Last Thursday I received an email from a friend, George Colombo, that pointed me to an article that Apple had filed a patent for "customized podcasts."  I was immediately surprised and dismayed, quite frankly, because my business partner, Matt Thompson, and I had actually developed the technology (we called it Modcast) and implemented it on our former podcast, The Cubicle Escape Pod, back in June 2005.  I wasn't miffed at Apple for filing the patent, though with very little research they could've figured out there was prior art, but I was upset because I started to have second thoughts and regrets about why we didn't push our concept harder.

Read more...