Press Release
The Jerusalem Post Launches iPost Powered By Odiogo, A New Podcast Service That Allows Readers To
Become Listeners On Mobile Phones, iPods And MP3 Players
GSM WORLD CONGRESS, Barcelona, February 15, 2007 — The Jerusalem Post and Odiogo™ announced
today the launch of a new podcast service which allows end users to listen to the various information
streams of The Jerusalem Post's online edition directly
on their iPods™, MP3 players, PDAs, phones, or laptop computers.
All users need to do is click on the podcast button, which triggers the automatic download of sound
files directly to the user's device. To simplify the selection of the required information, users can
choose among a variety of available information feed categories: Front Page, Middle East News, Jewish
World News, Editorials or Opinion. The high fidelity MP3 files are produced with advanced artificial
intelligence technology and innovative text-to-speech algorithms that use the voice of a human speaker
to generate high fidelity and quality audio files.
According to Tzvi Harow, Director of Interactive Media at the Jerusalem Post, “The iPost service
allows our readers worldwide to access updated information about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish
world when they are at the gym, in the car, on the subway or anywhere else. We are very satisfied with
the user sign-ups experienced during the initial testing phases of the service.”
Odiogo's CEO Marc Kawam said, “We're very proud to announce the relationship with The Jerusalem
Post, one of our mainstream media partners.” According to Kawam, “It is a perfect illustration
of the bridge provided by our technology, linking text-content providers with the vast iPod and mobile
phone user community.”
How It Works: Odiogo™ Generates Podcasts of JPost.com Content
The Jerusalem Post, like
many publications on the Web, uses the standard distribution format, RSS. Odiogo monitors JPost feeds
and automatically creates for each news item small audio files using cutting-edge text-to-speech technology.
Unlike many of its predecessors, this new breed of artificial intelligence technology observes punctuation
and more natural speech patterns to provide a high fidelity listening experience, which the company
is continually fine-tuning.
Consumers subscribe to the audio-enriched news feed by just clicking a button displayed on the content
provider's site. Updated news items are automatically loaded each time the user's iPod™ is synchronized.
On mobile phones with a 3G or WiFi connection, mp3 files can be downloaded through a lightweight html
page provided by the service.
The iPost service can be reached at:
http://info.jpost.com/C006/Services/iPost/
About Odiogo (www.odiogo.com)
Founded in 2005 in San Francisco, California, Odiogo creates cutting edge software for mobilizing
and energizing content. Products include a groundbreaking new service that enables newspapers, magazines,
and blogs to automatically create vocal versions of their content. The Odiogo-produced sound files
can be listened on computers and mobile devices such as iPod™, MP3 readers, cellular phones,
etc.
About the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com)
Established as the ‘Palestine Post' in 1932, The Jerusalem Post is the number one news media outlet
covering Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world for 75 years. In 1995, the Post launched Jpost.com
and became one of the first newspapers in the world to go online. Today, Jpost.com provides up-to-the-minute
coverage of events in Israel to approximately 2 million unique monthly users from around the world.
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