Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy spoke at the 140Conf in Los Angeles last month and we covered the reactions of his talk in an earlier blog post. While you can view his presentation there, checkout the video of his talk below:

We suggest you crank-up the speakers to max or listen in with headphones, the volume is a tad low on this one.

The term ‘Real-time’ is the flavour of the year. Twitter was recently valued at $1 Billion and the reasons for this large valuation are known to those familiar with the Web for a while – companies like Twitter are at the forefront of the Real-time Web.

Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to plug into this ‘river of information’. In the slide presentation below, Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm shares his views on Marketing in Real-Time on Twitter, which he presented at the 140Conf in Los Angeles on the 28th of October 2009:

Here are some reactions to his presentation from those at the 140Conf on Twitter:

This one tweet by @gbolles sums up Mahesh’s presentation rather well:

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by Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan

TechCrunch has scooped the mainstream media yet again! It’s the first to report that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. (The official FB press release page is down as of 0125h IST presumably because of an avalanche of traffic!)

ET’s Lightning Analysis: This is a BIG deal in the Web 2.0 war! While at one level Facebook is conceding that its recent homepage overhaul has not been able to dent twitter, it has now put pressure on Google-Twitter to do a similar deal. I think the biggest gain for Facebook though is the FriendFeed founder team (early Googlers all) who come on board. Between the gang, you more or less have the brains behind Gmail, Google Maps and some critical parts of Search, which makes them invaluable to anyone wanting to challenge the big GOOG.

But enough of ‘gyaan’ from me – hey, what do I know? I’m just commenting as a user of these sites. Let’s get in a REAL expert, who’s also insane enough to take a journalist’s call at 0130 IST! Here’s a quick Q&A on the Facebook – FriendFeed deal, with the Founder-CEO of India’s (and probably Asia’s) largest Search Advertising company, Pinstorm: (NB: answers are not exact quotes & are paraphrased from a telephonic interview)

Economic Times: Mahesh, no numbers have been disclosed, so as a VC who knows Silicon Valley math inside-out, what’s your ‘back of the envelope’ guess?

Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy on Twitter) : This is speculation, but typically, its a million per person, so I would assume this is in the range of 30-50 million dollars. But then again I’m known to be conservative (“Sabko pata hai main kanjoos hoon”) so that’s what I would pay for it, but it could be more, maybe even close to three figures, if they got a good deal. The founders though are the real value that Facebook gets out of this. One of them, Paul Buchheit coined Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto!

ET: Does this mean Facebook failed with their new home page?

MM: The page wasn’t a good substitute for Twitter – you had to manually refresh, while FriendFeed and others do it automatically. I suspect FriendFeed will become Facebook’s new home page.

ET: Does this increase the pressure on Google to buy Twitter?

MM: I think this increases the pressure on Twitter to get acquired by someone – they’ve been talking to everybody of late.

ET: Why did FriendFeed do this?

MM: Out of my 2400 odd followers on Twitter, only about 200 subscribe to me via FriendFeed. I don’t know what FriendFeed’s user numbers are but I suspect they’re not more than a fifth of Twitter’s 50 million. FriendFeed had no choice, since they were never going to catch up with Twitter.

ET: Does this get the industry any closer to figuring out how to monetize social media?

MM: Well, more people will come to the Facebook homepage for sure, but there aren’t many monetizing options there. Google does 21 billion dollars in revenue with about 700 million unique users giving it approximately 30 dollars per user. Facebook barely gets a dollar per user, so they’ve resorted to selling ads like television – “We get the attention of “x” users for “y” amount of time” – since they don’t have much to write home about, on web parameters like Cost per Click or Cost per (1000) Impressions. So I don’t think this deal addresses that issue, since FriendFeed is also more about watching the action and less about acting upon it.

ET: These FriendFeed founders include the guys responsible for Gmail! Do you think they could bring some of that expertise to making Facebook’s inbox better?

MM: Hmmm, that’s something I never thought of (abhi2point0 pats self on back)…. problem is you can read all your Facebook messages from your email inbox – and most people give their Gmail IDs these days – so Facebook will need a different approach to how they’re currently doing it, if they’re serious about monetizing it.

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PRIYA SRINIVASAN

Call us biased, but being in the business of words ourselves, we think Pinstorm is the coolest company in this listing (and one whose business needs some careful explaining, so read on). The key to internet-based marketing is key words. Every time a user searches for something on, say, Google, the results page also displays sponsored links on the right. These links appear there because the companies concerned have paid money for them to do so when the searcher uses certain keywords. For instance, a Spanish travel company may have paid big money to ensure that its link is displayed when the keywords cheap and Spain are used in conjunction. Now, here’s the catch. Most known combinations of keywords are very very very expensive; Pinstorm promises that its team of mathematicians and linguists can come up with lesser known keywords that are just as relevant to your business and do not cost as much, while, at the same time, bidding just the right amount across hundreds of keywords. Phew! Does it work? Well, Pinstorm has come up with gems such as Nike+Child+Labour (keywords) for Child Relief and You, and lnfosys+Results for online brokerage Sharekhan. Founder Mahesh Murthy is so confident of his company’s technology that he charges customers a fee based on leads generated, not, as is the practice in the business, a cut on the total spend. That’s earned him business from the likes of British Airways, American Express, eBay, Sun Microsystems, Greenpeace and Monster India. Better still, the technology, claims Murthy, can work across languages. The company’s technology has actually helped it identify under-serviced segments in the market and it has ventured into two of these, handicrafts and hotel reservations in India (ah, that would explain the consignment of brass handicrafts that arrived along with this reporter at Pinstorm’s office), but it is as a search-based marketing engine that Pinstorm would like to be known. That, as we have already said, is cool.