PodZinger's Alex Laats on Financials, APIs and a PodZinger Advertising Network
I had a previous Interview with PodZinger's Alex Laats in January of this year.

In this interview Laats discusses financials, APIs, PodZinger's upcoming advertising network launch and their new Spanish search offering.

Thanks to Jasmine Chng, who graciously helped make this happen.

1. Are you profitable? If not, when do you predict you will be?
PodZinger believes that the explosion of audio and video content will result in a re-allocation of advertising dollars that are currently delivered through broadcast radio and TV. In the US alone, the total advertising dollars delivered via broadcast radio and TV totaled $76 billion in 2005 (IAB/PWC). PodZinger’s audio and video search capability will be a crucial enabler in the re-allocation of these advertising dollars to the online world. Because of this large market, PodZinger believes it has an excellent opportunity to build a fast growing, highly profitable business. In terms of the details of our financials … sorry, we’re a private company, and we do not discuss our financials publicly.

2. From a percentage perspective are your partnerships or onsite advertising more valuable right now?
PodZinger’s business plan has two major elements, (1) the ongoing growth of the consumer-facing site and (2) the delivery of audio and video search on a “white label” basis for customers. So, PodZinger is working aggressively on both of these aspects of the business, and they have equal importance in the ongoing growth of the PodZinger business. You’ve seen that we have been rolling out co-branded sites, e.g. Rocketboom, Entercom and TED Talks, and you’ll continue to see a steady stream of them in the upcoming months. We are also dedicating a significant amount of resources to improving the way that advertising messages are delivered in connection with online audio and video content.

In the next month, we are formally introducing our own online video advertising network to both publishers and advertisers. Early reaction has been very positive and we think that this will grow quickly.

3. Where do you see those percentages in five years?
I anticipate that we’ll see the business split evenly between partnerships and onsite advertising.

4. How long could your company last on five million if you continued on at your present income levels?
As a private company, we do not discuss our financial plans publicly. Needless to say, the company is well capitalized to execute its plan, and the company is always building relationships with private equity investors for future rounds of financing.

5. Talk about your plans for advertising - right now you have AdSense. What is the timeline for sponsored audio/video ads? Would it make more sense to wait for Google to create an AdSense model for audio/video ads?
As I mentioned previously, we are kicking off our audio and video advertising network this Fall. PodZinger’s advertising program is unique because of our ability to assess “consumer intent” and to filter the best content from the less desirable. Consumer intent is assessed via a combination of query terms and usage filters, and PodZinger automatically classifies the incoming content using sophisticated natural language processing. The result is an ability to deliver more relevant audio and video ads to consumers, while making it possible for advertisers to associate with the most appropriate content for the delivery of their brand messages.

6. How many developers on the project?
Currently, we have approximately 20 developers on staff.

7. Can you describe the team and the process for the Spanish-language launch?
We have a very diverse product team hailing from different geographies, plus many of our speech technologists are well-versed in multiple languages including Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. As a result, the Spanish language launch was managed by the same team that manages PodZinger. We spent quite a bit of time fine-tuning the underlying technology to ensure high quality results in Spanish and we ran tests with Spanish speaking friends and family to iron out those often overlooked items such as the meaning of words and phrases or interpretations when an English site is translated.

8. Do you have plans for leveraging usage data for PodZinger users or advertisers?
Aggregate data on usage patterns helps PodZinger to deliver better search results for users and a more targeted audience for advertisers. The power of search is that this capability does not depend on any personally identifiable information. Any personal information for users, publishers and advertisers is considered private and is used solely for the purpose of enabling these constituents to manage their PodZinger accounts.

9. Would you/will you keep users anonymous the way that Findory does or would you keep them more public like YouTube?
All user information is private, in fact, any user can search for audio or video on PodZinger without the need to register.

10. How many RSS subscribers do you have?
PodZinger provides updates for thousands of RSS searches every day. We do not publish details regarding volumes of RSS searches, as these numbers are changing every day.

11. What are the most popular RSS subscription terms?
We find that we find that we have a long tail of very, very diverse subscriptions, that is from health-related topics to proper names to favorite sports teams. Most popular RSS subscriptions have to do with video and entertainment including video games. These are followed by RSS subscriptions for current events and politics, e.g. “iraq war”.

12. What are your thoughts about an API that would enable me, a hypothetical developer, to section out vertically oriented podcasts for my vertical content site? (Can I post JUST your search marketing and search interview podcasts in a box on SEL?)
PodZinger’s ability to classify content based on our sophisticated natural language processing technology makes applications such as your hypothetical possible. With PodZinger, the spectrum of new application ideas is very broad and very deep, and PodZinger’s product team is aggressively pursuing this and other application interfaces.

Our objective in all cases is to help improve the consumer experience, and your application idea is consistent with that goal, so we like it!

13. Why don't the majors offer podcast search? (Or do they?) Is it too challenging, do you have patents that protect you, is it not popular enough?
Right now the “majors” as you call them only search the metadata of audio and video files, including those of podcasts. Going beyond the metadata to search inside the audio and video is a very difficult thing to do. PodZinger is built on over 30 years of research in speech recognition and natural language processing from BBN Technologies. Post 9/11, the technology was greatly improved via a government program whose mission was to extract information more easily from audio. BBN was the leading participant in this government research program and went on to deliver specialized systems to the government for broadcast monitoring of foreign language broadcasts. This is not an easy problem to solve. It takes both money and a lot of time. We’ve solved this problem and the industry is beginning to take notice.

14. How many Spanish-language podcasts do you have now?
PodZinger has approximately 800 active Spanish-language audio and video podcasts as of today.

15. Why Spanish first instead of Chinese?
The audience for Spanish podcasts is very interesting particularly in the U.S. since Hispanics spend more time on line than the general population, with about two-thirds rating the importance of Spanish language content very high. The growth in Hispanic advertising was about 10% in 2005 vs. 3.4% for the general population. The available podcasts are very informative, relevant for current events and very good quality. Our early testing showed that they were very well received.

It is interesting that you mention Chinese’ since we have done some work in that area. The number of Chinese podcasts has been growing rapidly however, the biggest challenge is that many of these have not followed a standard convention for publication,i.e. RSS or audio and video formats. That is changing. I expect you’ll see a dedicated site sometime in the next year.

16. Do you compete head to head with Blinkx or do you have different customers?
PodZinger is recognized for its highly differentiated audio and video search capabilities. On the white label side of the business, PodZinger will often find itself in accounts that are currently using (or planning to deploy) Google or Yahoo for text-based search. These customers recognize PodZinger’s value proposition for audio and video and are working to deliver a best-in-breed solution with PodZinger side-by-side with the major text-based players. PodZinger rarely sees any other start-ups in target media accounts.

17. To whom do you think PodZinger and podcasting in general is mission-critical?
PodZinger is mission critical for consumers because it makes it possible to rapidly find the most relevant audio and video content, and then provides unprecedented access via PodZinger’s “jump-to” capability. For content creators and advertisers, PodZinger provides a nexus between consumers and targeted brand messages. The bottom line is that PodZinger is critical for anyone seeking to (a) deliver a great consumer experience for their audio and video content and (b) generate revenue based on relevant audio and video advertisements.

18. What keeps you awake at night?
The “idea space” for audio and video search is so vast that it is hard to rest while there are more opportunities to pursue. What keeps us grounded is our focus on continually improving the consumer experience with audio and video search while simultaneously pushing the envelope for online audio and video advertising.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |