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March 19, 2006
InfoSpace readers: you should develop this product
This is a product I would like to develop but do not have the time, so someone please beat me to it. I think some media-focused mobile content company like InfoSpace should create the following product:
Personalized keypad tones.
Witness this old skool mobility: When Gordon Gekko punched in Bud Fox’s number on his Motorola DynaTac 8000x all he heard was DTMF tones. That picture of Gekko rolls me. It seemed so hi-tech at the time, didn't it?
What is the value of DTMF to a user’s ear? Zero. Yet many handsets still make DTMF tones when the keys are pressed. I don’t mean in the earphone, but in the external speaker. Seriously – why the hell do I have to hear that?
Do you remember playing Baa Baa Blacksheep or Mary Had a Little Lamb on your phone by pressing the keys? How sad does that seem now? What a comparatively pathetic form of entertainment that was. Here is a nifty site I found if you want to play some songs on your handset, as lame as that is.
I think this is an interesting personalization opportunity. It would take a celebrity 5 minutes to record their voice saying, “One” then “Two” etc. and maybe for other keys like the Go button, it could vary by celebrity. It would be enough for most people just to say, “Go” but other stronger personalities like Snoop Dogg (he is the Doggfather after all) could say something like “Yeahhh” or “Go maf*cka.” This could be a standalone product or a feature of a phone personalization product that includes a ringtone, wallpaper, ringback, etc. And now that I think about it, the personalization wouldn’t even have to be mapped to the keypad numbers themselves (like “one, two, three” etc.) because that wouldn’t even really add value. It would just have to be entertaining.
I would personally never tire of my phone if everytime I punched in a number I heard a bunch of funny shit from Samuel L. Jackson. Click around on the Samuel L. Jackson Soundboard and picture it replacing the keypad tones on your phone instead.
I also don’t think it would get annoying because most of the calls I make I place from my address book and don’t really use the keypad that much. The rare times that I would have to actually use my keypad would make the presently cumbersome act of dialing a number more fun.
So what would have to happen? Well, we know the handset makers can make the keypad tones sound like whatever they want – it doesn’t have to be DTMF. Some just make standard beeps. At a minimum, a handset maker would have to expose access to whatever very small piece of code controls the keypad tones. This would probably be trivial, but I don’t know. Then someone just has to create a package that contains the media and a bit of instruction that tells the control function on the handset how they map to the keypad. This gets sent to the phone like a ringtone or wallpaper and the user saves it and executes it the same way they personalize other parts of their handset.
What’s wrong with this? Seems like a pretty cool product. I wonder if someone has already hacked a handset to change their keypad tones. Maybe it's not as interesting as ringtones, but then again ringtones weren't as interesting as ringtones at one point, either.
This would be a good way for a handset manufacturer to differentiate itself, as well. LG or Kyocera or whatever could partner with InfoSpace to roll out the product, leveraging their content licensing expertise.
Anyway - just a thought. I think there are still interesting opportunities for device personalization and this one seems fairly simple to implement.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at March 19, 2006 10:14 PM
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