Zingy

» see zingy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

zingy was a US-market thing. i was in ankara on a nokia phone during zingy's peak, on turkcell, with ringtones that were either the factory nokia tunes or mp3 clips someone had trimmed on a desktop and shoved over infrared. the whole american paid-ringtone economy that zingy sat at the top of never made it to turkey. the local carriers ran their own tiny wap portals, prices were low, most turkish teenagers just did not pay for a ringtone.

fabrice grinda started zingy in 2001 out of a manhattan apartment after selling his first company aucland (a european ebay clone) to terra networks in spain. the pitch was mobile content for us mobile carriers. carrier-billed polyphonic ringtones, wallpapers, small java games where the java supported it. by 2005 the company was pushing 200 million dollars in annual product sales. grinda later described the growth as going from three people to a couple hundred without a proper product-management layer, which is what late-stage-startup people say when they had to build the plane in flight.

the exit was strange. in april 2004 grinda sold zingy to a japanese mobile-content company called for-side.com for 80 million dollars. for-side had offered forty million previously and grinda had passed. the second bid at eighty went through. grinda owned 53 percent at the time. he stayed on as ceo for about eighteen months, working through the transition, then left in december 2005 with andy volanakis taking over as interim ceo. for-side was focused on maintaining margins, grinda had wanted to keep expanding by acquisition. those two positions do not sit at the same table for long.

the death is fuzzy. no clean shutdown date, no press release. the polyphonic ringtone business itself started dying when the iphone shipped in 2007 with real audio ringtones cut from itunes tracks. by 2009 the carrier-billed sub-clip model was a legacy line of business at every ringtone company. for-side wound the zingy brand down as a us product by roughly 2010, in the same slow-fade pattern that jamba (already dead, next plot over) followed in europe. the specific date is not on wikipedia because the death was not a shutdown, it was a quiet folding.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the manhattan apartment ~

grinda has told the origin story on his blog and in interviews: he and a small team were coding zingy out of a new york apartment in 2001-2002, trying to sign licensing deals with sprint and cingular that would let them bill ringtones to us mobile subscribers. the initial deal that changed the business was a bmi comprehensive ringtone licensing agreement signed in october 2001, which cleared the composer-royalty piece and let zingy sell polyphonic clips of pop songs without a per-track negotiation. that agreement is the piece that made the 200-million-dollar run possible three years later.

~ what came next ~

grinda parlayed the zingy exit into founding OLX with alec oxenford in 2006. OLX became a global classifieds marketplace, eventually owned by naspers, and the one grinda is remembered for outside the ringtone world. from a burak-in-turkey view, olx is the interesting successor because it was one of the few classifieds services that actually operated inside turkey (via sahibinden as competitor). still, though, the zingy years were the ones where grinda learned what a mobile carrier billing relationship actually costs to run.

~ the long tail ~

zingy is one of the graves that has almost no consumer artifacts left behind. no logos in circulation, no famous ringtones, no meme afterlife. the whole business existed for the four years when polyphonic clips of billboard hits were the biggest thing you could sell to a us teenager through a carrier bill. once itunes could deliver a full mp3 ringtone for the same money, the category folded. for-side kept the brand alive on legacy pages for a couple more years and then even those stopped resolving.

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