Free telephony with contextual advertising

An American company with the intriguing name Pudding Media is working on a service that will make all calls made absolutely free. True, in this case you will have to view and listen to advertisements broadcasted depending on the topic of your conversation. That is, in order to use the service, its users will have to get used to the idea that their conversation is tapped and analyzed by a third party. While you are thinking about whether people will be ready to trust such a service, we will inform you that Pudding Media has already attracted $ 8 million in investments under its brainchild.

Money received from Opus Capital and BRM Capitalthey will integrate with all common voice services - mobile operators and IP-telephony, as well as with voice over Web applications.

Their system is somewhat similar to contextual advertising in Gmail: it converts speech into text, analyzes and, depending on what you say, shows the corresponding advertisement. The company assures that no recording of the conversation is carried out. Already now you can use the service at www.thepudding.com , although calls can be made only to the United States and Canada.

Of course, for many, the idea of ​​automatically collecting personal information may seem daunting. But, without a doubt, there are those for whom free telephone service is a very attractive service. It is on the last group that The Pudding is designed. If you do not want to open access to your telephone conversations, then you can simply not use the service. Otherwise, welcome! But then what about those on the other end of the line? It doesn't seem like anyone was asking for their consent to track the conversation.

In some states, the law prohibits the recording of telephone conversations without the consent of its participants. Perhaps these laws do not apply to this service, since it seems that it is not being recorded in it - all data is processed on the fly. But there is a suspicion that the information is still stored for some time - even if only for a few seconds and then deleted. Such a situation can give rise to many legal problems.

But the project is more at risk even not in the legal part - it is not known whether it will receive approval from a wide audience. But if everything goes according to an optimistic scenario, then Pudding Media will have at its disposal a huge number of potential advertising platforms - real people talking on mobile communications, via IP-telephony, etc. It is still unknown whether the project will succeed or someday for the hour of reckoning, which all startupers are so afraid of, will come ...

via Techhh