Alexander Castro is the CEO and co-founder of Pluggd. He has prior management experience from Microsoft, Amazon, and Trilogy. Alexander holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University. Visit the company blog here.

What is Pluggd and what unique features do you offer?

Pluggd helps people find Internet delivered radio and TV shows (coming this fall), easily enjoy the content online without requiring a download (although you can if you like), and share your playlists, ratings, reviews, with the rest of the community. We crawl the Internet to find these shows (aka podcasts, videocasts, vlogs, etc.), so we have a very large and comprehensive index of this content. We also provide all of the functionality you'd come to expect from a site like this, such as, ratings, reviews, playlists, etc...

The type of content Pluggd is focused on is more episodic and more structured, which is what distinguishes itself from the 'clips' you find on sites like YouTube. I think YouTube is fun, and I enjoy the site. However, it isn't the future of TV and it isn't going to be the only major Internet video player. Just like we have eBay, Yahoo, Google, Expedia, among others - none of these are the single dominant HTML player. I mean, we wouldn't even talk about things that way, would we? So, to say the video space is crowded or the market is owned by YouTube, is like saying the HTML space is crowded. These types of shows represent the space Pluggd is focused on.

Our most unique feature is HearHere, which we presented at the DEMOfall conference last month (watch the video here). HearHere allows people to find precisely and exactly what they want within a show by combining speech recognition and semantic analysis. We don't just help you find the keyword, because most people aren't really interested in hearing someone repeat a word, they are looking for the 1-2 minute segment where the topic of discussion is related to the keyword. We were thrilled with the positive reception HearHere received at the DEMO conference last week. We were optimistic because it resonated with people in our own usability studies, but you never really know how a broader audience will react. It was great to receive that type of validation. HearHere is only available for a single podcast right now, but we plan on rolling it out across all the content we've indexed by the end of the year. In the meantime, anyone can play with it themselves here.

HearHere is built on a technology foundation we will extend to power our search engine, enable sharing of content in unique and interesting ways, enable an innovative personalized consumption experience, and targeted advertising.

What hardware and software technology is behind the service?

We have a mixed-environment. We use Flash and HTML/CSS/Ajax on the front-end. Our web application is Ruby on Rails. We use Java in the back-end for web crawling, semantic analysis, etc... We run everything on Linux and MySQL.

What are your plans in expanding Pluggd beyond podcasts and why?

We've never really thought about ourselves as a 'podcasting' company. We're really about on-demand Internet Radio and TV. It just so happens that the latest evolution of digital media on the Internet included making the content more easily downloadable onto portable devices, and folks coined the term 'podcast.' The name is a complete misnomer, because the vast majority of people consume this content from their computers and not on an MP3 player. In fact, a recent WashingtonPost article described how for-pay movies and TV shows purchased through the iTunes store are rarely watched on the video iPod and most are watched on the computer itself. This is why Apple has been consistently evolving their products to include Front Row, which allows people to more easily watch and listen to these shows from their computer, and now they've announced iTV which will allow people to watch these shows from their living room sofa.

We're moving to a world where more and more of the audio and video content that has been delivered via traditional broadcast technology will be delivered via the Internet. I'm not convinced IPTV is the way, or the only way, digital media will be delivered to the living room. In a few years, a whole lot of programming that is enjoyed on the Internet, like RocketBoom, Diggnation, Best Damn Tech Show, and Scriggity, will be watched from the sofa on a TV hooked up to the Internet.