Irish company Alatto has come up with a product called VConnect which ‘replaces the “bring, bring” (or “brrrrrrrng”) sound heard before the call connects with a wide range of content types including music, celebrity audio, or movie clips, self recorded messages, sound effects, practical jokes etc.’

The system has already generated around $100m of revenue in Korea for the service provider which offered it, as customers chose to listen to pop tunes or whatever instead of their conventional ring-tones. [via DMEurope]

Now why doesn’t some clever cellular service provider offer to beam celebrity voiced advertising to subscriber phones instead of ringtones or pop songs, and give the subscriber cheap/free calls in exchange for listening to the advert? Reminiscent of the defunct Swedish scheme in the late 90s?