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Podcasting as a viable business venture takes another mainstream step with news that PodTech Network has received $5.5 million in venture capital funding from Venrock Associates, US Venture Partners, and Silicon Valley angel investors.

In just under eight months, PodTech has grown to become a leading producer, aggregator, and distributor of professional technology and business podcast conversations for audiences worldwide, according to yesterday's announcement. Its corporate clients include Intel, Juniper, Yahoo, Symantec, and nVidia.

In the announcement, John Furrier, PodTech CEO, said:

[] We know it is time for a company to provide a professional environment and high quality filtered original content of fresh technology and business voices to the world of podcast listeners. With this financing we are now poised to deliver on our content development goals and to play a big role in the evolving ecosystem of this new media.

And according to a report in Silicon Beat, Furrier has big plans:

1) He will be hiring a full podcasting news team, a sort of National Public Radio for podcasting.

2) He'll build out what he calls Infotalk. This is where other people produce podcasts in partnership with Podtech, and there will be some sort of split of the revenue generated from advertising running alongside or within the podcasts.

3) He'll build out a sponsorship network. These will be businesses like Intel (you will see Intel's feature channel on Podtech's homepage) which will pay Podtech to produce and host podcasts.

Undoubtedly business developments like this will feature in the podcasting book Shel and I are writing for McGraw-Hill, to be published later this year.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology. Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: NevilleHobson.com.