Phonezoo Blog

Hi and welcome to Phonezoo’s blog.  We’re starting this blog to keep users up to date with things that are going on at Phonezoo and to talk with people in the Phonezoo community.  We encourage your comments and feedback to these postings.

My name is Jim and I run Marketing (and to a certain extent ad Sales) here at Phonezoo. I was employee #1 (after the two founders) so I’ve been here a while.

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First thing I wanted to talk about was some new technology we implemented as part of the Ringtone Creation process.  We now have a way to determine if the content you upload is copyrighted content or not.  Why does this matter?

When we started Phonezoo, we wanted you to be able to do two basic things: create ringtones from songs you own and send them to your phone, and share original content that you created with others in the Phonezoo community.  That’s why we ask you to mark content as Copyrighted or Public when you create a ringtone. 

But what we’ve found is that this idea is confusing to many people.  They don’t know if the content is copyrighted or not and don’t know what they are supposed to do.  One risk is that someone mistakenly marks a song from “Mr. Big Shot Recording Artist with a Huge Record Deal” as public content.  That would mean anyone could get that ringtone, whether or not they own a copy of the song.  And since our goal is to respect the rights of content creators and work with them, we want to eliminate the possibility of these types of errors as much as possible.

So what does this mean to you?  Well, if you own the song and are creating a ringtone, the process will work exactly the same as before.  You upload the song, edit it, and send it to your phone.  If you mark a copyrighted song as public, we’ll change it for you automatically.  And if you are looking for a ringtone from a particular artist and see one with a © next to it, we’ll ask you to upload your own copy of the song before sending it to your phone.  That’s it.

We think this helps the artists that make the hit music you love while still encouraging people to upload stuff they made on their own to share with everyone at Phonezoo. 

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Second question on people’s mind is: “Will Phonezoo work with the new iPhone”?  Well, we honestly have no idea.  We put it in the list of phones anyway.  Anyone have one we can test?  If not, you’ll just have to wait until we get our hands on one (and I’m not camping out – I have work to do).  I actually have friends at Apple who worked on the thing, but there’s no way they’d let me get near one.  So stay tuned….