The Virtual Handshake

written by Peter Clayton:

I attended an Internet conference hosed by SG Cowen last Thursday in NYC - their first Internet conference since 2000, btw, — Kris Jacob, EVP of Business Development at Podshow told the audience that…
– currently 10m people listen to podcasts regularly
– there are 50m mp3 players in the US
– 150m mp3 enabled cell phones - US

and the kicker - 18-34 demographic are NOT listening to traditional radio (can”t imagine why) ;-) - of course, this age group is advertiser’’s sweet spot.

Ad agencies and advertisers are taking podcasting seriously - looking for ways to sponsor without being intrusive.

there was a lot of focus on search at the conference (John Battelle, author of “Search” and cofounding editor of Wired and founder of Industry Standard spoke) - consensus opinion - search is the “killer app” and the game is over - won by Google and Yahoo.

Cowen projected that Goggle’’s share price could hit $650! Also, they believe Google’’s spending on R&D and capital expenditures will eclipse MSN and Yahoo in 2006 - to 1.1b - they project MSN at $775m and Yahoo at $696m.

Another company that grabbed my attention is quigo.com - based in NYC - Mike Yavonditte is the CEO -