Cartwright Reed

iofy will be exhibiting at the ALA in Jan '08

As the American Library Association (ALA) will be in our home town of Philadelphia for their Midwinter conference this January 11 to 14, we'll have the whole iofy team out to show our products. Ingram, our distribution partner, is courteously sharing their big booth with us this year. We'll be showing off the new iofy player and demonstrating download services for librarians, resellers and publishers.

We'll be giving a limited number of iofy players away with bestselling titles, so come by and say hello!

Announcing our new Player at CES

We will be announcing our new iofy player at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 7, 2008. We've been working on this player for a long time and I'm very proud of it - we've responded to just about every request for new features from our previous player, including USB, MP3 support, better navigation, better audio quality - the list goes on and on. Of course, it does a great job playing audiobooks on SD cards, but now you'll be able to make your own chips, upgrade firmware and search in audio using tag clouds like this. Stay tuned for more!

We'll be announcing the new player with our hardware partner, GeneralPlus, a division of Sunplus, the manufacturer whose processors power many low cost consumer electronics and smart toys. (Remember the Furby? That's them.)

The CES is a great show - reminds me of my favorite quote from William Gibson: "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." There are always new companies showing devices that feel like visitors from a place a little further down the road.

First Post

I founded iofy three years ago to explore the opportunities of dynamic, device-independent and vendor-independant digital content. As we built a successful company managing 12,000 titles from major publishers, we've learned a lot about what the spoken audio industry needs. Now, we're making use of what we've learned by introducing the iofy platform.

I'm passionate about spoken audio -- you have audiobooks which begin as regular text, specialized audio, such as speeches, training audio, and sermons, which are more like performances, and podcasting, free-form audio that is brand new and yet as old as fireside conversations.

Although I've been blogging consistently since 2003, the blogs were always part of one skunkwork operation or another. This one will be out in the open, so please be patient as I figure this out!