Our Bureau

Bangalore , Oct 21

YAHOO!'S new podcasting service comes with a `Made in India' tag. Engineers at Yahoo's development centre in Bangalore have created the new podcasting service being offered globally.

Podcasting is creating media files for download to digital multimedia players. Netizens can now distribute their audio and video files with the help of a podcast service provider such as podcasting.net.

Podcasts vary in topics, ranging from news to favourite radio programme. With this technology, users can listen to news using their desktop players, as well as download it to their multimedia gadgets.

Podcasting is a convenient audio and video distribution channel with a large potential. There is a growing market need to find, share and access podcasts.

According to technology analyst Mr Marc Freedman, The Diffusion Group, by 2010 there will be 56.8 million users of podcasting.

Yahoo has just released the beta version of Yahoo! Podcasts. Consumers can find, listen to, rate and review online audio programs at http://podcasts.yahoo.com and on the Yahoo! Next Web site.

Yahoo! Podcasts integrates with desktop media players, including Apple's iTunes and Windows Media Player. They can also be downloaded to MP3 players such as the iPod, iRiver, Dell DJ and Creative Zen, said the company's release.

According to Dr Prasad Ram, CTO, Yahoo Software Development India, engineers here have been working on latest technologies such as vertical search. Vertical search offers Internet users the ability to narrow down their search in verticals such as travel, real estate, shopping and audio, he said.

Audio search is the most sophisticated of vertical searches. It incorporates large-scale feeds, sophisticated matching heuristics, accurate extraction of multi-media content from Web crawls, and predictive relevance and ranking to accommodate a variety of parameters including popularity, keywords and download locations.

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