This session is all about how 2.0 and social net technologies are impacting the marketing and advertising industries. This is a perennial hot topic segment at DEMO because on the one hand, many people in attendance work in or with these practice areas and yet they’re also consumers.
FastCall411: FastCall411 is a local search engine that taps into a database of local merchants and service providers to find the product or service being searched and creates an immediate connection using VoIP. Satisfaction data is captured as part of the process to continually rank and rate participating merchants. For immediate results, this looks like an interesting approach. In the demo, the scenario used was trying to find a plumber who is immediately available to do some work. Having just had the experience myself of needing to find an appliance repair person who could unlock my suddenly inaccessible oven the day before a large party at my home, I can immediately see the value in having an engine like this find a resource.
Sway: Shoutlet allows marketers to harness the power of social media with one tool. It supports campaign tracking and provides results data in real time. It also allows them to choose how to reach out to prospects with message mixes the company calls Shouts which can combine HTM e-mail, RSS, podcasts, and SMS messages. The most powerful aspect of the product is the back-end content management system and real-time measurement services. Tracking the effectiveness of this type of multi-medium campaign in the past has required an aggregation of disparate tools from a number of providers – an IT challenge most marketers are not terrificly excited about undertaking. From the DEMOfall stage, the company announced new deals with CozmoTV, Odeo, Pheedo, and TubeMogul.
Pudding Media: has been the source of much controversy even before they demoed here at DEMOfall this year. The company is providing free voice over IP calls on the web and claims that it will enable your favorite carrier do the same thing soon.
To subsidize these free calls, Pudding listens in on all your conversations and then sends the FBI to your door advertisements to your display based upon identifying keywords in your conversations and then using those keywords to source what are ostensibly contextual advertisements to your screen be it PC, IPTV or mobile phone.
Even during the presentation the company was quick to state the neither the Mossad nor the NSA was an investor in the company but I honestly wonder about this. Similarly, with what I know about call monitoring by machine for prison inmates I don’t find it terribly reassuring when the company says there are no people actively listening to my calls or that no records are being kept.
I have to ask myself who are these guys that I should trust them when they say this; and who are they to say “No” to the CIA or NSA when they come calling and politely insist that half a million user’s calls need to be recorded and archived for “Homeland Security reasons”.
Frankly this is one of the most disturbing and rife for abuse developments I’ve ever seen in the telephony world. Beyond this I have a number of significant issues with Pudding’s model, the application and their claims.
First, and most deeply worrying what assurance do I really have that my calls aren’t being actively monitored for more than just keywords (and how would I know if they were? - until the men in black pay me a visit for my politically left-leaning comments)
Second, how viable is this model really? It seems to me that the only people that would agree to this service are people that can’t afford to pay for phone minutes in the first place. If this is the case, then just how viable are those same people when it comes to taking action on the advertisements that they see as a result of the keywords delivered to their phones.
Third, I don’t think they’ve thought the mobile end through completely. If the ads are delivered in real time how will people see them with the phone held to the side of their heads? The iPhone even turns off its display under these conditions hardly optimal for viewing the ads. If the company tries to display the ads once the calling party hangs up, what in the world is going to keep the person sitting there staring at their handset display well four or five advertisements scroll past desperately trying to make an impression or get a call to action.
Fourth, if the company has any success at all, how long will it be before not just free calls, but calls we actually pay for start employing the same strategy? This is an ugly possible future and one I really hope we can avoid, but which won’t surprise me if we are victimized by this technology in invasive and much more invasive ways.
I advise people to avoid this like the plague; in the end it might be worse than the black one {plague} if they get traction.
360Desktop: Virtual desktops have been around for a long time but I have never seen anything quite like 360Desktop before. This software takes your desktop and extends it into a scrollable panoramic space that can contain applications, widgets, and file system windows that you scroll through in real time to access workspaces. It really needs to be seen – the demo Oliver and I saw in the Pavilion today was just mind-blowing. The desktop on the demo machine had a panoramic image of London that we scrolled through using a collapsible control panel or by dragging on the desktop itself. Icons on the control panel represent applications open on the desktop and can be used to quickly jump from one workspace to another. In this panoramic space, ads and multimedia can be loaded – we saw a great example of a Porsche desktop with striking images of the very cool Cayman displayed a VR window that allowed us to explore the car’s interior. Great branding for companies with strong loyalty to build on. If that was all this application did it would already be one of the coolest things I’ve seen this week at DEMOfall.
But there’s more. 360Desktop is a “universal widget engine” as well. Any web content or pre-built widget with an embed code can be integrated into the panoramic space. We played with Yahoo! and Google gadget, created our own from an eBay auction, and it took a matter of seconds to create a very dynamic environment.
For Mac users, there’s a good news/bad news story. Beginning next month, 360Desktop is available on Windows XP and Vista. The good news is that a Mac version is in development and should be available next Spring. The better news is that if you run Windows on your Mac, either in Boot Camp or using Parallels or VMWare Fusion, you can use it as soon as it’s released and the performance is quite amazing. The demo we played with was running in Fusion and it wasn’t until the end of the booth demo that we were told that.
The day is not quite over but this product may very well be my pick for best of show. It combines fun and real utility and should be wildly popular with anyone who’s run into the edges of their existing desktop.
Myndnet: is an information marketplace that seeks to solve real-world business issues by selling information linking people with questions to experts with answers who are paid when they respond to a question. Myndnet’s CEO says the service provides access to information that has been trapped in the heads of people that you may or may not know and belong to social networks that you may or may not belong to. It’s an interesting model that provides incentives for people to share their expertise. Anyone who has knowledge or connections can contribute that knowledge for a fee. The service also allows you to leverage your existing connections and share revenue with them by referring questions in their areas of expertise to them. Nicely summing up the essence of the business model, the CEO said that the company wishes to pay for value received and get paid for value delivered.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
MyndNet sounds very similar to ProspectMarkets http://www.prospectmarkets.com, in which they are focused in on using crowdsourcing to generate business leads, instead of trying to be a recruiter/business answers marketplace like Mydnet.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Hi Marc,
Interesting to read your thoughts on Pudding. (I’m a VC but I’m not an investor in Pudding Media). Wondering why it seems so awful to you, I was at Demo and thought it was pretty cool. I remember the same comments about GMail - “Oh no, google will be ‘reading’ my email and sending me ads”, but no one even cares much about that any more, nor is it used for bad purposes. (yet?) Do you advise people to stay away from GMail since machines are reading that email?
And your point about “Only people who’d use Pudding are those who can’t afford the minutes” seems also flawed when you think about GMail. People who use GMail had other free alternatives, but found it a better experience. I’ve been playing with Pudding and think it’s cool and I’m not yet “creeped out” by it at all any more than I am by GMail. It’s free, they show me some interesting links (not just ads) based on what I’m talking about (sometimes) and it’s up to me to click on them or not.
As for “how could it work on an iphone, or other phone”, the company intends for one person to be using a headset on a PC. That’s the only way to originate a pudding call. just like skype, et al. So one party is on a PC headset (and sees the links/ads) the other person can be on a regular phone, no ads of course.
Anyway, interesting to hear your thoughts… I actually found it to be pretty novel. Not sure it’s a great business, but it’s no crazier than Gmail in many ways.
–josh
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Josh: Although the post was under my byline, the Pudding report was actually written by Oliver Starr with whom I was live blogging the event. I’m going to ask him to respond to your questions. I understand where he’s coming from with the concerns he expressed and think you’ll find his answers interesting at the very least.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
[…] said it would be possible to do some form of advertising subsidized calling but I suggested he read my review of Pudding Media before he made such a […]
October 14th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Josh,
Sorry for the delay in responding to your comment. I was traveling and not getting all my mail as quickly as usual.
Allow me to offer my thoughts in response to your thoughtful query.
First, I have substantial experience with the phone systems that are installed in State and Federal prisons as well as the detention center at the INS. I was the founder of a company that installed and managed these systems which include very sophisticated call monitoring equipment that does real-time speech recognition and in addition to recording all conversations and flagging key words that are on a suspect list, is also capable of making on the fly determinations as to potentially problematic discussions and notifying an attendant who can then monitor the call live without the inmate or other party being aware that their conversation is no longer private.
I have no confidence that a similar system might not be employed by Pudding Media with potentially serious consequences due to our current national security environment of suspicion, illegal wire taps and guilty until proven innocent legal proceedings.
Your contention that Gmail is similar to Pudding is only partially accurate in my opinion. First because unlike Pudding, you have the opportunity to revise what you say before it passes the scrutiny of Gmail’s advertising generation software. Also, it is generally accepted that what you write online unless you are deploying serious security and encryption methodologies, is likely to become public at any time. Due to this lack of privacy most experienced Internet users act accordingly. We are not used to thinking that our phone conversations are likely to come back to haunt us.
While this might be naive it is nevertheless a fact that people are far looser with their lips than with their keyboards.
Believe me, if you were having a “saucy” conversation with your wife and a few minutes later were floated an advert for “marital aids” I suspect you’d change your opinion on the creepiness of Pudding pretty fast; especially if you got to wondering if that conversation might somehow end up in a court proceeding five years hence were your marriage to go the way mine have.
As to the economic viability of this model and my contention that the folks using it are probably demographically less desirable from a financial perspective I believe that this too differs greatly from Gmail.
First, the way that Gmail was initially propagated determined the audience fairly specifically, second, few people pay exclusively for an email address or account anyway; they pay for Internet access and get email as a part of their plan or they have email from work, or from a service that also has other proprietary content (or used to). Third contextual advertising has been seeping into our collective unconscious for a long time and Gmail is just another notch along the continuum.
Pudding is about getting something for free that for a lot of people is not readily available due to their financial situations. As a VC you probably don’t meet with many people on prepaid phone plans that scrimp and save and ask you to call them back on payphones because they are out of minutes and can’t afford to buy more until their next payday. I know that is probably alien to you but trust me, there are more people in situations like that then you’d care to imagine. These people don’t have credit cards or fat checking accounts and they certainly aren’t going to be going to any lobster dinners advertised to them online because they happened to talk about having a beer or a glass of wine during a call.
My other objection is that it’s a slippery slope that Pudding is perched upon. What’s to prevent AT$T or Sprint from deciding that in addition to the fee that we pay for use each month they want to pad their slipping voice revenue by adding voicetextual advertising to their service?
Wouldn’t it suck if before every call you got 30 seconds of audible adverts based upon the things you talked about during your previous call? It might sound far fetched now, but desperation and new technology can make for strange bedfellows.
So again I say with confidence that what Pudding is doing is a bad idea and I don’t wish them success in their endeavor. I hate to seem mean spirited but with what I know about these systems and what I fear about the misuse of them I simply cannot be convinced that this is anything less than potentially evil and possibly much worse. I hope you too will see this after reading my thoughts.
Oliver
October 16th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Thanks for the thorough and compelling response Oliver. I respect your personal experience with similar systems and completely agree that if Pudding were to record conversations and store them, or even to store what keywords were used, then this could be used for bad purposes and will bother people, me included. I may be an optimist who has not been burned or bothered by these systems in the past, but I just don’t see the evil intent and will reserve final judgment and hope the company will be transparent to alleviate these concerns. I know that banks know where I shop, that the phone company knows who I call, and that Tivo knows what I watch… and frankly, I just don’t care that much until I see it being used for purposes I REALLY don’t like. Contextual ads don’t reach that threshold for me, but I know that isn’t the case for others.
As to your point about “wouldn’t it suck if before every call you got 30 seconds of audible adverts…” - well yes, of course. But I also have faith that technology finds ways around things like this… witness PVRs vs. broadcast, RSS vs. online pubs, popup blockers, etc.
I won’t justify with a response the paragraph that infers I have no idea that people have trouble for paying for things and that not everyone can afford lobster dinners. Pudding isn’t setting up Kiosks for free phone calls if you watch their contextual ads.
Thanks for the reasoned (and generally reasonable) response.
–josh