Stitcher’s Rewind: Top 2011 Events

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Based on all the listening data from 2011, we’ve created a list of the top events as heard on Stitcher Smart Radio in the past year.

You can listen to different episodes of each event right here on Stitcher!

Porchlight: A Storytelling Series

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Stitcher sponsored the Porchlight storytelling event at The Verdi Club in San Francisco!

The lovely hosts Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick

The Content/Community Team representing Stitcher!

You can check out the new Porchlight Storytelling Series podcast on Stitcher – bit.ly/Porchlight

Holiday Cheer at Stitcher

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The holidays are in full swing at Stitcher!

We held our annual White Elephant Gift Exchange during lunch last Friday, and there were some hilarious results! First, Justin Bieber items were popular this year as were Nerf guns and POP phones.

Jerry and Christine with their POP phones

Sean was the lucky recipient of a Hello Kitty water cooler, which he put to very good use.

Sean's Hello Kitty water cooler

Peter managed to get a can of unicorn meat, and Danielle stole the bottle of Crown Royal from Colin.

Danielle takes the Crown!

Last Friday was also the first day of our Five (Business) Days of Festivus. Each Stitcher employee has a chance to win a prize each day, ending with a grand prize this Thursday. (It’s a good one!)

To add to the fun, we had our holiday bowling party with family and friends this past Sunday!

Some of the Stitcher employees!

Noah, the bowling pro

Some of us did (much) better than others, with Noah having the best score.

We hope that you all enjoy the holidays as much as we have been enjoying them and, as always, thank you for your support!

Season of Sharing!

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Tis The Season of Sharing! Share with Stitcher for your chance to win a Kindle Fire Package! (Kindle Fire, case, headphones, and amazon giftcard)

We are running another great ‘sharing’ contest on Stitcher SmartRadio.

This holiday season; give the gift of knowledge, laughter, entertainment and so much more when you shares shows via Stitcher Radio.

Sharing is easy!

AND sharing can pay off for you!

All you have to do to hit the Facebook, Twitter or email icons from the Stitcher app to share your favorite shows with your friends.

Every time you share, you log another entry and improve your chances of winning.

Check in on Stitcher’s Facebook page for updates on the sharing leaders and more.

The contest runs from Novemeber 28th- December 16th and you can share as many times as you want!

So share generously! You could be the winner of the Kindle Fire Package!

Happy Season of Sharing from your friends at Stitcher.

Good Luck!

Stitcher Goes to the LA Auto Show, is Featured in CUE

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2013 Cadillac XTS

The LA Auto Show has become synonymous with the “Green Car” initiative with good reason.  California is on the cutting edge of green technologies, and our history and car culture make perfect bedfellows.  LA is also the Entertainment Capital of the World and the LA Auto Show has become the forum to debut all manner of in-car infotainment.  Of all the infotainment announcements at this year’s show, none turned more heads than the Cadillac User Experience (CUE), a highly customizable 8″ capacitive touch screen utilizing haptic feedback and proximity sensing.  If there was a ”WOW!” moment at the show, this was it.  Check out the video and see for yourself.  CUE will launch next year on the all-new 2013 Cadillac XTS luxury sedan and ATX luxury compact with Stitcher Smart Radio.

Not to be outdone, Cadillac’s stablemate, Chevrolet, debuted the all-new Chevy Spark.  The Spark is a smart small car designed with the “city experience” in mind and loaded with more features than any in its class.  Spark will offer the Chevy MyLink system with its 7″ touch screen and Stitcher Smart Radio.

Honda was the latest to announce a connected solution for their 2012 CR-V, and with several more auto manufacturers expected to make similar announcements in the coming months, the future for Stitcher in-vehicle looks very bright, though perhaps not this bright:

2013 Chevy Spark in Jalapeno

Stitcher Continues to Expand

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It has been a mess here at Stitcher, but we love it! With the help of our listeners, we have been expanding, and new cubicles were needed.  After months of planning, it was finally time to install them last Friday. Everyone pitched in and lent a hand with the packing, lifting, and unpacking. We had to move computers, printers, and even some furniture. Thankfully, everybody was patient in the midst of all the chaos!

We’re happy to say that we’re now in our new work stations. We’re still adjusting to the seating arrangements, but we’re excited about our continued growth! If you are interested in growing with us, please visit the Jobs section of our website. We’d love to meet you!

BlogWorld Podcasting Takeaways

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Scott Monty, Head of Social Media at Ford, being interviewed

Just back from a great trip to LA for BlogWorld 2011! We had the chance to meet up with many podcasters and sit in on some interesting sessions about the podcasting industry.

We also interviewed a bunch of the podcasters on-site for a special show called Voices of New Media. Listen here for some great information and insights from those in the podcasting community.

It’s so valuable to be able to talk to podcasters and content owners to make sure they are aware of Stitcher, to make sure that Stitcher is providing them what they need to best reach their listeners and to ensure we have all the content available that our listeners want to hear.

We have return inspired! It was great meeting some great people, to hear how many folks are using Stitcher (a big uptick since last year), and to understand how we can best support the goals of a podcaster.

Some key takeaways from the event:

• There was a general dissatisfaction about low traffic at podcast-related booths and the lack of support for podcasting  from Apple, Microsoft, etc
  • Podcasts have not driven revenue for these companies so they are not a priority
  • Podcasts are Stitcher’s priority!
  • On the flipside,  people pointed to the influx of mainstream media starting podcasts (Rich Eisen, Alec Baldwin, to name a few)
  • As terrestrial radio listening decreases, podcasting/on-demand content is increasing,  yet the industry still lacks a central voice/standards/rankings/tech development that enables huge success (monetization)
  • So how do you make money?
    • Only shows with more than 10K download per episode will really be able find advertising dollars in the current market
    • Pay attention to your listening metrics and download data
    • Cliff Ravenscraft has been successfully making a living off of his podcasting efforts for years.  He hosted a great session where he talked about how to make money.   His primary tips:
      • Don’t get into it for the money AND establish meaningful relationships.
      • Cliff offers great advice to podcasters from set-up to sales here.
• Don’t forget Stitcher offers an affiliate program – an effective way to monetize shows of all sizes!
• For the most part, everyone agrees that podcasters should ‘go wide’. Distribute shows on as many platforms, apps, social networks and sites as possible
  • Let listeners find you where they are and be where they want to be
  • This is how you have a chance to get to 10K/episode
  • Stitcher is the #2 place where people are finding new shows (c/o Rob Walch, Today in iOS, Libsyn)

Cliff Ravenscraft on what it takes to be a successful podcaster

Hopefully, as a result of our trip to BlogWorld, Stitcher will be able to offer more shows for our listeners and more integration and opportunities for content providers. We have already added quite a few new shows based on introductions. We have a few innovations coming out on the product side that will make it easier for show hosts to stay in contact with their audiences. We will continue to make enhancements to the Stitcher Provider Portal to offer greater insights about listening on Stitcher.  Also, we will soon introduce a quarterly Partner Newsletter. This will feature trends and rankings based on Stitcher listening, spotlight successful shows and feature advice from these hosts, and more.
We are really excited to roll out all these things to our Stitcher community.  It’s gonna be a big 2012!

If anyone would like any more info on the event,   about working with Stitcher, or to hear more about our goals, please email Rachel@stitcher.com. I look forward to talking with you!

The Nesquik Bunny Visits Stitcher!

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It was a fun day here at Stitcher! We got a surprise visit from the Nesquik bunny, who hopped over to deliver some chocolate milk! Thanks Nesquik for bringing us a delicious treat!

Stitcher’s New Logo/Visual Design Unveiled Today with Release of iPhone App Update

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Today we’ve released a new version of our iPhone app in the App Store!  You will pretty quickly notice the main difference — a new logo and complete visual redesign.  We hope you like it and for those of you interested in the thinking behind it, our Lead Designer Chuck Harris elaborates in the paragraphs below.  One other significant change driven by user feedback is we’ve made it easier to create new custom stations.  It was clear from your feedback that you love the feature but wanted to make it a bit easier to create a new station from scratch.  We’ve added an “Add Station” button in My Stations to allow you to do this.  Enjoy and thanks for the continuous feedback!

Chuck Harris joined Stitcher as Lead Designer in January 2011.  He has a dog named Truthy.  Awesome, no?

When I joined Stitcher a few months ago as the company’s new senior visual designer, the team had already begun expressing interest in changing our branding within the year. For about a month, we batted around soft ideas about what our brand was all about: Establishing ourselves as the future of talk radio with top content on-demand.

We were interested in overhauling both our logo and the visual design of our product itself. It’s a designer’s dream-come-true to rework both the components at the same time: more often than not, designers are called on to redesign a product but are hampered with an old logo. This of course presents a world of problems.  The logo is in an old color palette, it looks like it came from a different time period, it physically doesn’t fit, etc. The new Stitcher visual design and identity were revised in concert and made to work seamlessly together.

As for the visual redesign of the app, which was unveiled today with our latest iPhone update, I’m most proud of our progress on the display of content which is the heart of the Stitcher product. Typography size, colors, relationships, etc. were all thought through carefully to make the content easier to see, scan and find. We moved from an overall blue scheme to a dark gray scheme as we felt it was more appropriate for the media space; the neutral look we established allows the content and its album art take center stage. The app’s look now is cleaner and more professional, and puts the app itself in the background to effectively showcase the high quality content from thousands of content providers.

In the logo itself, we wanted more than just a pretty image (though of course that was important too!). The logo had to have a narrative that told the Stitcher story and gave listeners a hint at what was to come. We wanted the logo to “do a lot of work.” We continually asked ourselves how the elements in the identity might reoccur in the app.  The short story is the logo has two main elements – horizontal color band which is a reference to a variety of content, stitched together, and the vertical dial line which is a modernized take and reference to the dials found on old radios.  There are many more subtleties and “reads” on the the logo but we’d love to hear what you see when you look at it rather than color your perspective too much!

While you can see our new logo and redesign on our iPhone app today by downloading our new update in Apple’s App Store, the new design overhaul for our Android app will be available in an update very soon!  After that, we’ll tackle refreshing our website branding and look and feel as well.

In the coming months, we’ll introduce more product features that will rely upon the shapes, colors, and ideas embedded in the logo. Who knows, maybe what you see in the logo will make its way into the app!

Stitcher Brings Listeners Lectures from Top Universities

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Imagine taking a whole course in the subject area of your choosing, taught by a renowned professor from a top university – all in the comfort of your car during your daily commute. Stitcher is helping make that vision a reality with today’s launch of University Courses, a new station on Stitcher that brings audio recordings of course lectures straight to your mobile device for FREE.

University Courses‘ content includes course lectures and language lessons covering a broad spectrum of topics, from entrepreneurship to ancient Greek history, offered by top universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Emory, MIT and more.

Stitcher’s app allows users to instantly stream new lectures from the University Courses collection as they become available as well as access all previous lectures from the University Courses series, so you never miss a session!

Whether you’re interested in listening in on a Yale lecture series to sharpen your understanding of the inner-workings of the global financial markets, or you just want to brush up on your French and Italian language skills for an upcoming European vacation, Stitcher has you covered.

You can check out Stitcher’s new University Courses station on your smartphone or iPad by first selecting “On Demand” content, then selecting our “Education” category, then selecting “University Courses.” Or, as always, you can listen on your computer at Stitcher.com/listen.

To celebrate our new offerings, we’re kicking-off a “Back to School with Stitcher” promotion today. Just share an episode, lecture or piece of audio content on Stitcher that you enjoy with a friend, colleague or classmate and you will be automatically entered to win a new iPad2.

Happy Listening!