Podcasting on the news

The news of Channel 2 in Israel had a short piece on podcasting last Saturday. They featured a short introduction to the phenomenon, the TCast, a short talk with Izhar Ashdot, and a podcast "addict" (hmmm... sounds familiar to me :-) ). Podcasting will become mainstream sooner or later, and I'm glad to see it catching up in Israel too. We still have a lot of issues to solve here, though. The language (ahm) is a barier both on the content side and on the ways of promotion and distribution. And iTunes - which in other countries bring a lot of mainstream listeners - is not common in Israel at all.

Reverse Billing

The idea was simple: Take an mptrip, go visit Jerusalem or Mount Carmel or Metzada. Where-ever. In the end of the tour, we offer you to leave us a 'tip' by sending an SMS with the amount you wish to donate to mptrips.com. Donate only if you enjoyed your trip. 100% of your donation goes to our group of dedicated tour guides - in order to fund production of more mptrips - for your enjoyment. Simple, clean, convenient. They even gave a nice name to it - "Reverse Billing". There are even companies that take care of everything. Really nice. The only problem is that only 35%-39% of your donation actually gets to us, after the cellular companies take most of it, and then the billing company some. Don't get me wrong, I think they deserve a decent payment, but compared to other places in the world, it does sound a bit high to me. I guess that with time we'll get to the rates that the credit card companies charge (~4%?), but until it'll get to be at least close to this - we'll have to look for other solutions.

We're not up and running yet, but....

We're currently working on our first productions (In Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem). In the mean time, we're setting up things like a feed, some content, decent statistics, servers, hebrew support, testing, blogging tool (This thing is temporary, we'll probably start to use WordPress as soon as we'll have a host) and the such. Stay tuned.