Several forward thinking professors and even some whole universities are leveraging podcasts for learning purposes. Lectures are being recorded and even pre-recorded so that students have more flexibility in the learning process. In some cases they may not even need to go to class at all.

UC Berkely has even joined Stanford University in making their lectures available through iTunes and at no cost! Learning with Podcasting, what a concept. Maybe there is an application of Podcasting to learning business skills?

Check out these other articles to learn more…

Higher Education through Coursecasting

Campus Extends Reach to iPod Generation

Stanford, It’s Not Just for Smart People Anymore

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One thing about small business owners, they are always looking for ways to gain a competitive edge and get more efficient and control costs.

There are so many technologies available today that staying up-to-date with what is available and how to make decisions around technologies can consume a good chunk of your time.

This conversation with Dan Hoffman and Anita Campbell is designed to shorten your invested time around the technology called VOIP or Voice Over IP or Voice Over Internet Protocol to less than 60 minutes.

Just imagine… You can get your voicemails in your email box, you can make a small office operate like a large office (at least from a telephony perspective), you can implement and utilize virtual employees and service providers all like they are in your physical office, and so much more.

On top of the new features that may be valuable to you there is a good chance that the total cost of telephony for your business may actually decline. After all with the ever declining price of technology shouldn’t phone technology be following that some cost curve?

Read more and listen to: Voice over IP (VoIP) in Plain English

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Anita Campbell and I started Small Business Trends Radio in November of 2004. At the time is was almost a hobby like experimental project to see if we could make it work. Could we get anyone to listen? Would anyone want to be a guest?

In the 18 months since that time we have learned a great deal and have even defined a first phase of a business model (how we make money), defined basic processes it takes to operate the business and evolved to the point of doing a new show every week. We have a discovered that there is an audience for our content ideas, there is a way to make money at it and most importantly what type of effort it takes to make it work.

So as we look into the future what will happen with the concept of ‘Podcasting’ how big will this thing grow and how do we take advantage of our early success in the industry. One study I found that focused on the future of Podcasting showed these amazing statistics:

• 5 million Podcast users in 2005
• Average user: 6 downloads/month
• Average user: 6 hours/month
• >20% listened via an MP3 file
• Projected listeners in 2010: 63 Million

Wow, 63 million Podcast listeners, that is a large potential market that we can serve. Of course we believe the key to ‘The Future of Podcasting” at least for us is the content. If your content is good, listeners will like it and keep listening and wanting more. As they say, content is king.

When I work on business plans and market penetration I always like to set a goal of 1% market share. Lets see that would be about 50,000 listeners in 2005 and 630,000 in 2010. That is both a scary and terrific number. We are at about 25,000 listeners for the month of March so let’s say .5% of market share. Not bad, half way to an initial goal.

If you have ideas on how we can grow our market share or how we can bring you content that best meets your needs then leave us a comment. We are an ‘open source’ model for listener feedback and ideas.

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You know you need to insure that you and your employees have the right technology tools to do the job well. But sometimes you feel as though you are a little behind the curve in knowing what are today’s choices, how do you make good decisions around technology when it changes so fast. Most of us don’t have the time to keep up with the steep learning curve.

We understand and we can help. Anita has as her guest on this conversation Michael Dees of esecurity-direct whose businesses value is helping you learn how to make good decisions around technology across their entire lifespan.

The really good news is that there is terrific technology available at lower cost than ever that you will learn how to take advantage of.

Considering a technology purchase? Then you have got to listen to this information packed conversation BEFORE you go any further.

Go to read more and listen to: Hiring New Employees — The Technology They Need

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This year I will be speaking at the BlogHer conference on the subject of podcasting and Internet radio.

The BlogHer Conference is a conference for women who blog (although men are welcome to attend, too). It is being held July 28 - 29, 2006.

I will be speaking on Day One in a special podcasting session with Susan Kitchens and Nicole Simon — both of whom I am looking forward to meeting. My contribution will be in the advanced session, talking about best practices and the promotion and distribution aspects of podcasting.

Registration information here. Hope to see you there!

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Have you ever wanted to start a business, but then come smack up against the reality that you have absolutely no money?

That very situation faced Gary Schoeniger in 1987.

He was broke. He had no money. He wasn’t even sure he had any marketable skills.

But one day he got into his battered 1972 Dodge with a borrowed ladder strapped to the roof, and went door to door offering to clean out gutters.

From gutter cleaning and handyman jobs, to home remodeling, to building single family homes — eventually his business morphed into a multimillion dollar construction management business.

Review show notes and listen to “How to Start a Business with No Money.”

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Finally someone has come out with a guide to finding, subscribing and listening to Podcasts on iTunes. I have never found iTunes all that easy to navigate to find the content I am interested in. Read on and then check out the link to this iTunes Podcast guide. You will even find the Small Business Trends Radio program in the Business Directory of iTunes.

The iTunes Music Store puts thousands of free podcasts at your fingertips. To find them, select Music Store in the iTunes source column; then click “Podcasts” to journey Inside the Music Store. Or, here’s another way to get there: select the little podcasts icon in the Source column, then click the arrow next to “Podcast Directory” at the very bottom of the iTunes window. Once you’ve downloaded or subscribed to a podcast, click the Music Store button to return to the home page of the Store.

Search podcasts by popularity

Of course, before you subscribe, you’ll want to find podcasts that appeal to your interests. And you have several ways of tracking them down. For example, you can tell iTunes to find them for you. Although you could use the iTunes search box in the upper right-hand corner of the jukebox window, iTunes provides a search window specifically for podcasts in the left column. You can use it to search by podcast title, podcast authors, or by all podcasts. And once it returns a list of podcasts that meet your criteria, you order your results by popularity. Just control-click or right-click the column headers and select “Popularity” to see the most popular podcasts that contain your search term.

Click HERE to read the rest of this terrific guide…

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