Motorola Droid off to a well covered start
DJ Nitrogen receives patent for recipe-based ringtone sharing, establishing a new model for ringtone distribution.
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
Apple confirms iPhone ringtones are $1.29
In yesterday’s press event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes store will now sell pre-cut ringtones for $1.29. This is a big improvement on the old Apple model of paying for the song twice - the second time for the privilege of editing your own ringtone. Of course the 25,000+ users of Sharetones by DJ Nitrogen have found an easier and less expensive way to get custom ringtones from their music. With over 80,000 ringtone recipes in the Sharetones library, users have plenty of free choices without the need to edit their own.
Download a free copy at djnitrogen.com
Yes, Apple has realized that:
1. There is still plenty of life left in the ringtone category.
2. The old Apple model (buy it twice) wasn’t working.
3. Services like Sharetones are a much better deal for anyone wanting iPhone ringtones.
Free ringtones from Sharetones
It’s been a very busy few months at DJ Nitrogen - sorry we’ve been rather quite on the blog - but we’re happy to present the newest addition to our lineup of custom ringtone products - Sharetones. What is a Sharetone? It’s a ringtone you share. Share-tone. Hmmm… that was simple enough. But isn’t sharing content illegal? Not with DJ Nitrogen’s patent-pending platform. Sharetones makes it simple (and legal) for users to create, consume and collaborate on custom ringtones from the music they own. We align ringtone “mash-ups” with user “match-ups” - that is: users can only see ringtones for songs already in their collections.The more songs you own, the more ringtone recipes you have access to. Over 50,000 different ringtone recipess (Sharetones) are sharing through the DJ Nitrogen Sharetones platform right now.
To celebrate Sharetones, we’re offering free ringtones. Whether you use an iPhone or any MP3-compatible phone, try Sharetones now and get free ringtones with no further obligation.
Try Sharetones now at: http://www.djnitrogen.com/sharetones.html
Share with a friend.
Clearly there are just not enough music awards shows. But at least this one was reasonably entertaining and rather short. Good review on Yahoo Music.
The iPhone was the top selling handset in the third quarter, followed by the Motorola Razr and Blackberry Curve.
The Razr held the top spot for the previous 12 quarters.
Of course, all are compatible with DJ Nitrogen’s Ringtone Lab.
AT&T posted their 3Q earnings earlier today. Not surprisingly, they reported strong gains from their wireless devision this quarter. AT&T saw 2.4 million iPhone 3G activations this quarter, with 40% of which were new to AT&T. As you can imagine, the company greatly values smartphone
subscribers like iPhone owners due to the expensive data plans that have “significantly higher [average revenue per user] and lower churn than postpaid subscriber average.”
Rest of story is at iPhoneAlley.com
It’s true, you can get Free iPhone Ringtones with the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab
Some of you have heard that DJ Nitrogen is giving away free evaluation copies of our very cool Ringtone Lab for the iPhone. But you have to know where to look - or be a reader of this blog because it’s rather hidden at DJ Nitrogen. Click here for Free iPhone Ringtones and download the Ringtone Lab. This free version only works with the iPhone and it won’t be free forever, so get it now and sync all the free iPhone ringtones you’d like. Consider it a perk for owning a very cool phone. It’s fast, easy, and as we said, free. Don’t bother with all that “Here’s how to get free ringtones using iTunes” stuff. You know, like “Go to the “Options” tab, then find the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes to set your length… Right-click on your “ringtone length” song and choose “Convert Selection to AAC” plus four or five other steps.
Skip all those steps - just get the Ringtone Lab for the iPhone while it’s still free.
The Copyright Royalty Board ruled to keep royalties on CDs, downloads, online streaming services and ringtones broadly unchanged, imposing a “truce” between music labels, songwriters and digital music services such as Apple’s iTunes store.
Of course we know Metallica is too loud and “Death Magnetic” the dynamic range of a jackhammer, but it’s not just Metallica. Lot’s of music tries to be louder now and the result is less dynamic range. While dynamic range might not be particularly important for your ringtone, it does make a difference in the musical experience.
(Great article from the Wall street Journal, complete with interactive graphics.)
All those iPhones - 800,000 a Week
About that last post: Of course we’re thrilled that these new iPhone users, regardless of their country, will be able to turn any songs in their music collections into ringtones using the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab. They can access ringtone recipes made by others or create new recipes from songs they own.
Every day we’re impressed by the vaiety of ringtones made by DJ Nitrogen users. They’re not just from the latest T-Pain collaborations, but even go back to the 60’s with classic tracks from artists like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Van Morrison.
Check out the Ringont Lab for the iPhone at http://www.djnitrogen.com/iphonedownload.html
This was reported today by Tech Crunch:
“Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers. This is “above current full capacity” and there may be some concerns with quality control.
Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones.
Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates
of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.
Apple is continuing to add countries - the iPhone is available in 23 countries today, and another 50 will be added this year. We’ve heard that Foxconn was initially told to expect sales of up to 40 million units in the first year, but that those numbers are being revised upwards sharply.
About 1 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide in 2007, says Gartner (Nokia sold about 435 million of them).”
iPhone owners are the heaviest users of the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab
Recent users of the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab are more likely to be sync’ing their ringtones to an iPhone than to any other phone on the market. They also create and share the most ringtones. “iPhone users appear to be very happy with our Ringtone Lab for the iPhone,” says DJ Nitrogen CEO Chris Sindoni. “Our top users have each created over 30 ringtone recipes just in the last week, which indicates they like the easy sync through iTunes.”
The Ringtone Lab is fully 3G and 2.0 compatible. It’s free to download and try, works in any country and still features an introductory price of only $9.99.
Check it out at http://www.djnitrogen.com/iphonedownload.html
