James's Weblog

From today’s San José Mercury News:

At the Web site of the ring tone company Modtones (www.modtones.com), you can dress your cell phone up for the holidays by downloading “Silent Night.” Or if you prefer, you can simply download silence.

Customers started asking for a silent ring tone a while back, said Jeremy Xavier, the marketing manager of Modtones, although at first he did not understand this oxymoronic request. When he did, he set his developers to work.

…

The user simply assigns the silent tone to any numbers in the cell phone’s address book. It seems to callers at those numbers that the cell phone is ringing, but the call is sent to voice mail.

Xavier said the un-tone has been getting “a pretty significant amount of downloads.” He declined to specify how many, but said it was beating out certain popular music.

Awesome.