Interesting Vendors at New Media Expo 2008

A great reason to attend trade show conferences is to meet the vendors in the expo hall.  It’s not just about getting free pens, t-shirts, and cool pens.  (Really Ty, it’s not!)

Personally, I like learning about new companies I’ve never heard of.  In fact, I try to gather materials the first day and research them on the Internet when I go back to my hotel the first night.  If anything is interesting, I go back the next day and talk with them.

Here are some of the interesting companies at New Media Expo 2008 this year.  I have added my comments for each.  I bolded the ones I found to be the most noteworthy.

TechSmith – They make Snagit (screen capture) and Camtasia (screen recording) software.  They are the best at what they do.  Their latest project is Jing (beta).  Check it out.  It’s free.

Shure – They make great microphones.  Their catalog is extremely insightful and helpful.  They have a nice online guide to podcasting.

Tubemogul – The provide online video distribution and analytics.  In other words, you upload your video to them and they send it to YouTube, Viddler, etc.  Several presenters spoke very favorably about them.

All voices – An open global community of reporting news from anywhere in the world.  This is amazing.  They aggregate video worldwide from all news channels, both amateur and professional.  They then have a proprietary system that ranks which ones are best. 

NOTE:  Allvoices is like NPR meets Google meets Digg.  Amazing stuff.  You have to poke around the site a little to really get it.  But when you do, it’s cool.

Noble Transcription Service – They transcribe your podcast.  (Check Google, I think several companies do this.)

Mogulus – They give you everything you need to launch your own 24/7 television station.  You can have multiple cameras recording in different locations and switch between them online.

These guys are working with Qik so that you can have multiple users with streaming cell phone cameras and switch between them to create a seamless program.  Incredible!  Oh, and it’s all FREE!

Story Bids – They auction off product placement in-video advertising.

Sound Dogs – Their website may be a little weak, but they have a tremendous amount of sounds available.  They gave us free CDs.

Stickam – Live broadcasting over the web.  (This is what Leo LaPorte uses for TWIT live.)  They have a great new service called PayPerLive which allows you to record a live event and collect a ticket price for users to watch it online.

UStream – Live broadcasting over the web.

Veotag – This is a great idea for instructional or information video.  It allows you to outline what is in the video so that anyone can skip to the section they want.

Blog Talk Radio – An easy to use web-based service that allows you to use an ordinary telephone to create free, live, call-in radio shows.  They are then archived as podcasts.

Viddler – I don’t know that I saw them at the expo hall, but they were one of the most talked about companies there.  Use Viddler to show your videos on your own site.  They allow you to brand with your own logo and player.  But don’t forget to also distribute using tubemogul (see above).