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A decade ago, the customizable ringtone was ubiquitous. Almost any crowd of cell phone owners could produce a carillon of tinkly, beeping, synthy, musicalized ringer signals. Ringtones quickly became a multi-billion-dollar global industry and almost as quickly faded away. InThe Ringtone Dialectic, Sumanth Gopinath charts the rise and fall of the ringtone economy and assesses its effect on cultural production.Gopinath describes the technical and economic structure of the ringtone industry, considering the transformation of ringtones from monophonic, single-line synthesizer files to polyphonic MIDI files to digital sound files and the concomitant change in the nature of capital and rent accumulation within the industry. He discusses sociocultural practices that seemed to wane as a result of these shifts, including ringtone labor, certain forms of musical notation and representation, and the creation of musical and artistic works quoting ringtones. Gopinath examines \"declines,\" \"reversals,\" and \"revivals\" of cultural forms associated with the ringtone and its changes, including the Crazy Frog fad, the use of ringtones in political movements (as in the Philippine \"Gloriagate\" scandal), the ringtone's narrative function in film and television (including its striking use in the films of the Chinese director Jia Zhangke), and the ringtone's relation to pop music (including possible race and class aspects of ringtone consumption). Finally, Gopinath considers the attempt to rebrand ringtones as \"mobile music\" and the emergence of cloud computing.

With advances in tracking and database technologies, firms are increasingly able to understand their customers and translate this understanding into products and services that appeal to them. Technologies such as collaborative filtering, data mining, and click-stream analysis enable firms to customize their offerings at the individual level. While there has been a lot of hype about web personalization recently, our understanding of its effectiveness is far from conclusive. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) literature, this research takes the view that the interaction between a firm and its customers is one of communicating a persuasive message to the customers driven by business objectives. In particular, we examine three major elements of a web personalization strategy: level of preference matching, recommendation set size, and sorting cue. These elements can be manipulated by a firm in implementing its personalization strategy. This research also investigates a personal disposition, need for cognition, which plays a role in assessing the effectiveness of web personalization. Research hypotheses are tested using 1,000 subjects in three field experiments based on a ring-tone download website. Our findings indicate the saliency of these variables in different stages of the persuasion process. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Animals can use different sources of information when making decisions. Foraging animals often have access to both self-acquired and socially acquired information about prey. The fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, hunts frogs by approaching the calls that frogs produce to attract mates. We examined how the reliability of self-acquired prey cues affects social learning of novel prey cues. We trained bats to associate an artificial acoustic cue (mobile phone ringtone) with food rewards. Bats were assigned to treatments in which the trained cue was either an unreliable indicator of reward (rewarded 50% of the presentations) or a reliable indicator (rewarded 100% of the presentations), and they were exposed to a conspecific tutor foraging on a reliable (rewarded 100%) novel cue or to the novel cue with no tutor. Bats whose trained cue was unreliable and who had a tutor were significantly more likely to preferentially approach the novel cue when compared with bats whose trained cue was reliable, and to bats that had no tutor. Reliability of self-acquired prey cues therefore affects social learning of novel prey cues by frog-eating bats. Examining when animals use social information to learn about novel prey is key to understanding the social transmission of foraging innovations.

Providing recommendations is acknowledged to be an important feature of a business-to-consumer online storefront. Although many studies have examined the algorithms and operational procedures relevant to personalized recommender systems, empirical evidence demonstrating relationships between social presence and two important outcomes of evaluating recommender systems-reuse intention and trust-remains lacking. To test the existence of a causal link between social presence and reuse intention, and the mediating role of trust between these two variables, this study conducted experiments varying the level of social presence while providing personalized recommendations to users based on their explicit preferences. This study also compared these effects in two different product contexts: hedonic and utilitarian. The results show that greater social presence increases both reuse intention and trust in the recommender systems. Moreover, the influence of social presence on reuse intention with respect to utilitarian products is less than that with respect to hedonic products.

We develop a two-stage consumer-level model of paid search advertising response based on standard aggregated data provided to advertisers by major search engines such as Google or Bing. The proposed model uses behavioral primitives in accord with utility maximization and allows recovering parameters of the heterogeneity distribution in consumer preferences. The model is estimated on a novel paid search data set that includes information on the ad copy. To that end, we develop an original framework to analyze composition and design attributes of paid search ads. Our results allow us to correctly evaluate the effects of specific ad properties on ad performance, taking consumer heterogeneity into account. Another benefit of our approach is allowing recovery of preference correlation across the click-through and conversion stage. Based on the estimated correlation between price- and position-sensitivity, we propose a novel contextual targeting scheme in which a coupon is offered to a consumer depending on the position in which the paid search ad was displayed. Our analysis shows that total revenues from conversion can be increased using this targeting scheme while keeping cost constant.

How can the category of the »musical emblem« become a »signal«? Probably the earliest musical emblem could have been the »Toccata« from Monteverdi's Orfeo. However, there are also cell phone signals, which could be treated vice versa as musical emblems of the providers. But there are also pure signals (for example the one from Nokia) that tend to be treated artistically, i.e. as pure compositions. The research is based on two sources: 1) on the offers of the main Croatian providers (T-com, Vip and Tele2) which can be downloaded in the hand-held phones; 2) on the material fund at 60 cell phones which belong to users of different age, ranging from 15 to 65. The content of the offers by the main Croatian providers has been analyzed according to the criteria of identity that could influence the choice of the user, the repertoire in 60 cell phones, however, has been analyzed on the basis of the content, which primarily does not exist in the offers by providers. In the second case the hand-held phones are supposed also to be »music boxes« that provide the listener with music that has nothing to do with the emblematic functions of the elementary sound signs (ringing tone, sign of incoming SMS message etc.). Kako kategorija »glazbenoga amblema« može postati »signal«? Zasigurno bi najraniji glazbeni amblem mogla biti Toccata iz Monteverdievog Orfea. Ali postoje i signali na mobilnim telefonima koji bi se – obratno – mogli tretirati kao amblemi, npr. ponuðivača usluga. No postoje i čisti signali (npr. onaj Nokie) koje se tretira posve umjetnički, tj. kao prave skladbe. Istraživanje se temelji na dva izvora: 1) na ponudama glavnih ponuðivača signalnih znakova za mobilne telefone (T-com, Vip and Tele2) koji se mogu preko tih telefona i preuzeti; 2) na 60 mobitela koji pripadaju korisnicima različite dobi, od 15 do 65 godina. Sadržaj ponuda glavnih hrvatskih ponuðivača analizirao se po kriteriju identiteta koji bi mogao utjecati na izbor korisnika, a repertoari kod 60 mobitela analizirali su se na temelju sadržaja koji ne postoji kod ponuðivača. U drugome je slučaju mobitel poput »glazbene kutije« koja slušaocu osigurava glazbu bez ikakve veze s amblematskom funkcijom elementarnog zvukovnog signala (ton mobitelskog zvona, ton najave SMS poruke itd.). (Napomena: odlomci iz zvučnih i glazbenih primjera pristupačni su na: http://niksa-gligo.from.hr/.).

This new feature in Journal of Design History has been prompted by the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Design History Society in recognition of the emergence of design history as a discrete academic discipline. The feature has two aims. First, to reassess and evaluate writing on the history of design. It will reconsider the texts that influenced the pioneers of design history, as well as the books by those early pioneers who emerged after the founding of the discipline of design history. This will include the influence and impact of writing from cognate fields – for example, from anthropology, ethnography, literary criticism, geography – on the development of the discipline. Second, it will re-appraise texts on the practice of design that have become part of the history of design. For example, a future review will look at Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World (Pantheon Books, 1971). We thus invite suggestions from contributors for this feature. Enquiries should be addressed to the book reviews editor. Deborah Sugg Ryan

The respondents fit the national pattern in terms of subscription to the different carriers, with 50% of respondents subscribing to NTT Docomo, 38% to KDDI, and 12% to Softbank Mobile, which resulted from Internet conglomerate Softbank's acquisition of Vodafone Japan. It took well over a year for other record companies to appreciate the power of mastertones as promotional tools, either as trial purchases or as free advertisement from another person's phone. Acknowledgments My special thanks to Edgar Pope for help in distributing the questionnaire; to Katsuma Kazuyo (JP Morgan) and Nathan Ramler (Macquarie) for data and guidance; to the executives, A&R managers, producers, and artists at Avex, Baby Mario Productions, Cultural Convenience Club, Dwango, Faith, File Records, For-side.com, Index, KDDI, MTI, Nippon Crown, Nippon Enterprise, NTT Docomo, Pony Canyon, RIAJ, Rightscale, Softbank, Sony, Sony Music, Solomon I&I Production, Toshiba EMI, Yahoo Japan, and others who wished not to be named for their time in interviews; and to my students at John Jay College and Brooklyn College for sharing their opinions.