Who do you want to be today?

At Universal Studios City Walk in Los Angeles, they have a store where you can have the picture of your face inserted into a variety of scenarios. For instance, you can have your face placed into a picture of Indiana Jones or onto the body of a supermodel. Well, today I found a place online where you can do this with thousands of different photos — all for free. You can even share the photos you make with friends.

If you’ve ever tried to manipulate pictures in order to try something different or just to have fun, you know that without the proper training and photo editing tools, it is very difficult and most of the time the results aren’t all that great.

Well, not anymore. With FACEinHOLE.com you can easily and, in a matter of seconds, create a totally “new look” for you and your friends. You just have to select a scenario, upload and adjust a photo (or use your webcam) … and there you have it, a great FACEinHOLE to send to your friends, post in your blog or make available to the world.

The site has a huge collection of photos you can put your face on. How would you look with a Mr. T haircut? Or dressed up like Wonder Woman? Or floating through the air skydiving? You can put for face into ads, book and magazine covers, film and TV posters, or on the body of sports heroes and celebrities, music artists and cartoon characters. And the service is completely free.

www.faceinhole.com

Low-Priced Professional Photo Editing

My mother in law recently found a box of old photographs in storage. She asked me if I could help digitize them so she could share them with others in the family. As I went through the box, I found some of the photos were ripped, others were faded and some others included the crazy cousin no one talks about anymore.

After scanning them in, I tried to fix some of the photos with Photoshop. I don’t have a lot of skills or patience with Photoshop, so I didn’t get too far.

But looking around the web, I came wowApic.com, a site that makes it easy and convenient to get professional photo editing services from the convenience of my home (computer) … from enhancing and fixing my pictures to restoring old worn-out pictures.

wowApic provides a whole range of professional photo fix and touchup services to suit your picture editing requirements. They can add a person to a family portrait or remove an unwanted stranger (or crazy cousin) from the background of photos, or even change the entire background. They also offer glamorize and digital cosmetic enhancements that, for example, can give you a tan, clear acne or remove braces.

Other services such as hand tinting for your kids’ pictures and “portraitize” to crop out one or a couple of people from a group photo are also available. Simple touchups such as digital camera mark or red eye removal are also offered.

For those old photos, wowApic can reverse the effects of color fading, repair cracks or creases, tears, stains, blemishes, blurred patches and other forms of damage on your valuable photos.

Their customer service is unbeatable. Upload your picture and get an instant price quote and delivery commitment. You also get free lighting, contrast and color optimization on every picture along with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

www.wowapic.com

3D Photo Viewing

I love to look at photos on the web. Sometimes I’ll spend hours stumbling around photo sites. Flickr, the massively popular photo sharing site, is one of my favorites. I recently stumbled upon a new photo viewing site. FotoViewr.com, launched just last week, brings online photo viewing to a new level.

The service was born out of someone’s frustration with browsing photos on Flickr, through static web pages that offered a meager user experience at best. Wading through page after page of thumbnails, clicking on them and then waiting for them to load made it seem more like a chore.

FotoViewr is a very intuitive application. It easily and simply pulls in any Flickr publisher and offers their photos up in a very elegantly designed 3D interface.

It’s easy to get started – choose your photo gallery style. There are currently 5 to choose from including one that puts all your photos into a 3D moving wall and another that places the photos onto a 3D floor. Then enter a Flickr username.

If you don’t have a Flickr account don’t worry, you can still enjoy viewing Flickr photos through the viewer. I am not sure they intended this, but you don’t need a password, so you can enter any username you wish and view those images.

Next, choose to view the gallery by photoset or keywords and press Create gallery. Your gallery is instantly available for interaction. Click on individual pictures and they fly to the forefront.

You can also choose to view the gallery full screen. Some of the pictures gets pixilated at full screen, but the experience is still worth it. Finally, FotoViewr, provides you with a link to share the gallery with others.

The service is currently free.

www.fotoviewr.com

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MCPS-PRS, the U.K. music publishing licensing and collecting organization, recently released a proposal suggesting that new digital media companies that want to license their copyrights should provide equity in their fledgling companies in exchange for the license.

They cited as some of the reasons behind this proposal:

1. Start-up firms present an undeniable headache for music rights entities. At incorporation, emerging firms tend to lack the financial resources, both in terms of cash holdings and cash revenues, to pay otherwise standard fees for music rights.

2. Emerging firms are not stable entities, in terms of their chances for success and the nature of their business models.

…and…

3. Nascent firms tend to operate at, or far beyond, the edge of the envelope that is offering music to the general public according to previously understood, acceptable and agreed upon terms for a license.

Therefore the music companies are taking a large portion of the risk in entering into a licensing relationship.

They go on to state that these companies are created principally for the benefit of the founders who will build the business and flip it for unknown rewards. The rewards, they contend, do not in any way benefit the music entity which helped make the transaction possible. Therefore the music companies should have a stake in that potential upside.

Before I offer some alternative proposals, there are a number of issues to consider here:

1. What experience does the society have in determining valuation vs. investment? These deals are highly speculative. I envision that after a few failed companies blemish the society’s investment record, the societies will charge valuation to investment ratios at unacceptable levels to hedge their bets. This would end up defeating the purpose of the proposal and bring us full circle to where we are now.

2. Would the company that operates on a multinational basis be required to give up equity in each territory? The process of getting licensed in multiple territories is complicated enough without having each society and label as equity partners. Rates vary by territory, so why wouldn’t the equity valuation and complications vary also?

3. How do the proceeds of an equity liquidation event get distributed to the members of the society? I’ve always been confused by the distribution calculations from public performances, which are mostly undocumented (restaurants, retail outlets) — will these calculations be the basis for distributing a windfall?

4. Finally, what level of control will the societies and labels demand or have over the direction and operation of the invested company? Do they get board seats? These organizations are strapped for personnel to handle the levels of digital media business development they have now. How do they expect to manage all of these investments? And how do you prioritize two companies competing in the same or similar markets with whom you have equity investments?

While I applaud the writers of this report for their efforts in coming up with a proposed solution for this evolutionary challenge, I think it misses the mark and raises many more questions and concerns than it answers.

I offer two alternate high-level solutions to the MCPS proposal.

1. Develop an experimental license fee program that will help companies of certain funding levels “get off the ground.” Many companies have an interesting idea that they think will “revolutionize” the music business. The problem is that unless they try out the idea in the public marketplace, no one will know if it works. Give them six months to one year from launch to develop the business at extremely reduced rates — the solid companies will rise to the top and become viable businesses from which the societies and labels can extract their revenue.

2. Maintain the status quo because the marketplace will take care of the issue itself. Much to the chagrin of many an idealistic entrepreneur, until music copyrights truly become part of the open source revolution, there has to be a price to pay to use these valuable assets. I don’t understand how companies can take the position that because the owners of copyrights charge what they think is too much for the use, they can just use these assets without permission. Music licensing is a right given by the owner, not an obligation (aside from the statutory mechanical rates). Those that build businesses on the backs of these copyrights without permission tread at their own risk.

In the end, I vote for #1. It’s going to take a lot of new ideas to revive this business. Given the way music sales decrease year after year, it would benefit the societies and labels to allow entrepreneurs to experiment in the hopes that together they can help the music business find a new footing.

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I thought I had the social network angle all covered with my Facebook profile, Linkedin profile, Plaxo, my website and a blog. But then I noticed people “Twittering” and “Zanneling” through my Facebook updates and I was intrigued. What were these new strange verbs, I thought?

So I went over to www.twitter.com and www.zannel.com and I looked around.

What I found was people of all ages, all across the globe sharing their lives in bite size bits — sharing web pages, photos, news stories and conversations being overheard. More bits sharing ideas, new product launches, videos, bookmarks and slideshows. Even more bits with moments of the mundane, the sad and the peculiar.

Then I dug a little more and found that there are many more sites with strange names, encouraging people to share their interests, loves, hates and lives. Some of the sites share information with other sites. They create a daisy chain effect where, for instance, I can Zannel a new video of the woodpecker harassing me during my conference calls, and it will feed the link to my Twitter account, which then feeds Plaxo and Facebook.

But what if you wanted to share and collect all the information on all your friends regardless of which site they are using?

Enter FriendFeed. (www.friendfeed.com) FriendFeed enables me to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that my friends and family are sharing. It automatically imports shared stuff from a list of 35+ social-oriented sites across the web.

The list of sites that feed into the service includes popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa web albums and Smugmug; video sharing sites including YouTube, Vimeo and Seesmic, and even online radio services like Pandora and Last.fm. In fact, pretty much anything you want to share with others can be fed into FriendFeed.

Here’s what I learned today from my friends on FriendFeed: Xerox is getting out of the copier business. Robert Scoble has 25 stickers on the side of his Mac. A company named Infectious is offering custom art to personalize the outside of your car. I also found out Marcus needs more sleep.

So what do all these little updates and tidbits mean to me?

Well, last week I removed Fox News from my home page feeds because the “news” they report is never new. It feeds on the downtrodden, the mentally ill and the foibles and tragedies of mankind. I had enough.

With FriendFeed, I get news that my friends think are interesting in their lives and the lives of others — the people I share with and follow provide updates on things they are building, investing in and caring about. They provide a vision into the goodness of this world that seems to have lost its way in mass media. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my day being fed a healthy diet of optimism.

It’s good to have friends.

Feel Free to Join My Networks! LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | FriendFeed | Zannel

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According to the International Telecommunications Union, worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions now exceed 3.3 billion — equivalent to half the global population. Cell phones now surpass the number of computers and televisions combined.

In the coming years, it is predicted by some that the cell phone will become the device of choice for watching video. There are a number of current challenges to this vision that to date have stifled the market. Much like the early mobile web browsing experience, user expectations are low. Users complain of poor image quality, complexity, slow downloading times and lack of selection of content.

Content providers, distributors and carriers see a huge pot of gold in mobile video. Before they can realize it, though, new tools need to be created that help people find the content they want, format it correctly for each device and deliver a quality experience through the subscribers’ network connection.

While companies like Scanby and Snaptell focus on the content-discovery problem, others like Vantrix and Mobicell focus only on content formatting or delivery.

Avot Media, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, CA, is a new entrant in the market that aims to provide an end-to-end solution, making it simple for content producers, distributors and advertisers to offer video to the cell phone while ensuring a quality and predictable experience for the consumer.

According to DeWayne Nelon, CEO of Avot, many media companies, aggregators and publishers wanting to deliver video to mobile devices have been waiting on the sidelines due to the complexity and experience of other solutions.

“We can mobilize a client’s video offering within hours. Once Avot is informed of where to pull the video master from, it reformats the video on the fly for each and every request made by a consumer. The process only adds about one second to the delivery process.”

In addition to mobilizing video for content providers, Avot has a solution called AdVideo to enable advertisers and brands to offer video to consumers in real-time retail experiences.

Imagine you are in the hardware store looking for a new power saw. AdVideo allows consumers to send a text message to a short code to see a video demonstration delivered on demand to the phone; or you can request to see a movie trailer on your phone, while reading a newspaper or looking at a billboard.

Avot is enabling these types of transmissions with an aim towards providing content to the person and not the device. Where people view video is expanding, so they want to make the content available to people when and where and on the device they have available at the time they want it.

In order to support their customers’ desire to provide video to the broadest device reach, Avot will be soon be offering solutions for the iPhone, Google’s Android platform and others as they become available.

www.avotmedia.com

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Are Traasdahl is the CEO of Thumbplay, the largest direct-to-consumer player in the U.S. An independent company with 100 employees based in New York, Thumbplay is projected to own about 18% of the U.S. off-portal market. The company recently raised $18 million in venture capital to expand operations.

Brian Casazza is CEO of 9Squared, a part of Zed, the leading mobile content retailer in the world with over $500 million in gross revenue annually. Zed has 40 million consumers around the globe who buy on a monthly basis. 9Squared announced earlier this month that they would formally combine operations with Zed.

Guillermo Cengotitabengoa is the VP Marketing for Flycell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Italian mobile-messaging pioneer Acotel Group. Launched in November of 2004, Flycell provides a broad range of premium mobile content products, including ringtones, games, mobile greeting cards and wallpapers that empower mobile users to customize their phones and make them an extension of their personalities.

I asked each of them about the state of the market, how the regulations were affecting their businesses and what they could do to build brand and grow their businesses.

ON THE CURRENT STATE OF THE MARKET

Traasdahl:
The consumer is maturing and better understands what the offer is. They start with ringtones, then graduate to games, wallpaper, video, etc. Music is the way to get them into the service.

Casazza:
U.S. operators are trying create value, to avoid spam-meisters who can put up a business one day and walk away leaving the carrier with a big problem. But the carrier won’t get the kind of growth and data revenues they want unless they partner with the right folks and give them freedom to build a lot of value to do that efficiently.

Cengotitabengoa:
It used to be that people only wanted music. Music is still the top seller for us — realtones. We have deals with the major labels and can provide the latest music … and a lot of people do want that. Games selection is getting better; there’s more compatibility with handsets and more people are downloading. Text alerts have always been good. We launched real-time sports alerts; those are doing well.

ON REGULATION

Traasdahl:
We are excited every time new rules come out. The more regulation and rules, the better for the industry. It evens the playing field. The ones who are concerned with bringing a good customer experience, double confirm on opt-in, always price front and center in every text message that goes out … those companies are pulling further away.

Casazza:
Self-regulation has been good for the industry, but the implementation has been a problem in terms of really being effective and efficient in deploying products and services. There has been a stifling of how fast those Premium SMS revenues can grow, based on content providers not having a clear or standardized path to market.

Cengotitabengoa:
The good News is that rules exist. Three years ago, there were no rules. Companies were signing people up for double packages. Our philosophy is for long term. Regulations were needed to control parties to make sure it didn’t hurt the market.

ON GROWING THEIR BRAND AND COMPANIES

Traasdahl:
In the product area we are taking music to the next level, to full-track downloads. Think about this: Nokia is the biggest manufacturer of mp3 players, not Apple. We’ve also seen some incredible growth in one- to two-minute downloaded videos, so we are bullish on the growth here.

We are focused on making the customer experience as good as it can be. We just launched a vertical search SMS product. Add an artist name to the word “Get,” such as “GET U2,” text it to our short code and we push a link back bringing the consumer directly to the WAP page with the specific content.

Casazza:
85% of the content from Zed is content we’ve developed internally — games, community tools, music, social networking, messaging — and because of that we are able to continually turbocharge our club by routinely developing this stuff and putting it into the system.

Now we’re taking this legacy and heritage, and plugging that together with what 9squared has done in terms of licensing major content, and working directly with carriers to distribute that content in a meaningful way. Finding this balance between internally developed, user-generated and branded/premium content is one of the areas of focus that is exciting.

Cengotitabengoa:
You have 400 million people here in the U.S., and it’s a newer market. Phone penetration has gone up, people are buying a lot of handsets and people are spending here unlike other countries. If you are a global player, you can’t avoid the U.S. Will it be tougher than three years ago? Most definitely.

Private-label partnerships like we’ve done with Island Def Jam is a growth area. There are plenty of companies in the U.S. who want to get in to the mobile space. Many of them don’t have the knowledge internally, or don’t want to do it themselves. Many companies haven’t done anything mobile yet; B2B is something we can do well in this market.

CONCLUSIONS
Overall, the sentiment is that this market isn’t easy. Success hinges on the ability to differentiate. Exclusive content is a key part of how to build differentiation. It is also going to take identification of new products that will drive into the mainstream. It’s definitely something that is going to happen quickly over the next year or so.

As the phone becomes more of an Internet device, these companies start to compete with the big Internet players and brands that will just start to customize their offering for the mobile phone. The iPhone is a wake-up call for that. There is a small window which these companies and others will have to carve a niche out as a premier mobile brand. I wish them the best of luck.

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Throughout the past few years, the mobile content industry has enjoyed strong market growth. Primarily fueled by the sale of master ringtones directly through the cell phone carriers, the market looked unstoppable.

Recent studies show, however, that the ringtone market appears to be peaking and is projected to decline in the coming years. So far, no other mobile content application has proven it is ready to take the ringtone’s place. Mobile video has yet to take off and full-track music downloads seem to be dead on arrival. Some project Ring Back Tones may be the one to break through although it’s growth has been slow to date.

As recently as last year, it was believed that the direct-to-consumer market, also known as “off portal” mobile content sales, would more than make up for any flattening sales at the carriers.

Foreign-based companies, which had been successful in their native markets, began entering the U.S. market. They launched multi-million-dollar TV and print advertising campaigns to quickly build brand and drive awareness. Many considered the ads misleading. They offered “free” ringtones without explaining clearly that the consumer would be signed up to a pricey subscription.

Many of these companies then moved to online marketing as the key subscriber acquisition tool. It was much easier to track consumers and they got a lot of personal information that allowed them to better market their services. But the misleading offer problems persisted. Over the past few months, lawsuits have been levied against the cell carriers for deceptive advertising practices by some of their off-portal mobile content retailers.

Each carrier is addressing the situation in a different way. Sprint Nextel announced last week that they will penalize content providers who break the marketing guidelines, possibly to the point of forcing the provider off the carrier’s network. On the other hand, they plan to incentivize companies to follow the rules by paying them bonus revenue share.

Other carriers have plans to insert themselves into the customer acquisition process to ensure the sale is valid.

On the online marketing front, Google continuously reviews and changes the offer guideline requirements for content companies advertising through the network. Recent changes demand advertisers clearly define the product or service offering and get the consumer to tick a checkbox on the offer page to show they agree and understand the offer.

The Mobile Marketing Association, a global organization with membership from agencies, advertisers, hand-held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers has also offered up best practice and codes of conduct guidelines for the retailers and carriers to follow. They recently released guidelines on mobile advertising.

All of these factors are leading to lower conversion and sales rates.

Despite the market predictions and the increased regulations, a number of brave souls have decided to stake their reputations and financial resources that the future of this market will be bright.

Next week, we’ll hear from the CEO’s of Thumbplay and 9Squared/Zed and the VP of Marketing from Flycell, with their thoughts on this market and what they think will make them succeed in this ever changing market.

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In a recent ICOM survey of U.S. shoppers, 77% of the respondents in the 18-34 age group see their coupon use increasing if they could use some form of paperless coupon technology … and 63% of those 35-54 said paperless would increase their usage.

The mobile phone is one of the best ways to reach the elusive set of 18-34 year-old adults who have disposable income to spend, brands with which to affiliate, but neither the time nor interest to read newspapers or watch scheduled television.

San Jose-based Cellfire has been working hard for over five years to meet that demand. Cellfire is the only nationwide discount offer service, enabling consumers to conveniently receive and retain savings right on their mobile phones. Today, 68% of Cellfire users are between the age of 18-34, and 27% are over 35.

Currently they offer coupons for popular retailers such as Hollywood Video, Hardee’s, Domino’s Pizza, T.G.I. Friday’s, Peet’s Coffee, 1-800-flowers.com, Omaha Steaks, North Beach Pizza, Pizz’a Chicago and more directly to your cell phone. The service is available on all major cell carriers.

There is no need to clip paper coupons and bring them with you when you shop. Instead Cellfire is available to use right on your phone when you are shopping.

Coupons for the retailers are available within the downloaded application and change all the time. No more checking e-mail or surfing the Web looking for deals. Consumers can quickly and easily navigate through coupons and discount offers by menus — without sifting through text messages

When you are in the store, browse through the coupon menu and when you find one you want, click on “Use Now.” Show the cashier the coupon number and get the discount on the spot.

Cellfire is moving into the grocery business next. Their mobile grocery coupon service will provide shoppers at major grocery chains with exclusive discounts directly using their mobile phones and grocery savings cards.

Many consumer brands are already on board, including General Mills, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark. They will be announcing the program launch in the coming months.

Cellfire claims astounding redemption rates of 5-15%, making this an excellent place for advertisers to connect with their market, drive incremental sales and generate brand awareness.

www.cellfire.com

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Last week, Las Vegas played host to the telecommunications industry’s annual CTIA conference. Over 20,000 people converged for the event to exhibit and explore the many opportunities of the wireless telecom world. Vendors were on hand to showcase the latest mobile-based applications — here are a few that stood out for me.

PC Games Come To Life On Mobile Phones

Back in 2003, Universal Pictures released “The Incredible Hulk” movie. About one month prior to the movie hitting theatres, I was part of a team that licensed the mobile content rights to the movie from Universal and Marvel. We had the rights to make a mobile game along with releasing various ringtones and graphics. Given the time frame to produce and release the game, we opted to produce a simple puzzle game.

It was panned by the critics as being too simple and not a good use of the brand, but went on to be a financial success. I guess, there just wasn’t much in the way of alternatives then, and brands sell. The general quality of video games built for the mobile phone hasn’t evolved much since then. Most include simple graphics, slow game play and little to no multi-player action.

An Israeli based company named Vollee is changing this. They have developed software that enables PC-based video games to be streamed to any 3G cell phone. Want to play Second Life with your own account or Tomb Raider with full graphics? Now you can. By leveraging the bandwidth available in 3G mobile networks, Vollee’s interactive video streaming platform delivers an exciting catalog of true PC titles with all their 3D graphics, and deep game play previously unavailable on mobile. Check out this video showing live streaming of Second Life through Vollee’s service.

http://www.vollee.com

Mobile Websites In A Box

Just a few years ago, the cost to create a website was in the millions. With the advent of web design tools like Frontpage, website builder templates and most recently widgets and reusable code, the costs have plummeted and everyone can have a website. Well, the race is on to develop websites that are customized for mobile phones. Millions of cell phone subscribers are connecting to the mobile web each day and their experiences are not good.

Creating a sophisticated mobile website is a very complicated process. Each phone has a different set of specifications for rendering web pages (also called WAP) and needs to be customized for the phone’s operating system, screen size and resolution and web browser. It can be a logistical nightmare and very costly to produce a site that renders well on all handsets.

German-based Netbiscuits has a solution. Their software helps companies set up and publish their mobile web applications within minutes by choosing templates for websites, ad landing pages, shops, community sites and more. With no internal hosting or device testing necessary, companies like eBay, AOL and Paypal are moving to the mobile web in record time.

http://ww.netbiscuits.com

Access Corporate Data On The Run

You are out on the road and getting ready to visit one of your customers. You forgot the files with the their purchase history. What do you do? Calling back to the office is time-consuming, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will be available to support you. Nick Bolton, CEO of New Zealand-based Mobile Data Now thinks he has the solution. His software allows you to access corporate databases by simply using e-mail, SMS text messaging or instant messaging.

Nick said, “Traditionally, mobile software has tried to re-create the desktop experience on to mobile devices without much success. People don’t spend the time to download and learn new programs, enter passwords, navigate menus and use the applications to get their information. But everyone knows how to send a message and all mobile devices have built in messaging applications.”

The service works on ALL handsets; there is no software to install and if you can send an e-mail or txt message, your information is only seconds away. The solution can also allow public access to databases allowing consumers to txt in for public information such as music playlists, real estate information and more.

http://www.mobiledatanow.com

Stay Out Of The Traps

It seems as though you are being watched wherever you drive now. Speed traps and cameras at intersections are everywhere. Trapster is a speed trap sharing application for mobile phones, PDAs and other types of devices aiming to help you stay out of the traps. It can be used with any kind of phone, but works even better if you have a phone that supports GPS or WiFi.

Download the application and run it in background mode so it doesn’t run down your power. Get in your car and drive. Press #1 to input a site that has a live policeman and it is entered on the map. Press #2 to identify a camera at an intersection and so on. When someone else drives near this spot, they are alerted through the application or sms to the trap in real time.

Some websites allow downloads of traps data to phones or GPS units, but few users actually use it, and the data is stale by the time you download and use it anyway. This service is free and the data refreshes hourly. There is even a community element where you can earn Karma points for inputting valid traps. Next time you head out on the road, bring Trapster along for the ride.

http://www.trapster.com

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In the midst of recent pronouncements that ringtone sales are in decline, Clear Channel Radio announced that mobile content offerings will be integrated into the websites of over 650 stations within the chain. The service, offered in partnership with Thumbplay, a leading mobile content retailer, will offer listeners direct access to purchase the tones for their cell phones.

Ringtone sales are projected to drop over 7% to $510 million in sales for the US in 2008. BMI says this is the second year of the declining sales trend. Some of the reasons blamed for the decline include high or complex content pricing models, advanced handsets that allow consumers to side-load content, mobile content sharing websites, social networks and the waning novelty factor.

Despite the decline in sales, marketing for ringtones is everywhere. Run a search for a music artist on Google or log on to your favorite social network, music artist website even brand sites like Purina (they sell the Fancy Feast ‘Ping” as a ringtone) … and ringtones are there.

New York-based Thumbplay is the power behind many of these offerings. Their partners include AOL, iLike and MSN. These partnerships give Thumbplay increased visibility in a very competitive market.

Clear Channel has been adding digital goods and services to their websites over the past few years in an effort to find and keep connected to listeners moving away from traditional radio. Their efforts include social networks where listeners can connect, streaming music videos and selling iTunes downloads. Now they are entering the ringtone market.

“Many of our listeners first discover their favorite songs on radio,” said Larry Linietsky, VP/ Business & Product Development for Clear Channel Online Music & Radio. “We can now connect the dots by delivering a broad selection of mobile content, including exclusive station-created ringtones and graphics, right to our listeners via our stations’ websites.”

Evan Schwartz, Thumbplay’s Chief Marketing Officer, said, “We’re seeing new consumers buying through the Clear Channel ringtone offerings.” This is encouraging news for the market. It seems that providing options to purchase the ringtone directly in connection with the latest station playlist or the Top 20 is working.

“Given that Clear Channel’s stations run a wide variety of programming formats, we’re seeing increased sales in ringtone categories that haven’t done well historically, like Country,” said Schwartz. Each of the stations has the ability through Thumbplay’s tools to program their its ringtone offerings based on the format.

The mobile content stores have already launched on more than 100 stations’ websites across the country, including those in such large metropolitan markets as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Washington, DC, Atlanta and Houston.

Among the first stations to launch the new mobile content stores are Top 40/Mainstream KIIS/ Los Angeles, Active Rock WJRR (Real Rock 101)/Orlando and Urban WGCI/Chicago.

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By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

The vision of the digital living room has been around a long time. This is where the living room and Internet collide centered around a screen (namely the TV) and information, video, audio, games, and communications all converge. Over the years, attempts have been made to bring this vision to reality mostly with lukewarm results. Anyone remember WebTV?

At a recent gathering just outside of San Francisco, this vision was discussed. The talks centered around three main topics: 1) What will the interfaces to this digital living room look like? 2) When will this vision become a reality? And 3) How will the various parties, from cable operators and content providers to ad agencies, hardware manufacturers and even consumers make money in this new world?

Attendees included representatives from across the digital living room landscape — the usual suspects such as Comcast, Verizon, HP and Microsoft to the upstarts and start-ups like Hillcrest Labs, HDD Disk Flix and SendToMyTV — mixed for a day-and-a-half discussing how each of them will make the future come to life.

It was soon clear that this vision was further away than anyone would admit. Some commented that the topics and problems at this conference have remained the same for years, moving forward each year only incrementally, if at all.

However, others saw progress, which lead them to believe the manna was going to start falling soon. The evidence towards this convergent possibility is the massive increase in people watching video, short and long form, over the Internet on their PCs and laptops, and the increase in broadband speeds to the home. Over 10 billion streams of video were initiated over the web in January of 2008.

The question was raised about how the consumer would be paying for all this content. Currently almost all of this video viewing is ad-supported … thus cash-free to the consumer. This ad revenue needs to get split between the distributor and the content provider. Unfortunately, ad agencies aren’t clear exactly how to measure this new medium, so they have little to show their clients as support for moving their budgets into the new world.

Cable companies want to maintain a walled garden approach to offering content, so they are concerned with how and when to allow their customers to access content from the Internet.

On the set top box side, TiVo, a pioneer in intelligent set top boxes, continues to be one of the more progressive companies in the space. With the luxury of having a proprietary set top box in millions of homes, they have expanded the digital video recorder to allow their customers to access parts of the Internet, like Amazon UnBox, in their living room.

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have a large installed base of boxes that have the potential to shift the landscape dramatically. The 360 comes equipped with a network connection that allow consumers to access the Internet, play games in real time with others, download movies, TV shows and play HD movies. The PlayStation is rumored to be adding a video download store soon.

With the expectation of massive amounts of content being available through Internet TV, companies are facing off around the consumer search experience.

Hillcrest Labs offers a pretty interesting interface available through their set top box. The consumer accesses the well-designed content interfaces and search screens with a slickly designed three-dimensional mouse device that allows the user to easily point and click on content or application choices.

Hitachi is focused on making the search experience as fast as possible with massive amounts of data. They’ve developed a very fast database and retrieval system, and are planning to bring it to the home set top box in partnership with cable companies and set top box manufacturers.

Currently the database is being used in in-dash, personal navigation and GPS devices with some really interesting application ideas. One application in particular allows the user to recall songs from the database that were playing at another time based upon GPS location information.

The main takeaway from the event was that there are many companies looking to make the digital living room a reality. So look out for a number of new services being offered by the cable operators, new set top boxes from companies you’ve never heard of, new content offerings and a multitude of business models in the coming months and years.

The bottom line, though, is it will take a lot of collaboration to make this vision a reality for all involved anytime soon.

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