The mobile media market continues to enter new phases of development, even as analysts such as SNL Kagan suggest that sales have reached their peak and are starting to decline. Reinvention and innovation are the current name of the game, and companies are scrambling to find new and better ways to capitalize on users’ desire for personalization and customization. Tying up with the music industry from day one to produce ringtones and ringback tones of varying lengths and origins has been a beneficial move, and continues to be even as companies develop more user-friendly ways to make these available.
3-year-old “next-gen ringtone pioneer” Vringo, founded in 2006 and dedicated to bringing about an evolution revolution in ringtones, has developed one such new system in 2009. Shifting the call signal signature landscape forever with an award-winning video ringtone application, Vringo has turned the audible experience into a visual one, transforming the acts of receiving and sending mobile calls into a highly visual, social experience. Vringo CEO Jon Medved comments that Vringo allows the maximization of the tons of graphics available online, a largely untapped market for mobile use in the manner that Vringo has developed. “When we developed Vringo, we knew there was extensive graphic content on the Internet that wasn’t being utilized to its fullest extent.”
One such lucrative and popular tie-up [and “team-up”] in 2008 was with Marvel Comics, whose currently hot Wolverine and the X-Men animated series and classic 1966 Marvel Super Heroes cartoon provided plenty of content for Vringo’s editable raw footage and pre-cut video ringtone banks. Fans with Vringo app-compatible phones – mostly the BlackBerry Bold, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, over 200 handsets in total – could even turn their clips into video ringtones, even setting a visual ringback tone with Vringo’s signature VringForward feature which allows them to select a Super Hero or Super Villain to be seen by friends who call. A similar tie-up in 2007 with avatar whizzes Meez also did well, proving that Vringo has definitely hit upon a niche graphic content market and used it to the fullest possible advantage.
Now users can install Vringo’s application to create or take video or images or even slideshows from anywhere, whether their own collections or Vringo’s immense online library of over 4,000 clips, and make the final product their personal cal signature. This totally new functionality has earned Vringo accolades from the New York Times, who has called them the “next big thing in ringtones” – and even USA Today acknowledges that Vringo’s services have “to be seen to be believed.”
Vringo’s current application format, Vringo version 2.0, works on Symbian and J2ME-enabled phones. The 2.0 format features an intuitive mobile browser, streamlining the process of finding and sharing the video ringtones that Vringo has become known for with thumbnail views and higher-resolution previews. This highly user-friendly service earned praise from CNET Download, who noted that Vringo’s offerings are “just getting better and better.” Soon, Windows Mobile users will be able to enjoy the benefits of 2.0 as well, ushering in another chapter in Vringo’s bringing of the visual ringtone revolution.
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