“We’re interested in allowing advertisers to open up a new medium for messages,” said Eran Arbel, VP of products for Pudding Media/San Jose, Calif., the company that’s playing ads to people making VoIP calls based on keywords heard in their conversations.
The company launched its ad service on Sept. 24 and is thus far playing only text ads, but it seeks to play other formats in the future. “We’re looking at creating our own inventory that includes banners and video,” Arbel said. “It’s more challenging to deliver video, depending on the speed of the network.”
The company is working with ad networks Arbel declined to identify and has begun playing ads for advertisers he can’t name because they are customers of the networks. “Ads are now playing for buying a car in your neighborhood, you’ll see an ad for a dealer, or for movies, you’ll get an ad for an online ticket buying service,” he said.
The company plays ads based on technology it developed to “recognize a subset of keywords to map into relevant ads,” he said. “We don’t understand things related to health, because it’s a private matter. We lean to sports, movies, entertainment, cars and education.”
Once a keyword is mentioned, the company plays ads in addition to non-sponsored content. For instance if the keyword is movie related, the user will get movie interviews and gossip along with an ad for a ticket buying service.
If the user is making the call on a computer, the content plays on the screen while the call is being made. If the caller is using a mobile phone the content will play on the mobile screen after the call is completed, Arbel said.
Users can go to the Thepudding.com to make free VoIP calls, but the company is providing the free phone service to demonstrate its new ad technology. “It’s not our business model and we don’t want to compete,” he said. “Our goal is to provide communication providers with the technology.”
He said, “There’s a wide gamut of providers from mobile operators like Sprint to Skype and other web-enabled voice services who are having difficulty generating revenue from VoIP. Many companies are offering free services, but can’t monetize it. The technology we developed generates revenue by providing users with relevant ads. We’ve taken the Google AdSense model and applied it to communication services.”
There have been a number of criticisms of the company’s model as an invasion of privacy, with many upset that the company is listening to private calls. But Arbel said, “We don’t know who they are, we don’t ask for private information and we don’t store the keywords they’ve said. We take a look at the ads and match them, and after we display them we forget everything and don’t provide any information to the advertiser.”
He said, “Many people are afraid of what they shouldn’t be, it’s all about perception.”
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More