In the news this week was the announcement of investment capital being drawn to Emotive Communications (including money from Warner Music Group), a company that has developed a method of delivering ringtones sent from the caller to the recipient. A press release sent to Pastepunk said the following:

Emotive’s flagship product, the patent-pending “Push Ringer”, reverses the common ringtone model. It enables a caller to push an outgoing ringtone to the receiving phone allowing the caller, not the called person, to set the tone. The chosen Ringer is transmitted to the recipient’s handset and temporarily overrides the phone’s pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files. Closing the loop, if the called person likes the ringtone, the service also enables him or her to instantly buy a copy of the ringtone for his or her own phone. Emotive’s Push Ringer moves beyond traditional mobile personalization by both adding value to the ringtones users purchase for their own phones and providing content recommendation and impulse-purchase opportunities to the users’ friends, family and coworkers. This new technology represents a vastly more active, expressive and compelling form of call personalization than exists in today’s ringtone market which is otherwise showing signs of leveling off at only about 6% of mobile subscribers, worldwide, The Push Ringer leverages rapidly emerging broadband wireless telephone and wire-line VOIP networks.

The product has already gained significant traction with consumers. Since its launch on Skype’s VOIP network in 2006, Push Ringer (known to Skype users as “Ringjacker”) has been installed more than 800,000 times and is demonstrating significant peer to peer pass-along rates. Emotive is unveiling its mobile prototype of the Push Ringer at the IMS World Forum in Monaco on April 24th 2007.

- Sounds like trouble…