Chat with Vringo’s CEO Jon Medved

by: Bena Roberts Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Rating: Is it a bird, is it a plane? NO. It’s a Vringo video dial tone!

I have followed Vringo since conception and the simplicity of the service and idea of visual dialler tones has appealed to me from the onset. This is what Vringo is aiming to offer. The company is still in BETA but after receiving USD 12 million dollars its brandishing a stronger, more confident and bullish outlook in the mobile space.

I had a chat with the CEO Jon Medved, an American Israeli now living in Israel. He told me that Vringo is ambitious and wants to lead the revolution in video or visual ringtones. He believes that the ringtone market is riding several waves.

• The first wave was the classic ringtone – users found their phone and personalised it with their favourite tracks.
• The second is the dial-up or Caller Tune where users set songs to play when users are calling them.
• The third, is where Vringo enters. This is the visual ringtone that allows personal information, music or user generated mobile content to be displayed on the handset when the phone is ringing. This allows visual sharing of information and content as the phone rings.

I like the idea and I could see myself setting up MyFacebook entry page on the service or something like that.

But Vringo is still in BETA and however bullish Jon was we both realised that there was still a long way to go. There are some patents evolving the technology that have not yet been issued; there are digital rights issues and content management scenarios that all need to be ironed out.

But Jon assures me that Vringo is on top of all of this. I pushed Jon on issues of advertising and making a return on investment for Vringo and he didn’t disclose too much – but he did say that some cool new social applications were going to be launched. Also that advertising was very much an aspect of the service.

I asked Jon how he would describe Vringo and he said “the digital signature of the next generation”.
…Nice….