UPDATE 13th March 2009 (at the top) Audioboo is now live at the App Store: http://snurl.com/dpx9j

Since our product pages are sometimes less than insightful about what they do, I thought I’d try out writing blog posts about them. And the first one up is our newest - AudioBoo, launched in partnership with our friends at 4IP.

AudioBoo has some interesting roots. We were doing some work last summer with the now defunct radio initiative from Channel 4, 4Radio. Dan Heaf was their (quaintly termed) new media chap and we began to have some interesting chats about how to tag audio data at source and then get it into the cloud where people could in effect create their own radio shows. Behind all these ideas was some serious stuff that I’ll maybe be able to talk about sometime. But in effect it meant that we started to dabble around these ideas in code.

We also talked with the venerable Tim Wright of XPT fame about the ability to create new forms of location based audio experiences uses all the technologies currently sprouting up. He had previously done some very interesting work on personalised audio experiences around war memorials.

Then 4Radio went down the pan, along with much of the economy. Dan moved over to 4IP as their London commissioner (by the way, a lovely picture of him here). And we pitched a prototype version of what turned out to be AudioBoo.

The essence of the approach was this. Innovation in audio online has been dominated by music. Podcasts are innovative only in their form of delivery. What we were interested in was the production & distribution of audio. We didn’t care or have a clue about what kind of audio that was. We saw value in having a publishing process and a platform that had the potential to do for the spoken word what Flickr did for images and Youtube did for video. That could be local journalists, twitter style musings, lectures, babies singing or a word of the day from President Obama. Geo-location on the iPhone would also give walking tours, restaurant, reviews and more.

And because we have no idea what people are going to use it for, we’re working on a API to allow everyone else to do the things we haven’t thought of. It isn’t ready yet but when it is we will hopefully see some pretty interesting examples of ways that people can use the platform.

For the tech savvy, the web framework is Rails and storage is delivered through Amazon S3. For everyone else there is a walkthrough here or some pictures below:

The “Boos we like page”. We thought it would be nice to have a highlights of the day section.

A list of someone’s own Boos

Playback and associated image

Viewing by location

And, to finish, here’s a well known Lord of the realm we captured at a recent Channel 4 bash: