Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.
If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you what you intuitively want when searching video: a way to skip forward to the exact part of the audio or video file you are looking for. We’ll be hearing more about Pluggd next year, as it begins to cut partnership deals with major publishers, and comes out of the testing phase it launched two months ago.
Let’s take an example.
Take this ESPN radio recording from yesterday. Select the “find” tab, and type in the word “Marlins.” Pluggd will show you in the heat map the places most likely to be interesting to you. Orange shows a very high match. If you move the cursor there, you’ll hear the part about the Marlins. (You can do this by clicking on this image at left. You may be prompted to update your Flash player; go ahead and do so.)
But it gets even better.
Pluggd finds related words. Let’s say you’re looking for anything to do with injury, because you’d heard that Kobe Bryant might be injured. You type in “injury,” and Pluggd locates the part where the radio mentions his sprained ankle, even though the word “injury” is never mentioned in the audio. (Again, you can try this by clicking on image at left.)
This is impressive. Pluggd can do this by analyzing pages and pages of sports articles, and finding the statistical relationships between words. Its crawler finds that sprained ankle is very clearly correlated with the word injury over time. It does this without any sort of human domain experts. No one is doggedly typing in these associations behind the scenes. It is all automated, relying on the great database called the Web. “The Web itself represents mankind’s knowledge,” says Alexander Castro.
Right now, this cool search is only available at Pluggd’s demo site. And in case we’ve lost you, here’s a screencast tour.
Meanwhile, Pluggd has also building an inventory of ESPN and other files — now numbering more than a million — and it is busy indexing them all, so that it can make them available for crawling with its technology. Like Google, it wants to become a destination site. Also like Google, it wants to offer its technology to publishers, too, and Pluggd says it will be announcing various deals next year.
The company has boot-strapped itself until now, and the $1.65 million can be considered a seed round, to be converted into a first VC round sometime next year.
Intel made up a good portion of the investment, but more than half was contributed by a group of angels, including Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft and Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications. Other angels include:
–Brian Magierski, CEO of Kalivo, former co-founder/CEO of iMark (acquired by Ariba);
–Fraser Black, technology investor
–Bill Bryant, founder and investor in numerous search-focused startups including Netbot, Medio and Singingfish;
–Alex Alben, former executive at Starwave and RealNetworks;
–Barry Newman, venture partner at NeoCarta, former vice chairman of the technology group at Bear Stearns;
–Mark Klebanoff, former chief financial officer at RealNetworks.
There are a multitude of other companies focused on audio and video search (Pixsy, Podzinger and CastTV, for example), but none that are using Pluggd’s heat map approach that takes you directly to where you want to go.
Tags: co:CastTV, co:Pixsy, co:Pluggd, co:Podzinger, inv:Intel-Capital, people:Alex-Alben, people:Alexander-Castro, people:Barry-Newman, people:Bill-Bryant, people:Brian-Magierski, people:Fraser-Black, people:Kristopher-Tate, people:Mark-Klebanoff, people:Paul-Maritz, people:Scott-Oki, video-search5 Comments
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Kelly Smith said:
Alex and team knows what he’s doing. At Curious Office we looked at a lot of deals this last summer before deciding to focus on Imagekind.com
His is the only deal where I questioned my decision to not invest. He’s going to do very well with Pluggd and he deserves to do so because he knows how to develop great software.
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Search Engines WEB said:
This technology could revolutionized Podcasting once it matures to the point of Latent Sematic Indexing and Concept Searching.
Blinkx has a conceptually analogous technology for videos - wonder if there are any logistical similarities in their engineering and development?
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Jeff said:
Soon all of the 61 video sharing sites will probably have this feature. My question is how do all of these companies that are now a dime a dozen keep getting the means to raise money.
Watch this video and help me understand please:
http://www.podsea.com/startuptrials.phpJeff
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Tony R said:
This is bad news for YouTube. The majors could simply use this tool indexing their content on their website, and you wouldn’t have to go to YouTube to see what constitutes 90% of their traffic.
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iwimjhexvz said:
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13 Trackbacks
11:20 pm
NewTeeVee » Pluggd Makes Bold Claims, Takes Funding said:
[...] VentureBeat reports Pluggd, a Seattle-based audio and video search startup, has raised $1.65 million from Intel and a group of angels. Pluggd, which we first met at DEMO this year, is trying to use speech recognition tools to help make sense of audio and video podcasts. VentureBeat runs the company’s claim it has “‘perfected the user experience’ for audio and visual search.” While we like what Pluggd is doing, that’s a bit of an overstatement. [...]
4:13 am
Pluggd « Technically Speaking said:
[...] Pluggd is in the news again this morning, late last evening. You can read a nice write up over at OmNet’s new site or also at VentureBeat. I last talked about the company here. *post link note - Wow, has it been that far back? The blog was just in it’s infancy back then! haha! [...]
5:27 am
Plug for Pluggd « John Furrier said:
[...] Matt Marshall has the story about the financing for Pluggd. I met with the Pluggd team yesterday to get a look at their demo of their technology. I was impressed them as entrepreneurs and with how well they’ve bootstrapped their business and developed their technology. What excited me about their story is that they are innovating. Alot of talk on Web 2.0 has been about new ‘micro apps’ or ajax interfaces but with companies like Pluggd they are developing real technology to provide real value. Any effort to make the media development and consumption experience simplier and easier is good by me. [...]
5:50 am
VentureBeat Wire » Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M said:
[...] See our story here. VentureBeat Community [...]
7:34 am
GigaOM » Pluggd, Perfect, Please said:
[...] NewTeeVee has a post about Seattle-based audio-and-video search start-up, Pluggd, which has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors. VentureBeat, which first wrote about the company says that Pluggd has “‘perfected the user experience’ for audio and visual search.” [...]
8:33 am
Lost Remote TV Blog said:
[...] Seattle-based Pluggd says it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and video search, and I have to admit, it’s rather amazing. The demo on their site allows you to search for words mentioned in an ESPN Radio sportscast. The colors on the bar illustrate how likely the words or phrase is used in a conversation. But the cool part is the fact it will find related words. For example, type the word “injury” and it will find a story about Kobe Bryant’s sprained ankle, although the word “injury” was never spoken. Pluggd makes the association by crawling sports articles and drawing correlations between words. Wow. It’s not perfect, though, as I searched for “New York” and it found a story on the Barry Bonds and the Giants — not the NY Giants, of course, but the SF Giants. Still, very impressive. The company just landed $1.65 million in funding from Intel and others, so media companies can expect to hear from Pluggd soon. (Via PaidContent) [...]
10:59 am
neunetz.com » pluggd- Indizieren von und suchen in Video und Audio said:
[...] Eins der größten Probleme mit Videos und Audio im Netz ist, dass sie nicht wie Text indiziert und durchsucht werden können. Noch nicht. Startup pluggd -eigentlich ein Podcastverzeichnis- behauptet, sie können das jetzt. Das wäre, gelinde gesagt, toll. Venturebeat hat sich pluggd und ihre neue HearHere genannte Technologie angeschaut. Und sind begeistert. Wenn es so klappen würde, wie auf der Demoseite zu sehen und erfahren ist, dann könnte man Begriffe nach denen man sucht, einfach eingeben und auf einem Zeitbalken werden dann die betreffenden Zeitabschnitte grafisch hervorgehoben. Direkt angeklickt, kann man dann direkt die Teile einer Show/Podcastfolge/wasauchimmer anschauen/anhören, die man will. Das wäre eine kleine Sensation. Venturebeat ist also nicht ganz zu unrecht so begeistert. [...]
12:36 pm
It’s getting more and more easier to scan podcasts – 21talks said:
[...] Voice recognition and semantics analysis are coming for the masses with Pluggd. The Seattle-based startup, presented at DemoFall 06, is rolling out an audio search. Users type their keyword requests, the podcast is analyzed, and matches are presented in a heat map covering the audio. With such a feature, ’scanning’ podcasts becomes as easy as using Google search. And it’s not a surprise to see Pluggd funded by $1.65 million by Intel and other VCs. [...]
7:03 pm
Pluggd has raised $1.65 million » Digital Podcast said:
[...] VentureBeat is reporting that Pluggd has raised $1.65M. Pluggd claims that it has perfected the user experience for audio and visual search. More hype than we need, but they are working on a good issue, helping people find the content they want. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
7:55 pm
Drew Olanoff, Unpluggd. » Pluggd “perfects†audio and video search, raises $1.65M said:
[...] Declaring it has “perfected the user experience†for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.read more | digg story You can also bookmark this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos [...]
9:38 pm
Social News Blitz: Zoodango, Searchles, Pluggd, Wallop, InnerTee, YourMinis and More - Mashable! said:
[...] Pluggd Gets Funded: Pluggd, which provides podcast and visual search, has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors. I originally skipped over this one due to an unworkable interface at launch, but a bit more digging shows they have some interesting technology: search for a word, and they’ll display a heat map that indicates where that word is most likely to be found in the podcast. It also finds related words and phrases - the word you’re looking for might not be in the podcast, but related words might be present. They want to build partnerships and become a destination site, but right now it feels more like a technology play. [via] [...]
11:39 am
Drew Olanoff Goes All In | [chrisbrogan.com] said:
[...] I think Drew’s riding high from some recent news. Whatever the case, this is great! 5things, fivethings, pluggd, promotion, scriggityShare and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
1:55 pm
pluggd in » More about Chunks: The Parts You Want said:
[...] Matt Marshall at Venture Beat did a good job describing how Pluggd works in this post (link to http://venturebeat.com/2006/12/06/pluggd-perfects-audio-and-video-search-raises-165m/) after we last spoke with [...]