Pudding Media launches on first partner platform

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.

Pudding Media Press release

Giga OM Coverage 

Tech Crunch Coverage

Venture Beat Coverage

Cool Site of the week: Connect2Elect – matching me with a presidential candidate

I 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.

The Daily Show bold new move

Back 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

Pudding makes the Final Business 2.0 Issue

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.

Pudding Media article final Business 2.0 issue October 2007