Ringtones are a huge business. According to BMI (via wired.com’s Listening Post blog), revenue exceeded $600M in 2006, but is now in a slight decline for 2007.

So why the downturn, and does this model of charging for a short clip of music makes sense ?

I think people love to customize and personalize their phone, and ringtones in that vein make a lot of sense. We see this phenomena of personalization every day in line @ starbucks when someone calmly asks for an “extra hot, double latte with no foam, half skim half 2%” 🙂

so why the downturn ? some possible reasons:

1) with any new product, the people who consume the product eventually fatigue, and the pool of new customers begins to dry up

2) smartphones make it easy to transfer music to your phone. I’m in this camp – never purchased a ringtone, and now move WAV and MP3 files to my phone if I want some new ring.

3) bluetooth headsets. Ok, maybe this isn’t a biggy, but I see more people being “always on” their own phone and not needing a ring, but simply “click” to turn on their headset.

4) free alternatives. lots of activity in this space.

But what about the model of charging for a ringtone, and often charging for a short clip of a song you already have paid for ? I think in this case, the mobile carriers have been providing a solid service and the market has dictated the value of this service — but I see a larger opportunity for other services.

A ringtone is a public performance in many cases. It’s very common for your phone to ring with many people within earshot, and at the very least you yourself are listening to that ringtone. Given that, shouldn’t we treat it as such and not hear the same ring over and over again ?

With the full understanding that this could become annoying if abused, here are some ideas:

1) free updated ringtones with your favorite sports / news / RSS headlines. If you are a Mets fan, how cool would it be to get the 8th inning score when your phone rings ? Or the latest headline from techcrunch !

2) new product launches. Give away a fun ringtone that also conveys what your new product is good for. This could work really well for products that have a very loyal/fanatical customer base (think apple, toyota, or a new music album) which already blogs about products, created elaborate message forum signatures, etc. Example: “<jingle> – 2008 Prius just broke 100MPG“.

3) Political ads. This could work as both attack ads, and endorsement type of ads. I could see inside the beltway staff in DC having ringtones of “I voted for the 87 billion dollars before I voted against it”

4) customized ringtones pulling in RSS. Example: If a friend calls, pull in their latest RSS headline from their blog/facebook/mysspace/etc and convert it to speech. That way you have something timely to talk about when they call you 🙂

5) and this one is in the category of I hope it doesn’t get abused, but probably will — build a marketplace for paying people to use your ringtone. Ideally people would be shamed into not getting paid for really lousy and annoying ringtones, but if a company like Coke is spending millions on marketing, why not pay people to play your new jingle ! Or on a thursday before a big movie opening, pay people for ringtones promoting the new flick.

Then again, maybe we’ll see a trend in phone etiquette where people will use non intrusive means for getting alerted to a call …. unlikely, but one can hope 🙂

Lots of buzz about twitter these days, and I must say the service is really growing on me.

( if you don’t know what it is, the best way to explain it is to look at this: twittervision.com ).

One thing I’m not sure I understand is why people elect to use SMS with twitter. I see two problems: 1) diminished importance of SMS messages which I have set to alert me in a similar fashion to a phone call and 2) depending on your cell plan, you only get about 100 SMS messages/month included for free.

I see tons of people getting messages all day long, and then getting crushed by the cost of all these inbound SMS mesages.

Why not use mobile web, or a jabber/gtalk IM on your phone/blackberry. That way it’s easy to see and track, plus it’s part of your data plan in most cases.

So for a few days last week I tried to see what would happen if I relied exclusively on my blackberry 8700c, and skipped carrying home the 5.5 pound notebook or using any of my 3 machines at home.

Here are how my usual tasks faired:

– work email:
1) obviously the blackberry is pretty solid in this arena.
2) any email over 10 or 15 lines long I generally skip.
3) I miss the “follow-up” outlook flag, and the ability to move emails into folders
4) I really miss the color coding ability to quickly spot important emails
verdict: i can get by on just blackberry for email for after hours usage, but the “maintenance” work I do on all my emails at night cannot be done on mobile.

– personal email
1) gmail downloadable mobile app is great and really works pretty well.
2) I do wish gmail did not cut off long messages such as paidcontent’s
3) for some reason I was not able to open any draft emails on gmail mobile.
verdict: good enough for the light personal email stuff that I do at night.

– RSS reading
1) I know there are a bunch of rss readers out there, but none seemed to work great for me. I’m about to test out litefeeds but haven’t yet.
2) I ended up reading most of my RSS via the google ig homepage and myyahoo mobile
verdict: not quite ready for primetime, but i need to do more research.

– photos
1) Yahoo!Go works great on my bb 8700. Once you sync in your flickr photos, the experience is pretty good
2) able to see new photos for my contacts
3) able to see and write comments
verdict: excellent experience

– general news browsing
1) most sites I follow have either a mobile friendly version, or have nice XHTML/CSS that renders well on mobile devices
2) anything long format — over 1500 words — is not really workable, but the blackberry scroll makes it OK
3) images now render pretty well, so you feel like you are getting the full story
4) video / audio are a no-go ( for now ), so I do miss that
verdict: pretty good. latency/lag/speed are still big issues, but if I had to choose between a newspaper and a blackberry for news, I’d choose the latter.