“People smile when they hear his name,” David Berney, managing director of RJMobile, told XBiz. “He’s iconic here.”
Jeremy will be lending his recognizable brand – as well as the aforementioned noises – to the RJMobile phone experience. The company has developed an operator agnostic Java portal that allows subscribers to use their existing mobile service while downloading as many as 30 scenes a week. Depending on the country – England, Sweden and Italy are very strict, Berney said – RJMobile will offer three gradations of content, from “very soft” to hardcore.
Essentially a Ron Jeremy runtime, Berney likened the portal experience to someone who “squats on Fleet Street or Fifth Avenue without paying the rent.”
“Man’s Best Friend” was developed for the Java browser Alto, which is written in J2ME MIDP 1.0 and is compatible with 60 different models of phone.
Users pay approximately $3 a week to download regularly updated scenes to their phones, avoiding charges associated with streaming. RJMobile also said it has purchased the non-exclusive content rights from many companies in Europe and is talking with a company in Florida. But Berney said that American companies so far have insisted on revenue-sharing, whereas RJMobile prefers full buyouts.
Jeremy, who Berney likened to affable UK rogues like Billy Connolly and Ozzy Osbourne, will help launch “Man’s Best Friend” at a party at Leicester Square’s Penthouse Club.
“They paid me a lot of money,” Jeremy told XBiz.
Featuring a “Baby Ron” logo designed by London artist Nick Jeeves, RJMobile is using Jeremy’s crossover appeal to reach a larger swath of mobile users.
“We’re getting great feedback already,” Berney told XBiz. “At his speaking engagement in Oxford, he’s going to be speaking in the same room as did Mother Theresa and John F. Kennedy. People love him.”
Berney was reluctant to mention other celebrity-branded services in the works for RJMobile, but he said the company has put out a white paper on someone "fairly big."
