Keeping it short in the digital age
By Adam Maya
Cindy Mesaros
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Gregg Yacovone: TV in tiny places
Got a minute? When walking from your car to work, or riding up the elevator, or between classes? Well, you might not have enough time to call someone, but don’t put those cell phones away just yet. These short intervals of time are part of the future of technology.
Imagine watching trailers of your favorite program at TV quality on your phone. Or sports highlights, or music videos or movie trailers. Well, Verizon Wireless has you covered. Its new Vcast feature allows you to watch entertainment clips, sports highlights and news updates, and enjoy multiplayer 3D gaming, all over a broadband connection.
It’s safe to say cell phones are taking over. Verizon’s director of marketing Gregg Yacovane anticipates record labels will even begin releasing singles via cell phones before they hit online and on radio. But keep in mind, this technology is primarily geared toward those moments when you have a few minutes to kill.
“Nobody’s going to sit down on their couch, turn off their TV and turn on their phone,” Yacovane says.
Already, there are cell phones that can send multimedia messages and e-mails, include storage for mp3s, videos and photos, and multimedia players that allow you to play files transferred from your computer. And then there are ringback tones, which allow you to hear music while waiting for that person on the other end to answer after making a call.
Soon enough, all these features will be the standard for cell phones.
Cindy Mesaros: The sound of money
Believe it or not, ringtones have become a billion-dollar industry.
As annoying they might be to some, it seems everyone wants that next new sound coming out of their phone.
And so we have the ringtone company Moderati, aimed at consumers looking to kill time in three minutes. The average person with a cell phone is in a hurry several times in a given day and wants content relevant to that particular situation; they want to be entertained in a short time.
“What can we do to entertain people?” asks Cindy Mesaros, Moderati’s vice president of marketing.
As it turns out, there’s a lot.
Moderati is best known for its innovation of Modtones, which are polyphonic ringtones (those involving several notes at once) created by Moderati’s in-house musicians. Mesaros attributes the industry’s success to demand and to carriers who have countered pirating by making the downloading of ringtones easy and affordable. Moderati also provides ringtones that identify who is calling without having to look at your phone.
But Mesaros is just as excited about what’s next. In a conference in San Diego this May, Moderati presented cell phone carriers with the idea of a cellular magazine, Mobile Forward. The product would feature instant voice clips, wallpaper images and movie quiz notes.
And there’s a practical side to this ‘entertainment’ as well…
“Say you’re on your way to a bar and you want to impress someone you’re meeting there,” Mesaros said. “This will give you the tools you need to do that. Click ‘pop culture digest,’ and here’s your one-liner so you can act like you know what you’re talking about.”
In other words, the phone will be a sort of social assistant, complete with pick-up lines, rejection lines – and, if all else fails, a fake phone number ready to hand out to the unwanted suitor you can’t seem to shake.
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