32 | Business World Magazine |
February 2014
South American market, the piper that led
the company back to the U.S. didn’t play a
flute; it instead was a cell phone playing a
ringtone. Fresonke says it wasn’t until 2006
that U.S. consumers really began to wake up
to the power that was in their hands. Though
business operations had been relying on
ClearSky’s array of services, consumers were
still using their cell phones for voice calls.
Then along came the ringtone. Something
as simple as playing a favorite song when the
phone rang drove consumers to begin using
their handsets to access the wireless data net-
work to download a tone. As Fresonke ex-
plains, “Even in the mid 2000’s the phones
and networks were capable of some pretty
