Odiogo launches Talking Netvibes powered by Odiogo, the first app that makes iPhones read personal news selections from Netvibes Dashboards

New York, July 20, 2011. Odiogo, the leading provider of cloud-based audio solutions on the go, has released in partnership with Netvibes, the global leader in dashboard intelligence, the ‘Talking Netvibes powered by Odiogo’ iPhone application. This app allows Netvibes users to browse their entire dashboards, tabs, and widgets to view and, most importantly, to listen to any story. Social sharing features also allow the user to share articles via email, Twitter or Facebook.

Marc Kawam, CEO of Odiogo says, “The information overload drives users to seek ways to access information in ‘eyes-busy’ situations, for example when driving, exercising and cooking. The Odiogo technology combined with Netvibes dashboards, allows users to create their personalized audio news bulletin with the news sources that they trust. Also, the audio feature proves itself to be extremely convenient for visually impaired users or for those experiencing difficulties reading on a small screen, as well as for language learners”.

“Allowing partners and third party providers such as Odiogo to connect with the Netvibes environment via a set of secured APIs, is at the cornerstone of our strategy. We are the universal platform that lets you Dashboard Everything,” said Freddy Mini, CEO of Netvibes “We salute Odiogo’s initiative to provide to our large community of both individual users and Fortune 500 brands, with an innovative and convenient way to access the content of their Netvibes dashboards on the go.”

The application is available on the Apple Store (http://bit.ly/TalkingNetvibes) for $2.99. A 6-month subscription is included with the purchase of the application. After the 6-month period, users can renew their service for another 6 months from within the app.

About Odiogo (http://www.odiogo.com)

Odiogo is a pioneer in the ‘media shifting’ space and is the leading provider of audio and vocalization services on the go. Odiogo provides a cloud-based intelligent and automated bridge that links text-content providers (mainstream media, internet news sites, and bloggers) with mobile phone and MP3 enabled device users (e.g. iPhone, iPod, tablets, other portable media players, PCs, etc.). Odiogo enables content providers to quickly and automatically generate audio from textual content, allowing consumers to easily ‘listen to’ their favorite online news/information on any device. The Odiogo solution is cloud-based and can be deployed on content sites very quickly.

Contact: [email protected]

About Netvibes (http://business.netvibes.com)
Founded in 2005, Netvibes pioneered dashboard publishing, user personalization and universal Web apps (UWA). Today, Netvibes is the leading dashboard intelligence platform for the real-time Web.

For consumers, Netvibes.com is the most awarded dashboard engine that helps millions of people around the world instantly dashboard everything that matters to them most. For organizations and enterprises, Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence solutions transform the chaotic real-time Web into tangible business information, expert knowledge and automated business processes.

Netvibes powers dashboard intelligence and Web apps for more than 1,500+ of the world’s leading brands, interactive agencies, government organizations, non-profits and enterprises-serving more than half a billion Web apps every month. Netvibes has offices in Paris, London and San Francisco.

Media Contact:
Vincent Chang
[email protected]

Over the last months, we’ve been busy putting together an extention to our service that will please a lot of the Odiogo users community…

Stay tuned!

Over the last few years, many industry experts and analysts have published reports on the future of newspapers. In May ’09, BBC’s Stephen Evans dedicated one of the daily episodes of Business Daily Today to this topic. The whole podcast is very interesting; we were particularly captivated by one of Evans’ guests, Roger Pary who is the former CEO of the international division of Clear Channel. On the audio media Pary says: We love getting information through our ears (…) it actually replicates one of the key human senses which is hearing (…) the use of audio material has a very very solid future…

Needless to say, we approve those views which sound like… music to our ears!
It seems the BBC doesn’t keep an archive of the past programs. Short of finding a link to the full podcast, here’s an excerpt of the interview © BBC.

Mashable’s Doriano “Paisano” Carta published this week-end another of his popular HOW TO: articles. In his post titled HOW TO: Convert Your Blog Into a Podcast on iTunes for Free, Paisano provides a detailed step-by-step guide for Text-to-Speech conversion using Odiogo. The author stresses the added value brought to the visually impaired and also to readers with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. As a demonstration of the ease of use and set-up, Paisano helped Rachel from Why Not Rachel set-up Odiogo on her blog.

After detailing the plethora of features provided by Odiogo and listing other players in the space, the author concludes as follows:

Providing greater accessibility to your content makes a great deal of sense for several reasons. It not only gives your readers more ways to experience your blog, but it also allows many others to enjoy your work that otherwise couldn’t do so. Text-to-speech technology continues to improve with time, so look for this feature to spread across the blogosphere, slowly but surely as people realize that the web isn’t just for viewing but for hearing too.

See also, the discussion thread inspired by this post on mashable, especially Rachel’s comment:

You have no idea how wonderful, and liberating adaptive tech has been for people with print disabilities! I’m really grateful to Pai for helping to make my site more accessible…

The WordPress MU Administrator needs to install the plugin as follows:

1. Click menu Site Admin > Options
2. Make sure option Plugins is checked, if not, check the option and click Update Options
3. Download the Odiogo Listen Button WordPress Plugin
4. Upload directory odiogo_listen_button to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory via FTP

The instructions to be provided for bloggers to to activate Odiogo on their blogs are:

1. Sign-up freehere
2. Login to your WordPress admin account
3. Click menu Plugins and click Activate for Odiogo Listen Button
4. Click Settings > Odiogo Listen Button
5. Enter your Odiogo Feed ID specified in your Odiogo Activation Email and click Save
6. Click Design > Widgets and click Add for Odiogo Subscribe Button
7. Click Save Changes

WBIR-TV from the Gannett group ran this story on Odiogo’s deployment on the WBIRTV.com site.
Enjoy!

This short ‘how-to’ video shows how easy it is to deploy the Odiogo widget on a TypePad blog.
Stay tuned as more videos are on the way!

Give your TypePad blog voice … and legs! from Odiogo on Vimeo.

mojoPortal, is an open source web site framework and content management system written in C# that runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under Mono on Linux or Mac OS X.

Its latest release includes a tight integration with Odiogo: mojo users just need to sign-up to the Odiogo service and insert their Odiogo feed ID in the settings page:

Once both fields are set, voil! the Listen Button shows under each post’s title.

We’re happy to announce the availability of the popular ListenButton functionality for Squarespace blogs. Please follow the instructions below:

1. Go to your Squarespace Journal (Blog)
2. Click edit section html on the sidebar
3. Select Raw HTML from the drop-down list
4. Copy and paste the code below in the textbox. Make sure to replace FEED_ID by your Odiogo Feed ID
5. Click Save & Close

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://widget.odiogo.com/odiogo_js.php?feed_id=FEED_ID&platform=squarespace&code=1&show_sub_button=1″ type=”text/javascript”></script>

Good news for iPhone and iPod Touch owners: The January 2008 update (aka firmware 1.1.3) includes support for the lyrics option. With this feature, Odiogo users can visualize on their device the text content of an article or blog post of an Odiogo feed. This is helpful for those who want to quickly browse through a story before reading it.

More on this feature in a previous post.