Get paid to be a digital tour guide

PALM DESERT, Calif.--An early leader in the "name soon to be a verb a la Google and TiVo" category here at Demo '07 is Yodio, an audio-publishing system to produce and send audio with digital photos.

After 3-1/2 years of development, the Seattle-based Yodio (short for "your audio") is being unveiled in the next hour here at Demo '07. It works like this: Take a digital photo. Call their toll-free number and record a message (but keep it under two minutes). Yodio syncs the MP3 file with your photo, which can then be sent to anyone for free. Google ads are tacked on based on however you tagged your photo.

To take it a step further, you can record audio over multiple photos as a narrated slide show. Yodio is social in the sense that in the community section of the site you can decide who can/can't see your narrated photos. Or, as another option, you can charge for access to your photos.

Wait, what? Who wants to--hypothetically--see a narrated photo album of my new (and, of course, tastefully decorated) apartment I made for my out-of-town friends to see? Well, hopefully no one. But there is the chance that an expert traveler could create a really slick audio/photo travel guide for download to an MP3 player. I might pay for that if it were good. That's why Yodio says it allows the community to rank content providers, so you have an idea what kind of content you're buying.

Users can store as much content as they want and can set the price themselves, which is entirely optional.

Travel is the killer app, Yodio says, but it also pictures applications like self-help guides, online sermons or educational guides.