When Mom calls the cell phone, you might have a special ringtone just for her--like Squeezebox by the Who. When Dad calls, maybe it's Simple Man by Skynyrd. For your significant other, maybe it's a cheesy 80's power ballad. Ringtones are fun, and they've become a huge segment of business for the music industry. Of course, who's willing to settle for ringtones that employ just audio, when you can use video, too?

Vringo offers sharable video ringtones that work with smart phones from Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia (like the affable N73 in the picture). You can choose a "VringForward"--that is a video ringtone--to assign to each person in your phone's buddy list. The cool part is--they'll see the video when you call them. A "VringBack", on the other hand, is a video that one of your buddies has chosen for you to see when they give you a call.

What's even more nifty, you can record videos with your phone's camera and share those as VringForwards, too. So, if it's your best friend's birthday, you could create a special birthday greeting just for her. Plus, Vringo offers a slew of licensed video content from big-name music publishers.

The catch? Vringo's video ringtones work for buddies that are members of the service. You've got to join Vringo by entering your wireless number on their web site. They'll send their software to your phone via the Net, and you're in.

Big Blue has been eyeing a wireless software company called Vallent Corp., and is working to close a deal for early 2007. Vallent, a software company from Washington that develops network monitoring tools for wireless service providers, has developed software that is capable of monitoring traffic, identifying network bottlenecks, and protect against any service interruptions. Vallent's current high profile customer list currently includes Cingular, Nextel, Lucent and Motorola. IBM says that this deal will give the company key technologies that will increase the amount of consumer and corporate data that is transmitted wirelessly. IBM plans to integrate Vallent's software with IBM's Tivoli Netcool line.

Yahoo! has just announced it's Yahoo to Go service on Windows Mobile smartphones (like the sleek Motorola Q). The application has been around on some Nokia phones for a while, and was previously announced to be pre-installed on some Motorola handsets next year. This release will expand the service to the millions of devices running Windows Mobile 2003 SE & 5.0.

The application brings together a set of Yahoo! services into a neat little package:

• Yahoo! Mail
• Yahoo! Search (Local, Web and Image)
• Yahoo! Photos
• Yahoo! Address Book and Calendar
• Yahoo! News, Sports, Finance

The download will be available tomorrow from the Yahoo to Go Mobile site - I wonder if it'll run on my old Dell Axim X5???

OK, this isn't exactly a download. But all that software has to run on something, right?

Greenpeace has released their first ever global "e-waste" scorecard that ranks computer and electronics manufacturers in terms of how much effort they are putting into shrinking their environmental toxin profiles, and how successful they're being. Many people probably don't realize it, but most consumer electronics are potential mini environmental disasters: Lithium, Mercury, Bromine and Nickel--among other things--in batteries, switches, and relays; more lead than you can shake a stick at; petroleum-based plastic and polymer shells. And we haven't even gotten to the chemicals used in production or how the raw materials are mined and harvested. So how did the companies do? As you can see from the graphic above, not well. On a scale of one to ten, Dell and Nokia scored respectable sevens for their strong recycling programs and efforts to phase out some dangerous chemicals. In fact, their continued use of dangerous chemicals seems to be the only thing holding Dell back is its reliance on BFR-coated materials and PVC, for which companies lose double points in the rankings. The rest of their scores look surprisingly green.

On the other end of the spectrum are Motorloa and Lenovo, with scores of 1.7 and 1.3, respectively. Not much to say there, other than "shame on you." Apple, at 2.7, also loses out big, largely for playing nice with companies like Motorola. Apple itself has fairly high standards, but imposes few or no environmental requirements on its suppliers and contractors. They also don't match up to higher-scoring companies in the takeback/recycling department, offering take back policies in only five markets, and then only of their own products and only with a new purchase, although the policy is a little more liberal for corporate and educational customers. They get a "shame on you," too.

Of course, Greenpeace is hardly an unbiased source, so caveat lector, but it's an interesting start to what will almost certainly be a long and important discussion. Hopefully the next version will be a little more comprehensive. Where are the the chip makers, the big iron vendors? An electronics reprt card that doesn't even mention Sun, IMB, Cisco, Intel, or AMD seems incomplete to me.

[via J.Y.]

Getting up to the minute news and accessing information on your mobile device is great. Always being up to date by accessing all the hottest news, sports, movies, flights, and your package deliveries are great features to have on a mobile device.

One company that provides this mobile service is 4INFO. Through downloading the 4INFO search application onto your mobile device, you are presented with some great easy to use mobile search features. The 4INFO application can directly hook you up with your latest flight status, weather, stock quotes, and yellow page information just from opening the application and using your scroll keys to navigate to your particular category of interest.

There are many different mobile phones that 4INFO's application is compatible with, including Blackberry, Palm Treo, Motorola, Samsung, and Sanyo.

Well talk about perfect timing-today I was browsing jkontherun.com and saw Kevin C. Tofel's entry on an interesting little application called Pocket Light designed for the Motorla Q (which I just got over the weekend). Having been known to use the backlight on my iPod to get around the dog on the bed when going to bed after the wife is already asleep, I thought it would be interesting.

Kevin's post indicated the current beta expires on July 27 so get it quick. I did and went right to the site and downloaded it. In addition to the "Flashlight" mode that uses the light of the flash for the camera, there is a "Screen Light" mode that turns off the time out on the backlight and displays a blank white screen to get the brightest light from the screen.

There is also a time waster mode that allows you to send morse code signals using the light of the flash unit. And the message S.O.S. is a built in one, but you can set your own custom message as well. There is also a morse code table for you to decode messages from friends who also have this application.

[Via jkontherun]

Hi my name is Mike, and I am a downloader. ("Hi Mike.") Here is my story of how I fell off the wagon.

So it was time for a cell phone upgrade to a new phone, and I stopped in over the weekend with all intentions of picking up the XV6700 Windows Mobile 5.0 device. I had one for some time as a development unit from a client I was developing a mobile application for. My co-worker who had recommended these phones to our client did the dog fooding thing and got himself one. Al though recently he picked up a new razor to use as his phone, he still has the XV6700 for data use and getting his email. While waiting to be helped I checked out the Motorola Q again, and decided on that form factor instead of the XV6700. I soon had my contacts copied over to a new Motorola Q and I was off with my new enabler phone.

So the first application I downloaded was SplashBlog, which is one I had played with, and setup an account with, while I had the demo XV6700. I went to the the site on the phone, found the CAB for the Smart Phone edition, downloaded it , and installed it. It is a great application and it installed just as quickly as when I installed it on the previous device. I soon logged into my SplashBlog account and got my previous account all set up on the phone. This was all done by the time I got across the street to the plaza where I dropped the wife off to go shopping as I went to the toy cell phone store.

Later on that night I followed some of the download links on the phone and downloaded one of my other addictions, a Sudoku game, as well as a couple others Sunday I VPNed to my work computer and installed the Wireless Sync software to get my work email. I also got some of my numerous personal emails setup.

Now, readers, let me know what your must-have Smart Phone applications (or games) are in the comments.

It figures... not long after switching my cellphone (but thanks to Y! Mobile for adding my model), Yahoo! and Motorola announce that the Yahoo! to Go service will be pre-installed on some of their handsets.

No word as to which models will get it, but we'll start seeing them in the first half of 2007.

Up to now, it's just been on some Nokia S60 phones, so this could expand the service quite significantly.