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Grinda of Zingy made the leap into cell phones from another recent tech darling, online auctions. A native of France, Grinda sold his company Aucland, a pan-European version of eBay, to the Spanish company Terra in 2000. After watching a friend make a fortune in ringtones--a business he once thought would never be more than a novelty--Grinda got into the game himself. He started Zingy and sold it to the Japanese company For-Side.com last May, but he is still running the business and pushing the company into city guides and traffic reports.
And unlike some others, Grinda thinks there's still plenty of room for growth even within ringtones. Record labels have only recently embraced fully licensed ringtones that actually sound like music, he says, and Zingy is racing to sign up the most popular hip-hop acts to exclusive ringtone deals. (His roster already includes 50 Cent, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg.) Grinda says the only thing holding the content back is handsets: just some 15% of cell phones in use today support the best-quality ringtones. Of course, Americans typically replace their cell phones every 18 months. "Give me two years, and every handset in the U.S. will be compatible," he says.
Camera phones, on the other hand, are available on 27 million handsets, and Snapfish Mobile is trying to turn them into a business too. Cell-phone carriers have seen little in the way of revenue from the huge popularity of camera phones. Snapfish Mobile allows users to share and store camera-phone pictures--and encourages them to pay to turn them into wallpaper or order prints.
Of course, the big boys are also jumping into wireless services. Larry Shapiro, who runs Disney's North American mobile business, first realized the potential in cell phones in 2000, in Japan, where high-speed networks allowed cell-phone content to take off long before it did in the U.S. (Disney characters are enormously popular there, particularly with young women in their 20s and 30s--heavy users of cell phones.) In the U.S., Disney's games and wallpaper images of characters like the Incredibles have done well, but the company is still trying to figure out how to translate its movies and television shows to the mobile-phone environment. "Having a wireless strategy will have to be a part of any brand strategy," says Clint Wheelock, an analyst with NPD Group. "What they're all struggling with right now is to figure out what the business model should be." Shapiro admits that finding the right form for wireless keeps him up at night, but Disney is committed to figuring it out. "We think it has the potential to be a significant revenue stream," he says.