Hijacking Your Ringtone
April 19th, 2007 by Carolyn SchukAnnoyed by those Ride of the Valkyries ringtones? Well get ready to be even more annoyed.
Emotive Communications of Los Angeles has contrived a new level of ringtone obnoxiousness with its “Push Ringer.” Emotive’s downloadable client lets callers send ringtones — which the company has dubbed “flingtones”— with a phone call.
The flingtone, which can be video, animations, avatars or flash files as well as audio, overrides the ringtone on the recipient’s phone. You can also record your own voice message as a ringtone. If you like the ringtone, you can order it on the spot.
The press release doesn’t specify what to do if you hate it. Or how to handle the ensuing social disaster caused by ill-considered voice message ringtones.
The first version of this was released in January for Skype as RingJacker. Versions for Symbian and Windows are expected later this year.
Emotive CEO Anthony Stonefield, who founded the ringtone company Moviso in the early 1990s, has described flingtones as a killer app for 3G and 4G phones. And he’s got some big name investors like Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Warner Music Group that apparently agree.
