• Turn themselves off in particular situations (e.g., in hospitals, in airplanes during take-off and landing, in blasting zones).
• Switch from "ring" to "vibrate" in particular situations (e.g., in schools during class times, in movie theaters, in court houses).
• Change their "ring tone" and/or "ring volume" in particular situations.

A phone equipped with RingRules will be able to control its operation based on such things as:

• The current date and time.
• Its current location.
• Information available from the Internet (e.g., weather conditions, stock prices, traffic conditions).
• Images available from the camera (if one is available).

A user of a phone equipped with RingRules will be able to:

• Create rules on the phone itself.
• Create rules on a desktop computer and download them to the phone.
• Manually request rules from a local server (e.g., from a University at the start of the semester).
• Automatically receive rules from a local server (e.g., whenever she/he enters a hospital or blasting zone).
• Exchange rules with other users.

We will make the RingRules client (i.e., the software that runs on the "smart phone") available at no charge. Our revenues will come from the RingRules server, which will be sold to organizations that want to encourage proper phone etiquette (e.g., schools, hospitals, movie theaters, airlines).

Our preliminary research indicates that we are the only company that is currently developing a product of this kind.

Initial development efforts will use Java.