As an undergraduate computer science student and potential start-up founder I am always browsing Eventbrite for upcoming events in tech. Given that I live in Oakland, there are always events right across the bridge in San Francisco that I can attend on the weekends. I usually come across hackathons or other panels like the Tech Inclusion Conference, but a few weeks ago I came across Collabspace SF. Here is what I read;

Podcasting has become the Next Big Thing for the second time in our current golden age of audio. But how can great audio startups survive and thrive? That will be the focus of our Collab/Space San Francisco workshop on September 12, 2015. The workshop is sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and hosted by KQED. It will be an all-day, hands-on workshop focused on audio innovation.

I knew immediately that I wanted to go, I love podcasts. I am a commuter student to Davis and on my way I listen to a few of my favorites like Start-Up from Gimlet Media or Serial. But I am a new podcast listener and once I listened to seasons 1 + 2 of Startup for the 3rd time, I was ready for something new. I figured I would go to this event and learn all about new podcasts that I could explore (check out: PostBourgie & #GoodMuslimBadMuslim) but I did not expect an experience similar to an actual episode of Start-Up, where I would get to speak with founders about business models and scaling up, or talk about how to get new users for existing platforms, or think about revolutionizing the audio software that is currently being used. Collabspace was eye-opening and sparked a new seed of innovation within me.

The conference was located in the Mission district of San Francisco close to the 16 Mission street BART station at the KQED building. A light breakfast of pastries, orange juice, all you can eat fruit platters and endless coffee awaited arriving guests. In the room you could find graduate students from UCD, UCSF, Stanford and CCSF working on undergraduate degrees in computer science or PhD’s in orthopaedics and intending to make a podcast about bones. There were many start-up founders waiting to present and a few audio technicians and podcast media creators. After a cool ice-breaker/ meet and greet we listened to a presenter from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute who mentioned how great the work is at KQED and the accelerator program Matter. which you should look into if you have a start-up and are interested in taking your company to the next level.

Next we heard the start-ups pitch and were able to identify problem areas, to think of solutions later on. The first presentor Audiosear.ch plans to revolutionize podcasting by allowing users to search what their friends are listening to and be recommened to other podcasts. They have a large database full of information about podcasts and how users listen. Hopefully this API will integrate with i-tunes or the google play store so that podcasting can become more interactive and the process of finding interesting content can become easier. Podclear allows podcast creators to use a skype like service to remotely record content with premium quality audio. This company is aiming to solve a very specific industry problem. People are putting out content with background noise and fuzzy audio, but this service makes it a lot easier. Many creators in the room were very excited to start using this service and they charges by the episode not by the minute!

After listening to all of the presenters we had lunch and then chose a company whose issues were interesting and broke out into groups to dialog about solutions. I choose to join the group of critics for the company Spokenlayer, a digital audio platform enabling media brands to tap into the power of audio. Spokenlayer turns written media into professionally voiced audio and distributes the content. This company was interesting to me because I didn’t understand the problem the founder was facing. This product would be wonderful for media publishing companies to use so that subscribers could listen on the go. One of the main issues with text in the digital age is that it is inaccessible, half of the world is illiterate and the other half do not have the time to exclusively devote to text based content. Enabling users to listen on their MP3 devices would allow more people to engage. It seems that certain companies either do not want to purchase the product, or they don’t see the need for it. The group explored so many ways for this company to expand. We talked about Spokenlayer working with CengageBrain, the college campus bookstore, to create podcast versions of academic textbooks so that commuter students could study on the way to class. The founder mentioned the complexity of getting large companies to understand the omnipotence of Spokenlayer but I suppose there is not enough buzz about the service to get companies to pay.

All in all I am excited about the future of podcasting and I think that it could be used as a platform to enable communication globally something like a free newspaper for everyone. There are some issues we are facing globally like access to the internet and the technology which would enable one to create a podcast. Many start-ups at Collabspace were working on making it easier to create content and share it with the world. I would also like to encourage students who may be reading this to check out Eventbrite and attempt to find events you are interested in attending, don’t let finances limit you from attending events. There are volunteer opportunities and many event coordinators have a student division who will help with promotional codes to subsidize the cost of attending the event. I would like to thank members of KQED for helping me attend the Collabspace event.

This event has opened my eyes to so much content and ways to improve the podcasting environment. Developers are needed in this field to make software that is easy to use and create platforms for communication among listeners. There are also many ways to integrate the radio space with the podcasting space and figure out how to mesh these together so that listeners can create a personalized experience. NPR one has done something like this with their podcast radio station app. The audio field also needs creators, people who have not yet told their stories to speak out and share. I wonder if any of the recent refugees have started a podcast, that could be the next Serial, the entire world is covering that story. The opportunities are limitless.

By: Alivia Blount