Brothers Fouad ElNaggar '98 and Omar ElNaggar '07, along with Lucius Alexander '07, Jeremy Spurr '99 and David Aronchick '96, created the sound bite database Entertonement where users can share and download sound bites to their cell phones or for use on their web page. The site contains a library of more than 100,000 "tonez," excerpts from movies, television shows, advertisements, sports, games and American history -- virtually every genre except music.
"We found a hole in the market," Fouad said. "Plus, we like that hole in the market."
Users on Entertonement can download and upload clips. They are then rewarded with virtual "coinz" based on their number of listeners.
"Basically we just want to open the site to become a type of YouTube," Alexander said, referring to the video-sharing website. "People could even upload a clip of them talking as their personal ring tone."
Entertonement circumvents copyright barriers by measuring the usage of each sound clip and aptly compensating the content owners.
"Everything on the site will be supplemented by targeted advertisements," Fouad said. "Then we will give content owners agreed upon compensation."
Targeting allows advertisers to cater to groups of sound-clip listeners. For example, HBO's "The Sopranos" can advertise where the clip from "The Godfather" is downloaded.
To avoid legal issues, the site scans users' uploaded sound bites to delete all music clips, which are banned by the website.
"I think that a lot of businesses will follow this type of ad-based revenue model in the future," Omar said. "It's the idea of users getting free TV."
As online advertising grows, advertisers want to reach many people in centralized locations, which is why Google, Yahoo and MSN do very well in advertising, Fouad said.
Omar, a computer science and economics double major, has discussed the challenge of creating a broad base of active users with advisors in both departments, among them economics professor Christopher Snyder.
"We've been talking about how to possibly turn this business into a research project," Snyder said. "Can you design games to make the overall experience of being on the website an entertaining experience?"
The site's user-generated business model incorporates an incentive system with aspects from Wikipedia and YouTube, according to Snyder.
To collect the more than 100,000 clips now on the website, Alexander and Omar built a crawler to identify web sites that had a high concentration of sounds.
"Dartmouth is the perfect community to inspire entrepreneurship because most of the students are really creative people," Fouad said.
