Based on a project I am working on now for a religious not-for profit I found this article from the Huffington Post to very interesting. “Fatwa Against Muslim Prayer Ringtones: They’re ‘Demeaning,’ ‘Disrespectful,’ Top Cleric Says (see link bellow).”
The strict religious world and the word of New and Social Media have not exactly come to terms yet. They will, of course. Its inevitable. And the permutation will be very amazing to see. It will be an entirely different way of looking at new media and social media.
But in the meantime there are a of interesting challenges when doing New Media and Social Media for the strong in faith.
Its a topic I intend to spend a lot of time in the future. Thats what the core conversation group Judaism 2.0 I am sponsoring is all about.
But stay tuned for more as I explore this topic deeply.
On another note, Ringtones are still here and they still can be a very viral form of communication. If the passion is there.
Holy cow, what a week. Every time Mordy or I sat down to write a post, something else happened. I’m going to try to condense it all into one week, going by topic. Bear with me: (more…)
The handsome boys over at the search engine company Prodege (the first search engine to custom brand and incentivise search) have have created an image search site called YOWGO, a search engine dedicated to the concept of searching for images to send to your phone.
The “send to phone” service is being provided by Mixxer, the former ringtone turned multi mobile media company. “Prodege is the first engine company to utilize this tool and offer this free service to users,” says Scott Dudelson COO of Prodege.
Its really simple actually. Say, for example, I wanted to put Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as the wallpaper on my phone. But the campaign does not provide this service. Well as simple search for Romney on YOWGO provided me with a plethora of material to use… now how do I get it on my phone. Underneath its picture is a little link that says ‘Send To Phone.’ This opens up a Mixxer site that allows you to enter your phone model and number and send away (it even lets you edit the picture). In no time you receive a WAP Push SMS with a link to a mobile website where your phone will then prompt you to download the picture. Thats it, your done.
I think the implications for this are pretty huge it terms of making it easier to deliver user user generated content to the mobile phone… but it also makes such things are mobile viral delivery more viable.
Of course there are some possible legal implications to all this but for now its a really fun and obvious idea.
Just the other day I was talking with some colleagues wondering why there where never ever “Bushism” ringtones that become widespread. I mean, there have been cases of people making Bush blunder ringtones, but the real question is why political ringtones have not caught on and why no one is standing up and trying to distribute it on a mass scale.
Well just in time for the 08 elections, Ringtones08.com is hoping to make Ringtones the new bumper sticker and lawn sign. Simply put RingTones08.com is a free site that user the power of myxer.com to let anyone upload and download ringtones about the 2008 election. Thats a key element, not only will they create and distribute election teemed ringtones but they will also let you, or anyone (i.e a campaign) use their site to upload ringtones of their own for viral distribution.
When you have a specific ringtone in mind, it is not always the easiest of tasks to find it, especially when it’s a more obscure song.If you don’t know this already you simply must realize that I am a huge Weezer fan.My favourite song is Only in Dream, amazing, but not as commonly found as Buddy Holly or Beverly Hills.My ringtone quest is long. Of course I have to search a few providers before I finally find what I am looking for.Well my friends, this task just got a whole lot easier.I, with great honor, would like to introduce you to one of the first metasearch engines for mobile related content, brought to youthrough the partnership of UpSNAP and MuseGlobal.
“Mobile metasearch technology from MuseGlobal searches multiple mobile sites simultaneously. For example, if you are looking for a particular ringtone, rather than going to ten different mobile sites one-at-a-time, which will take you 30 minutes or more, you now go to UpSNAP.com and put in one search only. UpSNAP will then search all ten ringtone sites at once and deliver sorted, de-duplicated and uniform results instantly.”
Tony Philipp, UpSNAP CEO, was looking for a better way to organize and deliver content to customers of its free and subscription mobile services. “There are unique challenges in providing a usable and functional mobile search experience, and with the huge influx of personal entertainment choices it became apparent that a mobile metasearch solution was needed,†states Philipp. “In essence, UpSNAP will function as a one-stop shop for mobile users who want instant access to wireless features such as mobile radio, ringtones and games.â€
The metasearch works both through a web interface on any page of UpSNAP.com, or via SMS (shortcode = 27627) .More information on using the service can be found here and here.
Myxer.com (a service of mVisible), known for being a place where you can easily make and share mobile content (especially, but not limited to Ringtones), today announced the launch of MyxerMagic – a free download that lets users send any online image to their mobile phone right from their existing web browser (kind of like the Google Send To Phone extension but goes way beyond text!). From my first looks at the product it appears that MyxerMagic truly eliminates the need for file downloads, format conversions, serial or Bluetooth connections, and other tedious operations that have previously been required to get content to mobile phones.
The browser extension can be downloaded for free at www.myxermagic.com. Essentially, It extends the functionality of Internet Explorer or Firefox to add a “Myxer – Send image to phone!†command into the right mouse-click menu. Users also have the ability to send images to friends’ and family members’ mobile phones (spam potential?).
But of course, for those of you that are anal about your mobile content , MyxerMagic comes with a powerful web-based image editor to re-size, re-shape, or otherwise manipulate images to best fit a phone’s display. Like all of Myxer’s functionality, MyxerMagic works with ANY mobile device (that accepts MMS) and is carrier-independent, meaning it doesn’t matter which provider the user’s phone is with or what plan they are on.
“Myxer is about more than just customizing your mobile phone with ringtones and wallpapers – it’s really about leveraging the respective strengths of the internet and the mobile phone to make digital content easily discoverable and accessible anywhere you are,†said Myk Willis, founder and chief technology officer of mVisible Technologies, Inc., the company behind Myxer. “MyxerMagic completely rewrites the rules of how user-generated content is consumed, because for the first time ever, all digital content is one click away from being mobile content.â€
And he is right! In the future Willis envisions expanding the service to be able to pull ANY web content, from video, sound clips video, text, whatever, thus truly turning any web content into mobile content.
The potential for this taking off is huge. The ability to scrape content form any online venue or site or home-page (besides creating possible copy-write issues) has immense possibilities especially in the areas of viral marketing and messaging. Imagine something like a politician saying something stupid. Within an hour its on the web and within another our people are simply ubiquitously right clicking their mouse and sending the sound clip to their mobile phone as a ringtone. Or perhaps a picture of Tom Cruise delivering a baby on the side of an LA freeway makes its way onto the web. Technology like Myxermagic makes it easy to spread it to mobile wall papers throughout the country.
Of course MMS message rates will apply but I think that MMS has finally found an application to bring it to the marketing forefront.
Maine is not the only state that is taking advantage of the youth medium we call the cell phone this election. last Monday Michigan’s Coalition For Progress unveiled their mobile “My Future” campaign which harnesses the power of this cutting edge technology to engage young voters in this upcoming election.
While the the coalition using the medium to push out messages like “Did you know that Republicans in the Legislature want to make it legal for pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions? Vote Nov 7 – Move MI forward!” like the like Lamarche campaign, the coalition also looks beyond SMS as simply a push out message tool.
The coalition is also holding a contest where someone can text VOTE1 or VOTE2, all the way to 5, to 388873 and they’ll receive a trivia question about Republican Governor nominee Dick Devos. The trivia questions are silly and a little funny. Each of the questions are multiple choice. If you answer correctly you get one message back and, of course, if you answer incorrectly, you get a different one. The really cool thing is that the questions and answers are phrased in such a way to educate and reinforce the coalitions message. And, because they are not officially a campaign, the SMS trivia will enter you into a sweepstakes in which two people will receive a 30g video iPod with the Coalition For Progress’ logo emblazoned on the back.
I would imagine that on election day a Get Out The Vote message will also be sent and somehow tried to be made viral.
With that all set up the only problem is making people aware of the mobile campaign, a real challenge when its launched only a week before the election. They have a television ad. The ad focuses on an instant message conversation with a young woman encouraging her friends to join “MyFuture,†a Coalition project that centers on young voters. The television add is probably one of the best shortcode placement in a television ad I have ever seen.
The spot is airing on cable systems across Michigan during the final weeks of the campaign giving voters information on key issues and motivating them to get out and vote on Election Day. It also will be airing statewide on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
The coalition has also purchased AdWords to drive folks to sign up. I do not know anything about signs and what not… a week before the election its probably hard to put the Text: Join To 388873 on lawn signs but signs in universities and youth hangouts help as do radio and newspaper placements.
The coalition also has ringtone’s which can be downloaded here. They are pretty good.
This is also one of the first campaigns to work directly with an aggregator to create its campaign, in this case DC based Singlepoint (also the sponsor of Mobile Monday DC)
Everyone is talking about it. News Corp the new owners of MySpace has just announced that they bought 51% of Verisign’s ringtone business Jamba (known as Jamster in the US, and also known as the Crazy Frog people) for 187.5 million dollars. All this for the purpose of, News Corp says, of expanding its mobile content sales.
News Corp owns Fox… and their are already Family Guy mobile content. But among its first offerings will be ringtones, wallpaper and short clips from the popular Fox animated series The Simpsons.
News Corp will of course also leverage its mobile content sales through MySpace which is a pretty nice space to be able to sell mobile content…
During my travels to LA for the CTIA I stumbled upon this expired mobile marketing scheme by Pepsi. 1 in 3 gets a Ringtone” says the label. The ringtones are described as original tones from top artists and probably are. To entice you more the label on the bottle also tell you that you have the chance to win a Motorola music phone which means its either a RAZR, ROCKR or a SLVR. I would pass on that, or ell it on ebay.
But it was not just ringtones you could win. Some of the ringtones where video ringtones (how that works in the US I have no idea). Basically, a winning code will unlock any of over 150 music files that can be downloaded to mobile handsets. The sweepstakes was also promoted across Yahoo Music and several other Yahoo properties.
Nevertheless, the only thing mobile about the campaign was the ringtone and the (possible) phone. There is no SMS involved in entering this sweepstakes. Nope, this is just a regular look under the cap, see if you won and go the website to claim your prize type of deal. Alas, I did not win and the sweepstakes was already over (since 8.20.06) so I could not follow through with the prize to see how it worked. But I would imagine that the ringtone would be delivered via SMS.
Even though this is an old campaign and nothing new (in the world of Pepsi and Ringtones) I wanted to blog about it because I am wondering about the concept of giving away free ringtones, from the carrier perspective at least. There are only so many ringtones an average person will put on there phone… I am sure that a cool exclusive tone from Pepsi will mean that that person will not purchase a ringtone in the future. Did Pepsi or Yahoo Music (who powered this concept) have a deal with carriers or did the carriers only make money via SMS delivery and data downloading cost? It would seem like they would not like the concept of ringtone give-aways or even music give aways for that matter now that they are also getting into the music download business. Not that I care or anything, but from a “carrier relations” perspective it may be an important thing to think about.
