PhoneZoo
Phonezoo.com is a mobile Content site. By bridging the web and the mobile, Phonezoo allows for content creation, discovery, download and an easy mobile personalization experience. Phonezoo has combined the IDeaS of user created content and the power of the mobile community, also referred to as a mobile social network.
Background
Phonezoo was founded in February 2006 by Ram Ramkumar and Manish Vaidya. Phonezoo is a Silicon Valley-based startup with funding led by venture capitalist Tim Draper of DFJ Ventures, Inc.
As reported by Alexa, since its launch, Phonezoo has become a leading mobile social media and entertainment site in North America with 90%+ traffic from USA. Every day, hundreds of thousands of mobile content pieces are created, discovered and downloaded by members of the Phonezoo community. As per data collected by Quantcast Phonezoo.com is a top 5,000 US site that attracts a more female, teen group.
Like most social networking services, the business model is based on serving advertisements to users.
Features
Phonezoo is a service that allows people to send ringtones, photos and games to their mobile phone for free. Phonezoo is an ad-supported service and does not require users to sign up to any subscription plan. Users can create ringtones from mp3s on their computer and send ringtones others have created. They can also enter their own song title, song description and tags to their created ringtones.
Phonezoo uses Acoustic fingerprint technology to automatically detect if a file being uploaded is from a copyrighted track. Once such an upload has been detected, the site does not allow any sharing of such content.
This technology has been licensed from Audible Magic Corporation which is a commercial venture that provides electronic media identification and copyright management solutions using proprietary acoustic fingerprinting technology U.S. Patent 5,918,223 based on original research by Musclefish Consulting.
Partnerships
To keep the site free to end users, Phonezoo partners with leading advertising networks like Google and Adbrite to show advertisements on the website, on WAP pages and in the text messages sent to users. Phonezoo also partners with Greystripe to offer free, ad-supported games via its WAP portal.
Recently, WeMix.com, the user-generated music creation community created by Grammy award winning artist Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges and Phonezoo announced a partnership to launch an innovative content distribution platform for new artists.
See also
- List of social networking websites