According to the New York Times, a new startup called PuddingMeia will provide free phone calls in exchange for monitoring the phone calls and pushing advertising based on what is said.
I’m not too keen on the idea of a company monitoring my phone calls, but this company ought to have a conversation with Chris Pirillo. He’s runs a live UStream.tv video show with embedded chat and he’s been trying to server relevant Google ads on his hosting page. Current Chris sets a topic manually which is then used to control which ads are served up. I don’t think the minds if the ads are all that relevant all the time, but I’m sure the idea is to generate as much ad revenue as possible, so the best system would help with that. Seems like it would be a fit, if the technology worked.