ReadWriteWeb

In May of last year, Sonic Mountain bought the assets of Evan William's podcast directory Odeo (and then promptly renamed itself Odeo). In September, the new company bought out its chief rival, FireAnt, for about $400,000. The company planned to launch in December a public beta of its new software that merged Odeo's podcasting tools with FireAnt's desktop media player (which aggregated video blog feeds). Odeo obviously missed that date, but company COO Eric Rupert says that he expects the new Odeo "to be released for a more 'open' beta sometime at the beginning of Feb."