Questionable Ring Tones, Clairvoyance-Phone Ban

February 1, 2005

Some not-terribly-important-but-still-interesting international consumer technology news for you--

Mobile phone users now have a novel option w/r/t their form of ring tones: living adult-film legend Jenna Jameson moaning and making other sexual noises, including the 30-year-old blonde talking dirty to the phone owners--in English or Spanish.

iMi Dios!

Latin American users can download a "moan tone" for $1.00 each, while customers in the United States will pay $2.50 for a moan. U.S. customers will have to wait to purchase Jameson's voice, as no mobile carriers in the United States have yet expressed interest in carrying the service. The tones are already being downloaded in Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela. The moans and groans will be available to Latin American neighbors, from Mexico to Uruguay, in a couple of weeks.

A quote from Reuters' coverage: "If you can get her to say my name then I would buy it. I need that kind of personal attention," said New Yorker Julian McCullough [of Jameson].

This venture was launched between the porn queen and Wicked Wireless, a mobile music and entertainment company.

"Rock stars make music tones, porn stars make moan tones," Dennis Adamo, CEO of Wicked Wireless, told Reuters. "We thought it would be an interesting novel approach of introducing new content to the mobile users."

As I am, some say, morally flexible and solipsistic, my only grievance is this: If this really picks up in the States, how will we be able to distinguish between the excruciatingly annoying phone calls received in movie theaters and the equally sphincter-clenching irritability of libidinous high school couples in the back row of the theater?

Jameson, who recently wrote a best-selling memoir, also has her own wireless company, called Ytel Wireless.

Not wholly unrelated (and equally questionable to some), China has aimed at fortune-telling as its next target in a crackdown on illegal telephone content after going after phone sex, Reuters has also reported. The fortunes-via-phone ban comes on the heels of the country's sharp crackdown on pornography in 2004, in which the government ordered severe punishment of phone sex operators, shutting down hundreds of Web sites.

I wonder if this latest-targeted group is surprised by the crackdown, or if they, you know, saw the ban coming...

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DRB