Site of the week: Thefunded.com

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.

Pudding Media @ Demo Fall

 

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.

Pudding Media @ Demo Fall

Back from the OMMA conference

I 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…

In New York

I am in New York at the OMMA (Online Marketing Media Advertising) conference. Good to be back here, I haven’t been here in a while. It was a very long day and that with the launch, I am just going to crash. Will post more tomorrow…

We are live!

A very exciting day in the Pudding wonderland. Today we officialy launched the company and there have been a multitude of reports about us. Checkout out site at www.puddingmedia.com

Our team has done an extraordinary job on getting this out. and the site looks just amazing. I would like to acknowledge them for this outstanding job. The site looks slick and the messaging is coherent and clear in my view.

The fun continues later this week when Ariel our CEO will take center stage at the Demo fall conference in San Diego and will present the company. I am sure this will be a very exciting and looking forward to seeing that take place.

I actualy arrived on a red eye flight to New York when I got in and my Blackberry was hit with tons of messages from may people either congratulating me on the launch or many people actualy inquiring about the service. It’s kind of hit me by surprise as I wasn’t expecting that there is going to be so much coverage, but I guess it takes only one article on the New York Times for people to notice and since Pudding touches some interesting popular topics such as privacy and communications that many people are very opinionated about it resulted with this coverage.

A few words about the coverage. I include below some links to the major stories that I found about us. There were many thought provoking articles that gave a very accurate representation but there were many others that just dismissed this notion. I am all for respecting other people’s opinion, but there is nothing more I despise than a journalist that just writes something popular without checking out the facts. Some of these guys include some respected journalists like OM Malik and Henry Blodgett have totally mis placed us as providing a whole voice service based on ads and are really focused on thepudding.com which is not really the point but nevertheless, I am certain that over time people will get the point.

Here are the links to the stories that broke this morning:

NY Times Article

Business Week

Tech Crunch

The Marker

Ynet

Tapuz

Hello world!

This is my first blog post ever! I am very excited about it. I always wanted to do this but never got around to actually writing. Now I realize how amazing is the web revolution and how it effects our lives. We all have a voice and my voice should take part and contribute to the blogsphere just like anyone else. For me it is very tough, I always been a person who held everything inside, I never imagined myself as starting to open up and share with complete strangers so openly. Anyway, I realized it is time to make a change and open up. I have a very different perspective on things given my very unique experience. I have been very fortunate to work for very interesting people and organizations and learned a lot about the technology industry, entrepreneurship and how companies are born in the process. I am now out there on the other side of the fence, trying to make a dream into reality and have found this day and age to be very exciting.

So, I hereby making a commitment to be posting to this blog on a regular basis about my thoughts, experiences and interactions…

What this blog will be about ? I have no idea yet. As we go along, we will see what works and what doesn’t. There will probably be a lot of Pudding Business going on. Bythat I mean, given I am spending most of my time driving Pudding Media Business development efforts I will share a lot about my experiences working for such a hot company and how we are going to be revolutionizing the telecom and advertising space, but I will get to that later. There will also be some other thinking and some ideas coming up about interesting ventures and companies I encounter and always a personal life angle about life and the things that matter the most.

Stay tuned!