The round was led by Intel Capital, and Labrador Ventures also took part, if you haven’t already guessed.  In a press release resulting from the round, Alex Castro, the CEO of Pluggd, spoke of his company’s abilities and business model.

“We are building a really unique platform that can search inside the video stream, and we look forward to working with content publishers and advertising service providers both,” stated Castro.  “Our technology makes it possible to connect advertisers with new, hyper-engaged audiences by delivering the most relevant ad, at the best possible moment.”

In addition to searching for words within videos, Pluggd also deals with audio clips.  It’s an interesting idea, and as VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall points out, Pluggd “does something well that few others have been able to match.”  See Marshall’s clip of the technology in action if you need further convincing.

All in all, it’s a good day for Pluggd.  I was rather disappointed to discover, however, that the homepage of Labrador Ventures doesn’t feature any Labrador retrievers.

Seattle-based start-up Pluggd was founded in February 2006 with the goal of making it easier for people to discover, experience, and share online audio and video programming, which is more commonly known as podcasting.

According to the creators, the website “is an aggregation of both traditional media and independent online-only producers.” The site’s search results are based on topics of interest, popularity, and critical acclaim.

But what, you might ask, sets this start-up apart from the plethora of other audio and visual search choices? The answer lies in the unique search result features of the site, including heat mapping and the ability to choose the exact point of the audio or visual result you would like.

The heat-mapping feature allows users to search for a particular point in the broadcast of a recording or visual image that is most closely related to the original search topic.

For example, if a user were to search ESPN radio for “University of Kentucky basketball”, Pluggd would show the user on the heat map display the “hottest” place of interest in the color orange.

Pluggd even locates related topics in a broadcast, for example the term “bowl game”. A user listening to a broadcast about UK football could find the exact point in an ESPN broadcast where the team’s bowl game site would be mentioned.

Competing podcast sites, such as Podzinger, do not offer such relevant features as heat mapping. The lack of such a convenient feature could mean decreased traffic for the competing sites in the future.

Intel, who have their own audio and visual feature, made the largest donation. Intel, as well as other investors, seems to believe that Pluggd is a superior product, investing $1.65 million in the start-up.

Some other generous investors besides Intel include:

-Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications
-Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft
-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.

If you are interested in using the unique features of the search site, the download is available at Pluggd’s demo site.

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

If you want something a little more filling than burritos and geek talk on the beach, I put up a 38-minute interview I did with Alex Castro, CEO of Seattle startup Pluggd, which is working on a new search engine for podcasts which is really cool. I got him to give me a 3-minute-short demo too. See, something for everyone! Long interview for those who want depth, short demo for those who just want to get the meat.

That interview is one of those that I did up in Seattle. There’s a lot of interesting startups being built in the Seattle area. We’ll have some more from Seattle this week and next.

Here’s an article about Pluggd over on TechCrunch.

Anyway, wonderful time yesterday hanging out with Roxanne on a couple of Half Moon Bay beaches. She inspired me back at Vloggercon to live a beach-oriented lifestyle and I’m so blessed that we can walk to the beach from our new home.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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