Mobile Encyclopedia

Mobile Company makes you ringtone composer for your cell phone

What: OwnYourPhone

What it does: Allows users to turn songs they already own into ringtones.

Why: Typically, consumers purchase ringtones for about $3 each from a carrier or through a Web site. Users don’t have a choice about the part of the song that becomes the ringtone, and often they won’t find ringtones with music from obscure bands.

The background: About a year ago, Daniel Hornal called his friend Adam Eisley to see if a program could be built to make possible what OwnYourPhone now does. Eisley, a Web programmer, said he had bought a new phone at the time and was trying to figure out how to put music and content on it. The two filed a patent and formed the company, based in Shoreline. “The whole purpose of it was to create a site where you could upload whatever music you already own,” Eisley said.

How it works: To make a ringtone, a user uploads a song to OwnYourPhone.com. The user then marks where the ringtone should begin and end. When done, the user goes to the cellphone’s Web browser and enters a code on the site to download the song. The service costs 99 cents a song.

Digital rights: Eisley said that as long as a user owns the song and uses it for personal use, he’s not concerned about breaking copyright laws.

Next generation: In about eight weeks, Eisley said consumers can get the ringtone on their phone by sending a text message, allowing more phones — those without Web access — to use the service. To do this, OwnYourPhone partnered with mBlox, a company that provides text-messaging gateways to carriers.

Competition: Ringtones amount to almost a $3 billion market worldwide, and other Web sites offer similar services. Eisley said he’s not worried. “We have a better interface and product, and we charge half as much as them,” Eisley said.

Part time: Eisley, 27, hasn’t left his day job programming at Sublime Media in Seattle, and Hornal, 24, is teaching English in South Korea (he’s expected to return to the U.S. in six months). Eisley said they hope to attract enough investment to work at it full time.

Ringtones: Because of the service, Eisley converted the song “Bkab” by Ethan Stoller into a ringtone. The song, which plays during the credits of the movie “V for Vendetta,” didn’t even make the soundtrack album. Hornal said he has “Shiver” by Coldplay on his phone. Although that song is available commercially, he said he didn’t want the chorus, which is what you normally get.