"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
22 April 2007Like hell you willAny notion I might have had of upgrading my cell phone vanished the moment I read this:
The D. E. Shaw group, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Warner Music Group and prominent media and telephony angel investors have invested $7.7 million in Emotive Communications, Inc., a media technology and services provider that has developed a real-time interactive ringtone format for 3G, 4G and VoIP services.
Emotive's flagship product, the patent-pending "Push Ringer", reverses the common ringtone model. It enables a caller to push an outgoing ringtone to the receiving phone allowing the caller, not the called person, to set the tone. The chosen Ringer is transmitted to the recipient's handset and temporarily overrides the phone's pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files. Closing the loop, if the called person likes the ringtone, the service also enables him or her to instantly buy a copy of the ringtone for his or her own phone. Emotive's Push Ringer moves beyond traditional mobile personalization by both adding value to the ringtones users purchase for their own phones and providing content recommendation and impulse-purchase opportunities to the users' friends, family and coworkers. And what's to stop some cheesy marketroid from sending out thousands of the damn things at once? The only thing worse than spam is spam you have to pay for, and air time ain't free, Bunkie. I sincerely hope these people lose every last bit of their investment, and a few million besides, and that the next time they get ideas this stupid, they put their heads in the oven. It's a far cleaner place than where they are now. (Via Engadget.) Posted at 9:37 AM to Wastes of OxygenIf anyone spams me with a push ringtone, I'm going to buy one myself and push back. And my ringtone will be recorded off a whoopie cushion. Posted by: McGehee at 9:54 AM on 22 April 2007Hmm. I do like the idea of a whoopee (proper spelling, thank you) cushion ring phone. Posted by: Mister Snitch! at 1:43 PM on 22 April 2007Just off the top of my head, I'd say what would stop "some cheesy marketroid from sending out thousands of the damn things at once" would be that it will cost them money to do it. This is why E-mail spam has taken off - through illegal botnets and servers in unregulated countries and such, the spammers pay almost nothing to blast you. Not so for cellphone technologies. Plus, I kind of suspect that any phone implementing this idea would include a feature to only accept incoming ringtones from people in the address book, kind of like selective ringing. If not, no one would buy the phones including such features. If the feature can't be turned off, I suspect the anti-regulatory faction of the FCC would change its mind after the first 200 or so spammy ringtones each commissioner received. Just a hunch. Free-market conservatives tend to hate regulations until the unregulated markets start annoying them. They banned junk faxes, didn't they? Posted by: Matt at 3:02 PM on 22 April 2007Well, if you define "banned" as "made them technically illegal but didn't stop the actual flow of them," then yeah, they did. (Admittedly, I haven't gotten one in over two weeks now, but you'd think that something that was "banned" wouldn't show up at all.) And, like I said, I'm not buying a new phone, at least partially to make sure I am not subjected to this sort of thing. The marketplace in action. Ugh. Just what we don't need. Having bad music we don't like forcefully sent to our cell phones. (And I can see some of my friends thinking it's a cute idea and doing it to me) I'd only go for this if there was the option of, if I didn't like the ring tone, I could push back and have both the person who sent it to me and the developer of this concept receive a painful but non-fatal electric shock. Posted by: fillyjonk at 9:23 AM on 27 April 2007 |