James Cridland: The latest from our daily newsletter at podnews.net with Magellan
AI.
Chinese podcasting company Ximalaya is reportedly to be acquired
by tech conglomerate Tencent
for $2.4 billion. According to Bloomberg, Spotify bought Anchor
for just $140 million.
Well, Ximalaya, which claimed more than 303 million monthly
active users in 2023,
spent $100 million on a US expansion in 2019, although it may
not have done.
The company tried to float on the New York Stock Exchange, but
didn't,
and was going to float in Hong Kong, but hasn't.
Himalaya's highest profile employee in the US was Peter Vincer,
who made the headlines in June 2021, though he denied the story.
Now called Notorious LLC, his company hasn't posted on socials
for the last five months.
One of his last posts, a picture of Vincer dressed as Superman.
Clip: Easy, miss. I've got you.
You've got me? Who's got you?
James Cridland: Ah, it's like a greatest hits.
Spotify quietly launched a trending podcasts chart a few weeks
ago,
designed to spotlight the shows that are getting people talking
right now.
Available in many different countries, you can see it at the
Spotify podcast charts website,
or you can access it in JSON.
It's quite similar in intention to the Apple podcast chart,
which is also mostly based on trending information,
and for bragging rights, it'll be much better,
since newly launched shows should rocket to the top.
PodLibre has been launched.
The project is to build an all-in-one, open-source, privacy-first
desktop app
to help make podcasts.
Run by Benjamin Bellamy's Adores,
It has funding from NLNet.
The New Zealand Podcast Summit is less than two weeks away in
central Auckland.
It's a day of networking, sharing and collaboration.
You can buy tickets from a link you'll find in our show notes
and our newsletter at podnews.net.
It also includes lunch, as well as morning and afternoon tea.
Deepcast has launched DeepChat,
a method of chatting with podcasts using an AI knowledge bot.
You can try it out by chatting with the Pod News Weekly Review
today.
We'll link to that.
What's the definition of a podcast came out pretty well.
Hindenburg Pro has updated its transcription tool to now work
with 99 transcription languages.
You'll need to check for updates today to ensure transcription
keeps working.
You should be updated to version 2.05.
We also hear that if you're a Mac user, it's much faster.
For podcasters in the UK and Ireland, the Independent Podcast
Awards are currently open for entry.
This year, there's also the Independent Podcast Forum, too, on
June the 16th in London.
Podscribe's dashboard has three new campaign attribution
features designed to reduce repetitive workflow
and give new ways to analyse and report on data.
And Vox Media announced a new column and upcoming podcast from
Tefi Pessoa.
It's a Monday, so time for some tech stuff.
And podcast analytics service OP3 has a live feed showing what
people are listening to right now.
And using that data, a coder has created a website called Earport,
which plots every listener on the map.
And you can click each listener to hear the podcast they're
downloading right now.
It's very cool.
As part of that, it's worth looking at the massive numbers of
people
apparently listening to this very podcast in Malaysia and
Indonesia.
It's a bug with Google News, and we've still heard nothing more
from their team on how they intend to fix it.
It's costing us hundreds of dollars a month.
So if you know anyone senior at Google, we'd appreciate a
contact, because our contacts are going nowhere.
And the revised location tag has been approved for the podcast
namespace.
The full specification and implementation document should be
updated shortly, so we'll make a thing of it next week, if we
remember.
Podcast news from Wondery, Death County PA is new today on Open
RSS, a gripping new investigative documentary that delves into
the shocking and mysterious deaths of dozens of inmates in the Dauphin
County Prison in Pennsylvania.
Creators from True Fans is a new weekly podcast from True Fans,
which launches today.
Each week, Sam Sethi and Claire Waite Brown will showcase
independent podcast and music creators.
They'll also discuss features recently released in True Fans
that will help creators monetize their fandoms.
The Middle East is a huge, ever-growing business ecosystem, and
new podcast, Flavors of Ambition, talks to the industry pioneers,
global investors, and visionary leaders shaping the region's
future.
In Down the Road, Simon France tells a business story through
the lens of a life story, starting with the people who are down
the road from where he lives,
which is a small coastal town three hours north of Sydney,
Australia, called Forster, or, if you prefer it better that way,
about nine hours south of where I'm recording right now.
If you haven't been there, apparently it's one of the most
beautiful places on the planet, although it is in New South
Wales.
Lame Stream is new today in Australia from two formerly
mainstream journalists, Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell.
The show plans to interrogate the critical questions we face in
an increasingly complex media landscape, and will be available
in both audio and video format.
It's with Acast and Purposing.
He's back for a new season with Will Butler-Adams, the CEO of Brompton
Bicycle.
As the show's first guest, it features the people driving change
inside some of the world's most recognizable brands.
And this podcast is sponsored by Magellan AI. Planning and
insight equals podcast growth.
See how Bol and Branch did it and discover what worked with Magellan
AI. There's a link in the show notes.
And that's the latest from our newsletter. To read all the
stories and subscribe for free, we're at podnews.net.