In what looks like a firesale, Call Genie has acquired US-based mobile analytics and advertising network company VoodooVox, which has raised a ton of venture capital from investors like Apax Partners, Softbank Capital, Steamboat Ventures (Disney), Berkshire Capital Investors and Village Ventures.
VoodooVox provides demographic information on phone calls and mobile ad traffic in real-time, enabling companies to gain insights into their call volume and mobile application activity. → Read More
Your phone is now a broadcasting implement. MyVox is opening up a new set of APIs today that will let Web developers add voice notes and audio advertising to any Web application. Instead of making people record their voice on their PC mic or upload an audio file, with MyVox, they use their phones as their mics instead. Website visitors can simply call a number on their regular phones and follow the voice prompts to record a note or message. Some examples of applications that can make use of this voice functionality are: adding voice notes to Google maps, recording a voiceover for a Flickr slideshow, creating a RockYou widget that lets people’s friends leave voice comments on their Facebook page, recording vocals for a WeMix song or a Blabberize video, or even turning your iPhone into a voice recorder. Check out this gallery to get a sense of these and other applications. For instance, you can see how a Google map with voice-enabled push pins looks like here. Just click on one of the push pins and pres play. You could narrate a tour of landmarks or points of interest. To create your own map with voice notes, go here, click on “Add Marker,” select the push pin abd click on “call in audio.” Once you are done, save the map to generate a unique URL. MyVox is operated by VoodooVox, which makes money from playing in-call audio ads to people while they are on hold. The more call volume it can generate, the more audio advertising inventory it can sell. But instead of making Website visitors suffer through audio advertising, only people who use the service to create a voice track will hear an ad when they call in. And Web developers will get a cut of any advertising dollars associated with their applications. Sounds like fair trade. CrunchBase Information Voodoovox MyVox RockYou Flickr Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Jangl is finally turning on a revenue stream across its network of social calling widgets, which reach a potential 80 million social networking profiles (the company hasn’t announced actual active users). People generally use Jangl to place calls or SMSs to other web surfers without exchanging your real number. The new advertising initiative is called Mobile Media Platform and provides a set of APIs for publishers and ad units for advertisers. The strategy is similar to steps other widget providers have taken to finally make some money off their network by tying in advertisements. Through the APIs, developers can integrate bits of Jangl’s SMS and VOIP calling functionality into their applications. In exchange, Jangl expands its advertising reach a bit further. The monetization side is being handled in partnership with Pudding Media, and Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Group. Jangl will have several different types of ad units for advertisers, such as SMS ads tacked on to messages users send and pre-roll audio ads that play during the time you’d normally spend listening to the phone ring. Advertisers can target the ads by keyword, category, location, and demographics. Jangl’s been running tests of the SMS and pre-roll format on Facebook and Bebo with Pudding Media earlier this quarter and feels confident enough that they won’t turn users off to the service. CrunchBase Information Jaxtr Jangl Pudding Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
As if we didn’t have enough advertising in our lives, now we can look forward to listening to ads while on hold during a phone call, or while using a free Web telephony service. One startup trying to make that happen is VoodoVox out of New York City. Backed by Softbank Capital, Apax Partners, and Steamboat Ventures (Disney), VoodooVox has raised a total of $13 million so far. CEO J. Scott Hamilton wants to make VoodooVox the DoubleClick of what is known as “in-call” advertising. “It’s 1994 again” he says, “and I’m selling banners to people who don’t even know what a banner is.” What he is really selling is a relatively new form of audio advertising. VoodooVox started out five years ago building automated systems to handle incoming calls to radio stations, but in the past year-and-a-half it’s expanded to delivering targeted audio ads over the phone and elsewhere. Radio shows like Howard Stern’s or request shows on MTV can generate hundreds of thousands of calls per day. VoodooVox’s software handles those calls, records the incoming messages, and can collect the demographic information from callers as well. Adding advertising was a no-brainer. For instance, here is one ad for MSN Music that ran on NYC hip-hop station Hot97′s call-in line. (Listener’s were prompted to “press 9″ to get an offer from MSN Music sent to their mobile phones). The 400 or so radio stations that already use VoodooVox for call management, and 200 other “voice publishers” like calling card companies, receive 300 million calls a month. Currently, VoodooVox is serving audio ads in about 10 percent of those and getting average CPMs of $10 to $15, which it splits 50/50 with the companies receiving the calls. That gives VoodooVox the critical mass to become an audio ad network. It just struck an undisclosed $2.3 million deal with Jones MediaAmerica (a radio ad sales rep firm) for Jones to resell VoodooVox ads to radio and TV stations. But radio is the just the start. “We happen to be serving them into phone calls but there is no reason why we cannot serve them into other media,” says Hamilton. These ads could just as easily be inserted into Web-based telephony services or even online music services. In fact, VoodooVox powers ads on Web-based voicemail services MyVox and SayNow, and is in talks with audio app Blabberize . In a way, this → Read More
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