Starting May 1st we are asking that users pay an annual fee of $25 to use PodServe via PayPal.  We certainly won’t make any money with this fee (if every active user paid we would generate $50,000 per year, hardly enough to pay someone to provide basic support), but it will help defray the costs of operating the service and allow us to continue to use PodServe as a marketing tool for Big in Japan.  We have a plan to make PodServe better:

Our plan: a) add additional dedicated servers and a larger SAN, b) integrate updated code base to PodServe code for increased stability, c) add statistics, and d) provide basic support to users.

Interested?  Go ahead and send $25 via PayPal to sales@biggu.com, providing your user name with the payment.  Alternatively, you can wait until April and signup on the site.  Remember, if you are not going ‘Pro’ you will need to move your podcast before May 1st.

Is this a good deal?  If PodServe works for you it is a great deal.  If you need additional features like a flash creator, http://www.hipcast.com might be a better fit.  They have three plans ranging from $49.97 to $119.40 per year.

The Fancast is live on the Nip/Tuck site, or you can access it directly here. We’re really proud of this project, and would love to get your feedback. It’s running smoothly and we don’t expect any problems. If you have any feedback, please drop us a comment in this thread. We’d love to hear what you think!

We need to remember that much of our ‘paying business’ comes as a result of the free tools we launched last year.  I personally will make an effort to keep our free tools.  In the meantime we will take the praise from INC and redouble our efforts.  Nice that we are sitting between two heavy-hitters like Yahoo and Six Apart.  Here is the scoop:

For most companies conference calls are a fact of life.  Many of us sit in our office on several conference calls per week at peek work hours.  We could be connecting with partners and associates, but instead we are forced to listen to boring calls that often have nothing to do with us.  Podcasting offers a great way for businesses to allow their workers to timeshift conference call information.  Imagine being able to listen to a weekly conference call on the way home from work or being able to fast forward through parts not on topic to your function?  What if you could then use your cell phone to insert your own thoughts into a feed?  Alex details these features in his post titled, “Scoble is right, podcasting is inefficient!”

Podcasting is a great tool that can be used to save time or to waste time – its all in the application!

Alex did a great job of talking about PodServe and all the Big in Japan apps today at the Under the Radar event held at the Microsoft HQ in Silicon Valley. We got some kind words from Mssrs. Arrington & Clavier and had lots of good conversations with companies interested in hearing more after the presentation.

The best feedback so far is that PodServe was a ‘Best in Show’ winner after all the audience votes were tallied tonight. Not only did we ‘win’ the love of the crowd at our panel on podcasting, but PodServe was one of the top vote getters among all the apps demo’d today. Said one respondent: “I’d buy that.” Now that’s what we like to hear. Thanks, Debbie Landa and all IBD Network team for inviting us out to present. We also did an interview with Irina Slutsky, which I’ll link to once posted.

Rock on, Big in Japan team.

Very cool of Debbie Landa to invite us to show off PodServe at the Under the Radar event in Mountain View tomorrow. Alexander & I will be talking about how we ended up working on all the Big in Japan apps to support our work here at Weblogs Work, how PodServe has become popular with corporate clients who want customizable podcast tools for internal communications and other uses, and how PodServe’s telephony integration makes it super simple for anyone to create and publish new audio. Mike Arrington, Jeff Clavier and Zander Lurie will be giving us some input, so we’ll report back about what they have to say.