San Francisco, CA – DJ Nitrogen, creator of the Sharetones™ family of ringtone apps, announced today that it has been granted Patent No. 7,610,044 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “This is our core process that lets users legally share ringtones between their mobile devices and enables providers to unlock users’ music with pre-edited ringtones,” said DJ Nitrogen CEO Chris Sindoni. “We believe this is the future of the ringtone business.”

The patent covers the method of sharing ringtone content independent of the audio content used to generate the ringtone. DJ Nitrogen refers to this as the recipe-sharing model. The “ringtone recipe” is the meta-data that extracts the ringtone from the full audio track, including start and end points, fade in/out and effects. DJ Nitrogen matches music on a user’s phone or media device with the ringtone recipes created by other users. These recipes are stored in the DJ Nitrogen cloud. Each recipe is made available to everyone in the DJ Nitrogen ecosystem who owns the source audio. This gives users instant access to a huge and growing selection of ringtones for music they love. The platform is fully compliant with copyright laws because users share only the recipe; they never share the source audio content. In the same manner that users share these recipes, providers can deliver professionally pre-edited recipes to their subscribers using the patented DJ Nitrogen process.

DJ Nitrogen leverages the explosive growth in smart-phones and the trend in full track music downloads to these mobile devices. The ringtone recipes are created and shared by users of the Sharetones ringtone editing applications, including Sharetones for the iPhone. The company’s new smart-phone apps, starting with Sharetones for Android, complete the ecosystem loop. They give music fans access to a huge catalog of ringtones, including over 95,000 recipes created by Sharetones users. The recipe matching happens in the background, so smart-phone users just preview and select their ringtones. The patent granted today also covers DJ Nitrogen’s process for checking if the source audio sought by the shared recipe is not available on the local device and automatically obtaining a licensed copy of that audio. This enables ringtones to be the point of music discovery, encouraging full track purchases from partner music retailers.

About DJ Nitrogen:
San Francisco based DJ Nitrogen is changing the way consumers and media providers engage with digital media by empowering an ecosystem that unleashes user creativity,  protects copyright holders and delivers added revenue to media companies and carriers. The company has several patents (issued and pending) for the technology that powers its platform. CEO Sindoni and the development team are veterans of numerous large consumer Internet brands and start-ups. Visit www.djnitrogen.com for more information and to download a free Sharetones product.

Contact:

Bill Hensley - VP Marketing
DJ Nitrogen
bill.hensley @ djnitrogen.com
415-869-8859 x 716

The latest Sharetones for Android phones released to the Android Marketplace September 29th. Sharetones matches the songs on Android users’ phones with ringtone “recipes” for those same songs, made by users of the Sharetones desktop apps. This gives Android users instant access to ringtones.

Since these recipes are user-edited, the new ratings feature allows the Android users to rate them up or down, thus bubbling the best edits to the top.

The new Sharetones also features enhanced speed and adds a waveform graphic that shows the location of the ringtone within the song.

Sharetones is a new breed of ringtone solution, leveraging the trends in whole-song downloads and providing a social ecosystem for makers and consumers of music ringtones.

Sharetones is compatible with all Android phones, including the G1 and MyTouch. As the name implies, Sharetones are “ringtones you share.” It doesn’t matter what type of phone you have, and since what is really being shared is the metadata that defines each ringtone recipe, Sharetones is a truly legal method of sharing ringtones.

More information is available at www.djnitrogen.com.

DJ Nitrogen recently released the latest upgrade to its Sharetones ringtone app for Android, and the new Sharetones 1.1 app has already outpaced the original Beta launch.

The latest Sharetones is significantly faster when checking a user’s song library against the DJ Nitrogen ringtone recipe database, particularly important for users with large music collections on their phones. Sharetones 1.1 also makes it easier to assign ringtones directly to contacts from within the app.

Android users can download Sharetones for freee at the Android Marketplace.

By the way, it looks great on the new myTouch!

More information is at djnitrogen.com.