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ToneThis is an application that lets users create, share and download ringtones, wallpapers and videos. ToneThis has been downloaded close to 400,000 times at download.com. We caught up with one of the founders, Raj Singh, to get some very insightful answers on their business model, future features and challenges to date.

Can you give our readers a quick summary of what ToneThis provides?

Singh: ToneThis makes it very easy to create your own ringtones, wallpapers and videos and send them to your phone over-the-air or via Bluetooth or USB. Currently, most users have to buy mobile content either from the carrier (through their phone) or from an online site. With ToneThis, you can open your own music or image file, edit it and then send it to your phone. You can also share that content you create with your friends.

More recently, we’ve been adding a catalogue of free content our users can access in addition to their own content. We’ve added images from Flickr, videos from Revver and even free games from Greystripe which I will talk about more below.

What is the ToneThis revenue model? is it based on revenue from selling the desktop client that produces ringtones and wallpapers?

Singh: Initially, ToneThis was a premium Windows application only, meaning you had to purchase it for $20. This actually proved to be great revenue but in order to grow the userbase further, we looked at what all successful desktop software companies do and that was to have a free version and a pro version so that’s what we did. We now have a free version of the application that is ad-supported and we have a pro version of the application that you can buy for $20 online and in retail stores like Fry’s or CompUSA. The pro version isn’t really too different - it basically just removes the advertisements and includes some additional bundled content.

A partner of yours, Greystripe has been covered on inbabble.com in the past. How do you partner together?

Singh: As ToneThis grew, we realized that we had basically created a desktop channel (carrier) for mobile content. ToneThis is always running as a tray icon - it starts when your computer starts. Once we passed a 100K users, we realized that we should probably try partnering with content providers to see if they would be interested in distributing their content to our users and they were. We partnered with Greystripe to offer their free games to ToneThis pro users; we were actually one of their first catalog partners and still their only desktop distribution partner.

Who do you consider your competitors, and how do you believe you compare with them?

Singh: When we first launched ToneThis, our only real competition was Xingtone. They were basically the first company to focus on ringtone creation at the desktop; we were the second. Since then, there have been a handful of competitors trying to do what ToneThis does but all on the web; the list is long but it includes PhoneZoo, Mixxer, PhoneSherpa and Mobango.

Today, we have surpassed Xingtone in many ways - I can’t give specific numbers but we are now a Top 5 downloaded application in the mobile category on Download.com. Actually, just 4 weeks ago, we were #1 ahead of Skype Mobile, Opera Mini and Google Maps Mobile. We’ve also expanded beyond ringtones - we’ve added support for wallpapers, full-track downloads, mobile videos, games and even added sharing capabilities.

With respect to our web competitors, they have gained some traction creating an online mobile content social network; however, none of them have really been a smashing hit; Mobango has done a good job within Italy. Nokia just released Mosh last week, let’s see how that does.

While our web competitors have been battling with each other for profiles, we’ve continue to take ownership of the desktop. As ironic as this sounds, our main competitive advantage has been that we’re on the desktop. It allows us to distribute and do deals they can’t do. For example, now that we’re in the millions of application downloads, we are able to do doing bundling deals with several leading software applications and even PC manufacturers. This is enhancing our distribution and putting ToneThis on more desktops achieving our vision of becoming the desktop channel for mobile content.

That being said, we’ve explored partnerships with several of our web competitors - they are aware that sideloading is becoming the new way to distribute mobile content. ToneThis is in a good spot to allow a content provider to own the experience from the web to the desktop to the mobile.

FYI, iTunes has sort of become a new competitor - they are selling premium ringtones and we offer ringtone creation but like iTunes, we can sideload the content.

Do you have any product changes planned for the future? (video? ringtone search? games sales?)

Singh: The ToneThis vision is to become the desktop channel for mobile content. We are working to achieve this in several ways:

1. We want our users to be able to send any content from their desktop to the phone; we want to the My Briefcase for the mobile. So this will include expanding beyond ringtones, wallpapers, videos and games to office files, podcasts, flash content etc.

2. We want to make it very easy to send any content from the web to your phone with the ToneThis application. We are shortly releasing our ToneThis browser extensions so you can send any song, image or video from any website to your phone - there really isn’t anything like this available right now.

3. As our userbase continues to grow, we want to include more free and premium content partners. Given that we’re always running, we basically consider ourselves a Tier 3 operator - we have more active users on any given day than most MVNOs.

4. We are greatly enhancing the sharing capabilities of the application. We are integrating with instant messaging products to make it very easy to share mobile content with your buddies.

5. We’ve begun exploring partnerships with social networks and web content providers. Since ToneThis is a source of user-generated-content, we are exploring publishing this content to online social networks.

What has been the biggest challenge to getting ToneThis off the ground?

Singh: Desktop software is hard. Since most folks have been doing web development for the past ten years, people have forgotten how “old-fashioned” desktop development is. When we release a new version, it’s not trivial to get people to upgrade. When we do a new build, we have to test it against 13 variants of Windows, 5 different CD-Rom drivers, multiple video cards, different memory configurations - it can be a nightmare.

Besides the development aspects, desktop distribution can be tough. Most people don’t realize, only half the programs that are downloaded are even installed and maybe half of those are actually run. Distribution isn’t trivial and it definitely took a lot of hard work to get the ToneThis brand off the ground.

Richard T.