As customers lined up around the country for the latest version of the iPhone, a small Shadyside software company was counting on the Apple sales wizardry to help it turn a profit this year, too.

Wizzard Software hopes to make money selling apps, or tiny software applications ranging from games to GPS navigation software. In the past year, Apple created a online store that allows anyone who owns such apps to make them available for sale to Mac and PC users, as well as to users of iPhones and other mobile devices.

"They handed us the gift of all gifts," Chris Spencer, chief executive officer of Wizzard Software, said at the company's annual meeting last month at the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside.

That is because iTunes, the portal through which Apple offers apps, is also the portal through which Wizzard offers podcasts, broadcasts of audio and video programs over the Internet.

The company lays claim to being the world's largest podcasting network, hosting 20,000 podcasters who produce programs that attract 18.3 million listeners and viewers per month. If Wizzard and the podcasters who use its systems offer apps, Mr. Spencer reasons, that audience will respond by buying them.

The opportunity created by Apple is the latest turn in a long, winding road for a small company that began with speech technology, tried selling a talking prescription bottle and finally found its niche in an arena that didn't even exist when Mr. Spencer and partner Armen Geronian founded the company out of a Shadyside apartment in 1995.

Then, the partners had seen a demonstration at an industry trade show of a IBM software program that transcribed speech to text and allowed voice control of computers. IBM offered developers the opportunity to create applications based on the software, and the partners came up with a program allowing users to create and send e-mails using voice commands.

Creating a product is one thing; making money from it is another.

"The fact is, we really didn't know what we were doing in terms of the marketing side of it," Mr. Spencer said.

"We found that we were really good at adding speech recognition to other software applications on the market," he said. "That became our business for the next year or two."

Their growing relationship with IBM led to an offer, in 1998, to become the sole distributors of the company's speech technology to developers in North America. Within two years, they gained distribution rights for the world.

As a result, they received a lot of suggestions from IBM developers about applications for speech technology.

One suggestion was for a talking prescription pill bottle.

For years, pharmacists filling prescriptions for visually impaired patients have made audio recordings of instructions. The talking pill bottle would convert the text from the label directly into an audio file.

After developing a prototype and testing it in Walgreens pharmacies in cooperation with insurer Kaiser Permanente, Wizzard learned consumers simply did not want to pay for pill bottles. The company also learned that for either Medicare or Medicaid to pay for the bottle, it would need to undergo testing for five years.

They shelved the talking pill bottle.

As health care providers continued to make requests for other uses of speech technology, Wizzard's leadership mapped out a new path.

"We had a goal of acquiring 20 health care agencies, merging their tech departments together and implementing the speech systems," Mr. Spencer said.

They bought a health care agency in Wyoming in 2005 and a second one in 2007. Then the investment climate changed.

"Funding for a health care rollup dried up," Mr. Spencer said. "Six months earlier, our funders had loved it."

They placed the operation of the health care agencies under the aegis of Interim Health Care, a Sunrise, Fla.-based franchise. As Interim franchises, the businesses have turned out to be profitable, helping keep Wizzard going while it continued its quest for profitability.

"We're looking for that big home run hit and … we start getting requests from podcasters wanting to transcribe their podcasts and from bloggers wanting to turn their text-based blogs into audio podcasts.

"The first thing we said is, 'What the heck is a podcast?'"

The thornier question was how to make money from podcasts.

"We decided if we wanted to get into this business, we wanted to get into it at the hosting level," he said, because only as hosts would they be able to insert advertising into podcasts.

Rather than starting from scratch, Wizzard spent the next year or so acquiring three hosting companies. When the dust settled, their new subsidiary, Wizzard Media, was hosting programming for 4,000 podcasters, with 4 million audience members each grabbing an average of 10 downloads a month.

"We grew it as big as we could as fast as we could to attract advertisers," Mr. Spencer said. Wizzard boasts a roster of advertisers include such brands as Puma and Coca-Cola.

Now the company is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to make money from apps.

First, it has already acquired some of its own to sell online. The iTunes users who make up 70 percent of the audience for Wizzard's podcasters already have bought an average of 27 apps each, he said. "All we're trying to do is get them to buy one."

The second prong is to help podcasters to transform their podcasts into apps and to take a cut of the revenues when they sell them. The reasoning is that faithful listeners of a podcast will be willing to pay a small fee for their favorite online shows. "They love supporting their podcasters," Mr. Spencer said.

The third way is to take advantage of a feature introduced in the new iPhone operating system: The ability to make purchases within an app. For instance, a podcast that teaches people Spanish might be converted to an app that listeners pay for.

The company has seen losses of $4.3 million in 2006, $6.5 million in 2007, and $6.8 million in 2008. But if the apps strategy works, revenues could start heading the right direction. That could lift its share price from the 50-cent range where it has recently languished and investors finally could have their patience rewarded.

"At the end of the day," Mr. Spencer said, "we're all hoping to get bought out for a lot of money."