AT SUCH a massive bun fight as the recent MWC show in Barcelona, it was extremely difficult for an individual company to stand out from the rest of the herd and get its message across. Except for Telcordia, that is.

This particular supplier of telecoms orientated services and software spotted a niche by supplying journalists with its own promotional materials not on a boring old memory stick/drive but on an actual Apple Ipod.

The Inq believes that the company must have had a premonition, because no sooner had all the old hacks returned from Catalonia than Apple itself dropped the price of an entry level Ipod Shuffle down from just under £50 to more like £34.

So instead of just merely producing white papers and case studies in a written format, Telcordia actually professionally recorded some four ten minute long podcasts.

There were, unfortunately, some teething problems. The Ipods had actually been sourced in Spain so they defaulted to Spanish and the Itunes software pointed to Spain as well.

Luckily, the Inq remembered the Spanish word for language was 'idioma' and managed to configure the Ipod into English.

There's also more than a little method in Telcordia's rashness in handing out Ipods. The company swiftly sent through instructions on how to add its RSS feed automatically to the podcasts received through Itunes.

So when you're synching your latest downloads with the Ipod, you'll receive Telcordia's latest podcast releases at the same time. Very subtle.

As a trend, podcast releases should catch on, the Inq reckons. µ