German Podcast Company Gets $10 Mill in Funding
Amit Chowdhry | Friday October 20, 2006 | 510 views
spodradio, a Liquid Air Lab company created in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg Germany announced yesterday that they had received $10 million in 2nd round funding from Benchmark Capital Europe and Baytech Venture Capital.
Interestingly, spodradio was sued by Apple early this year. “The injunction states that the company must stop marketing its services under the brand spodradio, alleging the inclusion of the word ‘pod’ infringes Apple’s trademark [source].” Although spodradio was sued by Apple for using the word ‘pod’ in their title, a barrage of companies and organizations with the word ‘pod’ in their are being created such as Fonpods, L.A. Podcasters, Orange County Podcasters, Podango, Podcast Ready, PodKive, PodTrac, and Podzinger.
Baytech Venture Capital is a Munich, Bavaria Germany based company and backed up spodradio with $2.4 million in the first round of funding. Benchmark’s total investment capacity is $1.43 billion. Benchmark Capital Europe is based in London and the company headquarters are based in Menlo Park, CA USA. Benchmark clients include RedHat, Juniper Networks, and eBay.
Although the iPod has sparked a culture with many people, spodradio enables users to download music to their phones which may eliminate the need for having an iPod. With the new round of funding, Liquid Air Labs will be enabling spodradio to expand into other potential international markets.Â
Just by doing a simple search on your search engine of choice, you will notice that a plethora of companies are starting to support podcasts on their websites such as NPR. According to Wikipedia, “The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary declared ‘podcasting’ the 2005 word of the year, defining the term as ‘a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.’” This new investment into spodradio reinforces the notion that the podcasting market is huge.
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