Blåmba
What is it?
Visit www.blamba.de yourself to find out.
If you happen to have an old feature-phone with working cellular data, visit wap.blamba.de on it.
Background
Blåmba is a modern, open-source re-implementation of the popular commercial ringtone and multi-media providers for cellphones back in the early 2000s.
If you weren’t around back then, many companies offered small little ringtones, screensavers, screen backgrounds, which you could directly download to your mobile phone (via SMS, WAP, early web browsers).
These services cost a lot of money and were often associated with very annoying advertisment and questionable business practices (subscriptions, etc.)
The technical side behind those ringtone providers proved to be pretty interesting, though. There are a number of very cool, innovative (at the time) standards involved and those can still be used today (even if documentation is sparse).
Talk
At the 38th Chaos Communication Congress I gave a talk explaining a lot of the technical background regarding WAP, WSP, GPRS, CSD, UDH and all those other wonderful cellular communication acronyms:
Links
- www.blamba.de: Web version for normal PCs
- wap.blamba.de: WAP version to visit on phones directly
- 38C3 - Blåmba! ☎️ Behind the scenes of a 2000s-style ringtone provider: YouTube recording
- 38C3 - Blåmba! ☎️ Behind the scenes of a 2000s-style ringtone provider: PDF-Slides
- Sourcecode (Website/Backend): Git repo
- Content repo: Git repo