Toll free with contextual advertising

The American company with the intriguing name Pudding Media is working on a service that will make all calls made absolutely free. True with this you will have to view and listen to advertisements, broadcast 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 being listened to and analyzed by a third party. While you are thinking about whether people are ready to trust such a service, let us inform you that Pudding Media has already attracted $ 8 million of investment for its brainchild.

The money received from Opus Capital and BRM Capital will be used to integrate with all common voice services - mobile phone and IP telephony operators, 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 advertising. The company assures that no call recording is made. You can already use the service at www.thepudding.com , although calls can only be made 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 communication is a very attractive service. It is on the latter 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 asking their consent to track the conversation.
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In some states, it is prohibited by law to record telephone conversations without the consent of its participants. It is possible that these laws do not apply to this service, since it seems to have no record in it - all data is processed “on the fly”. But there is a suspicion that information remains for some time, even if only for a few seconds and then deleted. This situation can cause many legal problems.

But the project risks even more than the legal part - it is not known whether it will receive approval from a wide audience. But if everything goes according to the optimistic scenario, Pudding Media will have at its disposal a huge number of potential advertising sites - real people talking on mobile, via IP-telephony, etc. it will be the moment of reckoning, which all startups are so afraid of ...

via Techhh