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Voice - Monday, September 24, 2007

Stealth Mode Pudding Comes of Out With Free Ad Supported Phone Calls

Pudding Media will let you make free Skype-like calls so long as you are cool with having them scan your calls for keywords and have them serve ads to you. To give the ads greater accuracy, Pudding Media asks users for their sex, age range, language and zip code when they sign up. Pudding is running ads from a third-party ad feed, but says it plans to also sell its own ads in a few months.

We covered Pudding in stealth a couple of times, most recently in May when it raised $3.5M. The Israel and Silicon Valley company has been funded by Opus Capital, BRM Capital, and angels Ehud Weinstein, Ofer Shalvi and Yariv Gilat.

Pudding was founded by Ruben Maislos, formerly a senior executive at Intel Israel's cellular communications applications division. CEO Ariel Maislos was President of semiconductor firm Passave, which was bought by PMC Sierra for around $300M. Among their first employees is Eyal Karen, who was Director of Business Development at Amazon's A9.com.

The NY Times coverage focuses on the creepiness factor of an ad company eavesdropping on your phone calls. But Pudding responds that millions are used to Google and others monitoring email and inserting contextual ads and this is no different. Also of interest is that while Pudding calls now go through PCs, it may port to cell phones.

Read - NYTimes coverage
View - site