IPod Accessories

To provide NewsCasta.com visitors with the ability to kit themselves out with the latest MP3 players and accessories we've teamed up with our partners and added an accessories page.

check it out at www.newscasta.com

Sample newscasta jobs available for all

We've added a component to the home page of NewsCasta.com that provides links to the latest created NewsCasta podcasts.

We hope this will give people a flavour of what NewsCasta.com can provide.

NewsCasta.com's Beta1 phase up & running

The service is up and running on the web. We are limiting the number of users in this initial beta phase.

If you are interested in joining the beta trial please email us at beta1@newscasta.com your name and where you live and we will consider allowing you to register.

Interfacing with google news

Work has been progressing this week to ensure that the basic service of NewsCasta.com surpasses simple RSS to mp3 based podcasts. The premise of the service is to offer real news as audio podcasts as well as the ability to generate podcasts of existing RSS feeds. Google News provides RSS overviews of reputable real news services. Invaluable to any researcher.

To produce podcasts of news articles requires, not only the conversion of RSS feeds to audio but also the conversion, or reading, of linked web pages.

NewsCasta.com has a new algorithm specifically designed to get to the guts of an article rather that wasting your time by reading the page navigation and footer.

Be patient ... it will be available soon.

NewsCasta Beta

Development has been going well since my last post. The underlying NewsCasta engine has been completed and the user management facilities are mainly in place.
I believe that we'll be able to run the initial beta programme starting in a week or two.

This beta programme will run for up to 4 weeks during which time the number of user accounts will be capped and frequent code and user interface updates may occur. Documentation will also be limited during this period.
None of user accounts will accept payment during this time. NewsCasta jobs, or podcast access will not incur any costs.

There will be no guarantee that accounts or jobs initiated during the initial Beta programme will transfer over to the full service. We will, however, try to make the transition from Beta to the full service as painless as possible.

If you would like to be included in the programme, please send us an email to info@newscasta.com or post a comment here.

NewsCasta home page

The home page for NewsCasta is now in place. This is, and will be in the future, the home page to access the service once launched. So please bookmark.

What is NewsCasta.com

NewsCasta will be a service on the web to automatically read your news feeds into the right format for your favourite mp3 player. It will use Text To Speech (TTS) technologies to automatically convert RSS feeds into MP3s and make them available as podcasts.
It does this by reading RSS, passing the text through a text-to-speech engine to create MP3s that are then made available in another RSS feed in podcast format.

Imagine picking your ipod up in the morning before that trudge to work on public transport and finding the latest podcasts of news articles from your favourite web news sources.

You'll be able to share your podcasts or keep them private. This means you could publicise your blog in an audio format as well as the printed word. You'll be able to put a link on your website that takes your users to the latest podcasts from your site.

A beta should be available in a couple of weeks.