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Retro Ringtones Launches 'Cult' Ringtones for US Market; Innovative Ringtones Will Be Available through Major Carriers, Including Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile and VerizonHALF MOON BAY, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- June 13, 2005 -- Retro Ringtones LLC, a leading mobile content and tools company, announced today that its unique library of 'cult' ringtones will be launched in the US market. Customers subscribing to all the major US wireless carrier networks -- Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon -- will now be able to enjoy Retro's high-quality 'realtones,' which feature carefully tailored audio recordings in categories such as 'Sci-Fi SFX,' 'Air Guitar Riffs,' 'Endangered Species Mating Calls,' and 'Infernal Machines.' Retro Ringtones anticipates a July release on all networks. Following runaway success in Europe, Retro's stateside launch will leverage a string of distribution partnerships with top US ringtone outlets, including T-Mobile USA, Mobilestreams, Cellus/Airborne, Kargo, Buongiorno, Vindigo, and Moderati. Retro's 'Great Lies Of History' ringtones, featuring famous faux-pas by certain former US presidents, are already downloadable from Modtones.com, while Sprint subscribers can pick from 40 orchestral National Anthem recordings that were actually used in the stadiums at the Athens Olympics. "It's often said that the US is behind the rest of the world in ringtone adoption, but actually we've found that American cell phone users have more sophisticated tastes, and demand a broader range of interesting ringtones," said Retro Ringtones' founder and president Thomas Dolby Robertson. "A consumer can get a standard Top 40 ringtone from any one of a number of sources -- but it's much harder to find that one special, super-cool cult TV theme or Presidential blooper." Retro Ringtones licenses rare recordings from specialist record labels and copyright owners from around the world, and uses proprietary technology to produce them as punchy, fast-downloading ringtones for all US mobile handsets. Among the most popular are the 'Endangered Species Mating Calls,' licensed from Cornell University's Macauley Labs library and featuring recordings such as the Rwandan Mountain Gorilla, Pied Butcherbird, and Smoky Jungle Frog. Operators in the UK have donated proceeds from the ringtone sales to nature conservation charities. Over GBP 25,000 has been contributed to date. About Retro Ringtones LLC Retro Ringtones LLC was founded in 2002 by musician Thomas Dolby Robertson -- original co-developer of the Beatnik polyphonic software synthesizer technology now used by Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and others -- and Till Toenshoff, formerly Head of Technical Co-operations at handy.de, the mobile content division of Bertelsmann GmbH. Retro has developed a suite of server tools to streamline the ringtone and production delivery process. The tools were road-tested while Retro assembled thousands of ringtones from multiple producers, and delivered unique content libraries to customers all over Europe. These customers include Orange, Vodafone, O2, WES and Buongiorno. RetroFolio(TM) 1.0 is the heart of this powerful web-based tools suite, and is now being offered for the first time as a custom service to third parties. For more information, please refer to www.retroringtones.com. |
