London financial freesheet City AM and Titan Outdoor have announced a partnership to offer a free mobile podcast, or ‘bluecast’, to commuters using London’s Liverpool St and Waterloo stations.

Starting today at London Waterloo, with Liverpool Street joining later in the week, Titan’s Transvision screens will broadcast a City AM promotion targeting at encouraging commuters to turn on the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones and download City PM, City AM’s daily five-minute business news podcast. The service will have the capacity to provide 150 Bluetooth downloads simultaneously.

American University Washington College of Law introduced podcasts with the arrival of the 2005 class, and after a school year of podcasting, the College is considers the program a success. To date, the 200+ episodes have been downloaded almost 65,000 times.

“The primary goal of WCL’s Office of Technology,” says Dean Claudio Grossman, “is to deliver event content, interviews with VIPs, and course material to students and faculty in many formats.”

WCL recognizes that, due to distance and time constraints, students cannot possibly attend all of the many events offered at WCL. Podcast speakers have included former President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia.

Electronica artist Ryuichi Sakamoto has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the risks of nuclear energy, featuring a podcast featuring free music tracks and videos by Sakamoto, Thomas Dolby and others.

The Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture opened for testing on March 31st, 2006. Less than two weeks later, 40 liters of radioactive water containing plutonium and uranium were spilled inside the plant.

The “Stop-Rokkasho” podcast features music, video, photos, art, information and interviews to help spread the word about both the Rokkasho plant and the dangers of reprocessing in general.

Sonica Audio Labs has introduced the VHPextreme audio workstation, a Windows XP machine powered by the Intel Pentium D965 Extreme Edition Dual Core Processor running at 3.7GHz per core, with 4MB of cache memory and with a 1066MHz Front Side Bus (FSB). In addition, the VHPextreme workstation incorporates Extreme XMS II DDR2-800MHz memory, SATA II and Quad Display support.The VHPextreme is configured with audio production in mind, shipping with customized BIOS and optimized Windows XP services.

Dunlop Tires is using video podcasting to reach auto enthusiasts. The podcasts are being used to deliver information about new products, the sport of drifting and other automotive sports.

“Enthusiasts are naturally drawn to the latest technologies in automotive, electronics, communication and tires, so it’s only natural that Dunlop would build a library of information and entertainment to help them make informed choices,” according to Dunlop brand planning manager Janice Consolacion. “It’s another way for us to build relationships with our target audience, the ‘in-the-know’ driver.”

PodOmatic, a podcasting service provider, has introduced a “Geo-IP” statistical tracking system for podcasters. The system lets podcasters map IP-based geographic locations for their podcast listeners.

When a podcast application downloads a podcast episode, it sends the listener’s IP address to the podcast host server. These IP addresses are logged by the server, and can be used to look up a geographic location for mapping purposes.

PodOmatic stats also can track the number of page views, feed views, unique visitors and subscribers to podcasts. PodOmatic’s system provides a breakdown of downloads by podcast client, unique visits to a podcaster’s web page and charts of activity over time.

A working example of the stats system is available at the PodOmatic site.

The Corporate Podcasting Summit, being held June 20 – 21 in San Francisco Bay, has announced its complete lineup of speakers, including enterprise podcasters and leading commentators.

The event, described as Enterprise Podcasting 101, is intended to provide podcasters and businesses the latest information on “the how, where and why of business podcasting.”

iriver has introduced the clix portable media player, a new media player that integrates with the just-released version of Windows Media Player 11 and the public beta of MTV Networks’ URGE digital music service.

At $199, the iriver clix offers a competitive feature set, including a 2GB memory capacity, a color display, digital FM tuner, enhanced photo viewing, video playback, and FlashLite game support.

“The combined integration of the iriver clix with WMP11 and the URGE digital music service offers consumers more choices for obtaining digital content,” said Jonathan Sasse, president and CEO of iriver America.

Podcast Generator is a free PHP script that lets users upload media files via a web form and automatically create an RSS 2.0 podcast feed. The script features web-based administration and a dynamic web page displaying new podcasts.

The script, maintained by Alberto Betella, is released as an open source application. The script was originally developed to implement the University of Bergamo (Italy) podcasting service.

Features:

• Supports ANY media filetype, mp3, ogg, mpg, mov, etc.
• XML feed generated is compatible with Juice and iTunes.
• Password protected web administration interface.
• Dynamic “All podcasts” and “Last n Podcasts” web pages showing title description of the file.
• Easy inclusion of the script in your webpages.

More information is available at the Podcast Generator page at Sourceforge.

The Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) is charging the recording industry with breaking earlier agreements with consumers, congress and courts. The RIAA is suing US satellite radio firm XM over the Inno, a device that lets users record satellite radio broadcasts to be listened to at a later time. According to the HRRC, “the recording industry has now, via lawsuit, labeled its best customers as pirates and sought unprecedented tools to use against them.”

“I have a long enough memory to be astonished at the suit filed yesterday. We worked in good faith with the music industry to help pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), based on personal assurances that I received that it would put an end to this sort of harassing lawsuit against private, noncommercial consumer conduct,” said HRRC Chairman Gary Shapiro.