Some more coverage about the round by the Israeli press (Ynet & The Marker):
Pudding Media Funding
January 6, 2008
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Pudding Media Closes $8M Series A Round
January 6, 2008
Last Friday we announced the closing of our series A round of a total of $8 Million. This is a very positive indication of the progress we are making at Pudding Media . In fact, there seems to be a lot of excitement within the company lately as we are reaching a stage were we are hard at work to serve our customers and there seems to be a lot of activity on the business side. Looks also there is a lot of interest and opportunity coming from the market as our voice customers are seeking ways to monetize their services.
The following are links to some of the media that covered this announcement:
We were also recently selected as one of the top 25 innovations of Voice-Over-IP in 2007 by Voip-News:
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Posted by ekeren
Mr & Mrs Simpson
November 17, 2007Dont you just love them…
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Pudding Media launches on first partner platform
October 30, 2007
Tonight marks a very important occasion in the growth of Pudding Media as a company. We have launched tonight our first partner implementation with the instant messaging company Meebo. This announcement took place at a great party Meebo has put together in San Francisco to celebrate their second birthday and they have presented the Meebo platform for applications that are mostly focused on connecting users. Pudding was one of four inaugural applications of the platform presented at the party and our CEO Ariel took center stage and briefly introduced Pudding Media to the audience. Right now, Meebo users can directly make voice chat conversations with other Meebo users using a Pudding Media widget without the need of downloading any additional software.
This is just an initial stage of the solution. In the near future, we intend to allow users to call any phone numbers and run our voice discovery technology that will allow adding relevant content such as news, blogs, information and images in conversations and down the road we anticipate using our Voice Sense monetization technology to place contextual ad links relevant to the conversation. Meanwhile we are certainly looking forward to supporting the Meebo userbase. We also took this opportunity to announce our own Pudding Media Partner Platform that is offering internet telephony vendors, web publishers and social networks with our voice monetization and discovery solutions.
It was certainly an exciting day. It is certainly a great achievement in the life of a start up to get to go out to market and get users to start using your product. Our team really made a substantial effort and worked together with the Meebo team to make it happen.
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Cool Site of the week: Connect2Elect – matching me with a presidential candidate
October 22, 2007I was reading on Techcrunch about Connect2Elect ,the new web site that helps you pick the right presidential candidate based on your political views, priorities and attributes that you view as most important. So being such a novice in US politics, I decided to give it a shot as I need all the help I can get. I spent several minutes ranking my top issues, core beliefs etc and walla… the site has generated me the map you can see below. My position on the issues is represented by the orange dot and all the candidates are plotted below based on my ranking. Anyway, results were very surprising as the winner is John McCain who I didn’t really follow much and I ignored him and the person who is the most distanced from me is Hillary Clinton who I am actually very fond of as a charismatic leader so I guess those personal characteristics don’t get factored in that much. I doubt the notion that people just vote based on the issues. It is really about the whole package and that would be very hard for any software in the world to forecast as the intangibles are what make up the real difference in how people make decisions.
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The Daily Show bold new move
October 19, 2007Back to blogging. Sorry I have been out for so long. I promise that I will be blogging on a regular basis…
One very interesting development this week is the bold move by Viacom, the media powerhouse that owns the right to the popular Comedy Central TV show as they launched a new web site for The Daily Show to where they publish every minute of the show in the past 13 years online free and accessible to all users. I tried the new site and it is incredible as you can search through past shows and get to see any one of them. Looks like they spent quite sometime tagging all this content so it would be easily searchable. This was interesting to me as I recalled a friend of mine mentioned to me recently about a very funny John Stewart joke he did last month during the Iranian President Ahmanidjad visit to the United Nations in New York. I was able to go to the site search for the tag “Iran” and access that specific clip in less than 10 seconds of search time. I found that pretty amazing as by bringing all this mass content online and making easily searchable by tagging it properly, we are getting closer to an age where every form of digital content will be accessible online . Furthermore, seems like this move is supported by advertising. I saw an ad for Hyundai running both as a pre-roll and as an overlay on the screen while I was watching a clip. I dont know the economics here but it is my guess that advertisers would be willing to pay for such premium inventory but especially as users are really engaged as they are searching for particular content which can result in very high response rate tot he advertising. Finally, as I never really used to watch this show on a regular basis, I think just by bringing this complete show archive online, this opens up to a whole new target segment that is currently not addressed (just like people like me) and this should build more traffic and increase the audience of the show to a whole new population beyond of the regular TV watchers of the show. Seems like a home run to me.
For some more coverage about this see this Boing Boing post
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Pudding makes the Final Business 2.0 Issue
October 1, 2007
I received today in the mail the final magazine issue of Business 2.0 that was recently shut down by their parent Time Inc. We are featured as one of the What’s Next trends (see link below for the article). It is so unfortunate to see this excellent magazine get shut down. It was my favorite reading material and I enjoyed the enlightening and interesting coverage of the technology space. It will certainly be missed.
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Site of the week: Thefunded.com
September 29, 2007
One of my favorite recently discovered sites is Thefunded.com This is sort of like Amazon recommendations meet the old closed venture capital community. You get the inside scoop from entrepreneurs who have pitched or worked with funds and they rate VCs and write reviews. In the past, it was very hard to get the inside view unless you knew the right people who were closely familiar with those funds. I found it very enjoyable to browse through and read about all the VCs that I know and used to work with in the past. You have to take some of these reviews with a grain of salt as some of these are people that are trying to get back at VCs personally but it easier to spot the better performing funds. It is good too see that one of our lead investors Opus Capital has received very consistent and positive ratings.
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Pudding Media @ Demo Fall
September 27, 2007 
Yesterday, we have officially launched the company at the Demo Fall conference in San Diego. Follow this link below to see a video of the short demo that Ariel our CEO and Eran our VP Products gave at the show.
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Back from the OMMA conference
September 26, 2007I got back from the OMMA conference late last night. It was a very interesting event and it really reaffirmed for me the notion that the online advertising market is really booming regardless of recent difficulties the US economy is facing. For me it was a good opportunity to get a glimpse of the local New-York ad scene. As much as Silicon Valley is all about technology. New York is really the capital of the advertising world and only here is where you get to meet respectable top-tier agencies.
Nevertheless, it is puzzling how this landscape has changed and this conference although it wasn’t too large held an interesting mixture of agencies, direct advertisers, technology providers, search, SEM and web 2.0 applications all trying to get a sense how all of this meld really fits together (they actualy named the slogan of the conference is “Worlds Collide”). Seems like some of the interesting themes that were going on included some of the emerging monetization opportunities such as mobile, video and behavioral targeting. Another conclusion I made was that although the technology is there the agencies and the large branded advertisers are still behind on implementing some of the nextgen stuff although those that have jumped on these opportunities have found them to be very lucrative and the CPMs are really way up there.
In addition, it seems that one of issues that advertisers are facing is clearly the increasing fragmentation of content out there and that results in the need for getting more highly sophisticated in the way they can target their audience as there are so many options out there to consume content and standard demographic or geo targeting techniques dont work anymore.
One interesting angle for me that is related to what we are upto at Pudding Media is how it seems that Behavioral targeting has come along way. Although I think this is more in mind share than actual results produced to the advertisers. There seems to be a lot of activity happening in that segment. The recent acquisitions of Tacoda by AOL and Blue Lithium by Yahoo have signaled that this space is going through a stage of consolidation and this is one part of the portfolio of ad offerings those mega strategics want to provide. I recall two years when I was still working for A9, we looked at several providers and we didn’t want to touch this. Our perception of fear of breach of consumer privacy really dictated that we would stay away from these providers as they are not legit. At some point, the market turned the other direction and today tracking online user behavior by using cookie technology seems to have gained mass acceptance. The re was a lot of market education in place and today people are less concerned that their privacy is abused. So what the hell, so they caught me browsing at a Verizon Wireless site and now a week later while I am searching on the web I will be served a mobile ad. As long as none of my private Identifiable information is served to any advertisers I should be OK. Nevertheless, our position of Pudding Media is somewhat analogous to BT a couple of years ago. As our automatic system will listen in to conversations and will generate context that will be matched by relevant value and offers that will create value and the fear of breaching privacy will fade away. My point is as long as you know where to draw the line some of these things that at first seem to be intimidating might be able over time to become acceptable marketing practices as the value is proven. I strongly believe that over time people will realize the benefits that they get from targeted advertising in voice conversations and similar to long road the behavioral targeting has come along since it was outcast and ad supported calling will enter the mainstream ad market
And we will certainly be there to reap the benefits…
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