We have a few new sponsors for Podcamp NYC and I’d like to thank a moment to thank them!

Red Lasso has joined us as a Platinum sponsor! Red Lasso allows you to search commercial TV and Radio programs, and clip and use portions of these broadcasts in your blog or website. I’ve found this particularly useful when I am blogging about news items, politics or the like, and I can excerpt just the piece of a show I want to discuss, so anyone who might not have seen the show can see it right then and there on my site. Red Lasso has been a major sponsor of several Podcamps to date, and I want to thank them for being so supportive of our community.

Lee Gibbons and Doug Smith at Podango have come forward to sponsor Podcamp NYC again this year! I’ve gotten to know Lee and Doug better over the past year, and they are committed members of the podcasting community, hoping to help us all figure out the metrics game once and for all. Podango has been a sponsor of many Podcamps to date, and I wanted to take a moment out to thank them for not only their financial support to help make these events happen, but for truly caring about the community.

The great folks over at mDialog have come on board as Gold Sponsors, and I am really looking forward to meeting them in person! Thanks to Gail and her team at mDialog and to CC Chapman, who helped introduce us!

Bill Palmer of iProng has been sponsoring Podcamps since the very first Podcamp Boston in the fall of 2006. Bill will be flying in from the West Coast to attend the event, so be sure to say hi!

VitaminWater has donated its product for the event, so for those of you looking for a mid-day boost during Podcamp should be able to grab a VitaminWater and get the boost you need to carry on during the day.

Philip Richardson and the great guys at ooVoo are also sponsoring Podcamp NYC this year. ooVoo is a videoconferencing service that allows up to six users to chat at once, and they did a neat launch in February with their My ooVoo Day, allowing people to talk with some of their favorite online bloggers. I got to talk to with many people I had known only through twitter up until that moment, including Shel Holz and Connie Reece, among others, so it was nice to be able to connect in a new way through ooVoo. (On a side note, ooVoo also donated $750 to the Ma Chen- Autism in China project I just finished up, so thanks again to ooVoo for your generous donation to that great cause as well.)

Jeff Hinz, Barry Kantz, and the folks over at Raw Voice/Blubrry are a new Platinum Sponsor of Podcamp NYC. They are sponsoring our Friday Night social event, and there will be more details forthcoming about this event shortly! (I secretly love the Show Notes pads Raw Voice has given out at previous Podcamp events- they help keep me organized from planning a show to recording through writing up the show notes.)

Blogger and Podcaster Magazine is sponsoring again as well, and I’d like to thank them for sponsoring so many Podcamps to date. They have joined forces with mainstream media and have it set up so that individual Podcasters can afford to have their podcasts advertised in USA Today and on the USA Today website, something most podcasters could not afford on their own. Be sure to check out their table at Podcamp NYC and consider taking advantage of this offer for your show.

Thank you to all of our sponsors. We have sponsors who donate in three main categories, each contributing to making Podcamp NYC happen. Some sponsors help us out with cash donations, helping us pay for the venue, printing and administrative costs, insurance, and the like. Others have donated products or services to help us out, like VitaminWater, Confabb, iContact, and ZipCar, to name a few. Others have donated time, manpower, employees, and introductions that have also been integral to the success of Podcamp NYC 1.0 and Podcamp NYC 2.0 equally.

It’s important to us that each of our sponsors feels a part of the community itself, and not just someone we look to for financial, technical or in-kind support. While we provide sponsors access to our community, who are, in turn, likely to be interested in their companies and products, we are more interested in developing long term relationships with the people behind the companies, who are doing some of the most interesting and innovative work around. The Podcamp community is a family to us, and We hope all of you will see our sponsors as an integral part of that family.