Phonezoo

Phonezoo

Founded	Sunnyvale, California, United States
Founder(s)	Ram Ramkumar Manish Vaidya
Headquarters	1290 Oakmead Pkwy Suite 214 Sunnyvale, CA 94085, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Owner	Phonezoo Communications, Inc.
Website	http://www.phonezoo.com
Type of site	User generated mobile content
Registration	Required (to create, upload, and download media) Open to ages 14 and above
Users	19 million
Available in	English

Phonezoo.com is a mobile-related social networking site. Founded in February 2006 by the Silicon Valley based company, Phonezoo Communications, Inc., it is mainly used for creating, sharing, and downloading ringtones, but also serves as a platform for users to upload and download wallpapers, play games, and read horoscopes. As of 2011, Phonezoo reports more than 19 million users, from countries across the globe including the United States, Canada, and Brazil.

Background

Phonezoo Communications, Inc. 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. Growing entirely virally, Phonezoo has successfully built a profitable, off-portal content model for online and mobile entertainment. As of August 2011, the website has more than 300,000 "likes" on its Facebook page.

Features

Uploading and finding ringtones

Phonezoo is a service that allows people to send ringtones, photos and games to their mobile phone for free. It allows users to create a ringtone from any piece of digital audio they have, simply by uploading it and selecting a part of the tune to use as the ringtone. Phonezoo currently supports files with the following formats: .mp3, .wav, .aac, .m4a, .wma., and a size that does not exceed 15MB. Once you've uploaded a tune, an intuitive web-based interface can be used to select a small section of the audio, which will become the actual downloadable ringtone, and a number of options are given to tag the created ringtone. Once created, the ringtones are made available to anyone to download, as long as the ringtone has not been made private. To avoid the possibility of allowing people to create ringtones from commercial music, Phonezoo uses Acoustic fingerprint technology to automatically detect if a file being uploaded is from a copyrighted track. 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.

Every created ringtone can be associated with a genre of music, which is a convenient way for users to find and download their favorite ringtones. Once downloaded, the site automatically converts stored audio to a format suitable for a user's handset, as long as the handset is supported.

All non-copyrighted, public content are automatically visible to the entire Phonezoo community. If users would like to highlight specific content to their friends, they have the option to select one of the four icons next the content name and share their media via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or even to email a friend.

Friends, Favorites, and Fans

Friends are other Phonezoo users who you can invite to join you in enjoying Phonezoo. When you add someone as your Friend, a Friend Request will be sent to them. They will have to accept your request before that person is added to your Friends list. When you add someone as a Friend, all their status updates and public/shared content creations will be available to you in your My Feeds page for easy review.

Favorites are other Phonezoo users who you can add to your favorites list so you can keep track of their content creations under My Feeds. To add someone to your Favorites, you don't need their permission. If you always like the content created by another user, add them to your Favorites list and you will be notified immediately every time they create new content.

All users who have added you to their Favorites list show up your Fans. Fans get easily notified of your public/shared content creations through My Feeds page. If you are an artist who creates content and want to promote your work through Phonezoo, you should try to get as many users as possible to add you as their Friend or Favorite, so they can be notified of your content creations.

Other

Phonezoo provides download charts, search functions, and the ability to rate someone else's created ringtone, as well as leaving comments on individual ringtones.

Partnerships

To keep the site free to end users, Phonezoo partners with 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. Phonezoo has also been working with smaller independent labels like Underworldmixradio.com to promote their artists via free ringtone distribution.

Phonezoo worked with KITS FM Radio station (FM105.3) in the San Francisco Bay area to sponsor the Not So Silent Night 2009 concert featuring artists like Muse, AFI, Vampire Weekend, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and Metric.

User privilege levels

There are no monthly fee from Phonezoo, for it is an ad-supported service that does not require users to sign up to any subscription plan. Phonezoo does not charge its users but charges from the carrier occur as they do for all data use.

Press

January 7, 2010 Phonezoo powers mobile distribution channel for talented independent artists discovered by Underworldmixradio.com

December 2, 2009 Phonezoo.com and KITS-FM (LIVE 105) Partner to Promote Not So Silent Night 2009

October 20, 2009 Phonezoo.com Partners with AstroTwins to Launch Astrology Channel

September 23, 2009 Phonezoo Online Games: Glee for Free

August 29, 2009 Be Unique & Save Money Too -- Phonezoo.com Offers College Students a Money-saving Alternative

August 13, 2009 Phonezoo Brings Charlee Drew to U.S. Audience

August 4 , 2009 Phonezoo Breaks Through 10 Million User Milestone

June 3, 2009 Phonezoo.com Partners with Hooked Media Group to Launch Free Online Games

February 18, 2009 Phonezoo.com Continues Strong Growth with Second Consecutive Hitwise US Top 10 Award

January 8, 2009 MoVoxx Partners with Phonezoo to Monetize and Deliver Phonezoo's SMS Text Traffic

January 6, 2009 Phonezoo.com Wins Hitwise US Top 10 Award

December 9, 2008 WeMix.com & Phonezoo.com Announce Mobile Ringtone Distribution Partnership

September 10, 2008 Audible Magic Corp. Emerges as the Leading Content Identification Supplier to the Mobile Entertainment Market – Pens agreement with Phonezoo

Statistics

US Demographics Updated June 2010

GENDER:

• 44% Male

• 56% Female

AGE GROUP:

• 7% 3-12

• 34% 13-17

• 36% 18-34

• 16% 35-49

• 6% 50+

RACE/ETHNICITY:

• 77% Cauc.

• 11% Afr. Am.

• 2% Asian

• 8% Hisp.

• 1% Other

FAMILY:

• 36% No Kids 0-17

• 64% Has Kids 0-17

SALARY:

• 15% $0–30k

• 26% $30–60k

• 33% $60–100k

• 26% $100k+

EDUCATION:

• 58% No College

• 34% College

• 7% Grad. Sch.

See also

• List of social networking websites

External links

• Official Site
• Facebook Fanpage
• Twitter page