11th as the genesis of the extra funding you received, and in speaking about that you mentioned Mandarin Chinese and Farsi. Are they languages you are going to be working on soon as well, or are there other languages? And why Spanish? - 16:42
Do you have a next and a second next language after Spanish? - 18:42
And are there many podcasts coming out of China? - 18:59
One possible problem with doing one in Mandarin Chinese is, we saw on Wednesday that Technorati was closed down in China, by the Chinese Government. The Chinese government are notorious for throwing dissidents in jail when they get information on them from the likes of Yahoo. Do you see how indexing people’s podcasts may land people in trouble as a result of the Chinese government finding the information from the podcasts very handily indexed for them on your site? - 20:55
And finally, hablas Español? - 22:49
Download the entire interview here
(10.8mb mp3).
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