Vringo - push video-ringer gets funded

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 12:02 pm ET         

Startups in the ringtone space are trying hard to reach the long tail customers like me who have never ever bought a ringtone. Earlier I had written about an innovative startup Emotive that had launched a innovative service called - ?Push Ringer?. Basically, whenever someone calls you, the ringtone on your phone will be the one the caller chooses and not the other way round. And don’t associate just audio with the ringtone. You can transmit video, animations, avatars or flash files as well. Emotive had raised $7.7 million in Series A for this smart idea.

According to the law of venture capital, there will always be multiple investments of the kind. And in the push-ringtone business, Jerusalem-based Vringo is another startup offering a similar service and also got funded for the same. Vringo today announced that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding. According to PEHub, the investment round was led by Warburg Pincus.

Vringo’s precise pitch is that “it is a video sharing community that allows you to share video ringtones with your buddies each time you call them. You choose the clips you’d like your buddies to see and they choose the clips they’d like you to see. Vringo clips can contain either licensed content from the best of movies, TV and music, or user generated clips that are created on your own mobile phone.”

So how do they make money? Well, the Vringo mobile app is free and you might be required to pay for premium clips that transmit. Premium clips will in fact be free during the beta period.