JOHN DOFFING'S RINGTONE RUMBLE

"START MOBILE was actually a pretty obvious extension of my work in technology and my background putting on real-world exhibitions through START SOMA and the ART HOTEL. I have always believed that ART SHOULD BE FOR EVERYONE, and a mobile art gallery is a pretty literal manifestation of this vision - for less than the price of a cup of coffee, we have the ability to deliver some pretty amazing artwork to literally BILLIONS of mobile phones around the world. The implications of this are pretty profound.

"So what was the question again? ;-) I guess at the end of the day, I really just love the art. I can't make it myself, and am personally in awe of those who can. I consider myself lucky to be a small part of what I am convinced is an historically significant international movement."

Back to business: In addition to offering graphical art for cellphones you recently introduced "new music for the mobile medium". You even gave this new music a name: M60. What exactly is an M60 and what makes them stand out compared to the tons of ringtones already available?

"START MOBILE was founded to bring the work of emerging + underground artists to the new mobile medium, but after receiving countless requests for ringtones and seeing the profound lack of compelling content in this realm as well, we decided that START MOBILE would attempt to do the same thing for independent musicians that we were already doing for emerging artists.

"So this summer, we launched START MOBILE MUSIC. Much like with the art galleries, I wasn't interested in re-inventing the wheel. So instead of ten second MIDI clips of Top Forty songs, we launched with a few hundred mobile SONGS, created by independent musicians, bands, and DJs from around the world. It turns out that there is no technical reason that ring-tones should only be 10 seconds long, so we invited musicians to create sixty second songs, which still allows for fairly high-fidelity files to be delivered to mobile devices. And the limitation turned out to be a creative challenge for the musicians! A few of them compared the 60 second limitation to creating a haiku, which I thought was pretty cool. One of my friends, Bay Area rapper Wiseproof, and I came up with the name when we were in the studio creating the first sixty second mobile true tone. M60 simply stands for Mobile Sixty, which was also pretty obvious once we had everything else figured out! As was our focus on independent artists - 50 Cent doesn't need a new modality of exposure. Folks like Wiseproof do, and it is absolutely amazing to me how much unsigned talent is out there!"

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