Lions roar, birds chirp and cows moo. In the life of entrepreneur Deborah Rivel, it’s all in a day’s work – and those are just the noises coming from her mobile phone. What does a baby porcupine sound like? Ask the founder of Wildsight Productions, Inc. and Wildtones.com, Rivel – a former producer/director of PBS and Discovery Animal Planet documentaries – who has taken her passion for wildlife to bring animals directly to individuals in a very personal way: via their mobile phone.
“As a producer of wildlife documentaries for national television, I saw that the future of educating people about animals and their environment would more likely be through their mobile devices,” says Rivel. “The messages I convey about animals are personalized and ready whenever the user is. I strive to give individuals access and choices on how to learn about various species, up close and in a very personal way.”
“The more that people learn about animals, the more likely they are to take their stewardship of those animals, and the environment, more seriously.”
At her website, Wildtones.com, Rivel donates a percentage of her animal ringtone sales to various non-profits dedicated to animal welfare.
As a female entrepreneur in high tech, a rare species in itself, Rivel feels compelled toward the dual nature of her business, creatively providing a service that doubles as a mechanism to help fund her passion for preserving the animal kingdom.
Rivel just launched the first all-inclusive birding application from the world’s foremost authority on bird watching, Peterson® Mobile Field Guide to Backyard Birds, for iPhone users. The application includes quizzes, bird calls, maps and the high quality Peterson bird images. For non-iPhone users, a subscription package, similar in nature, is available for Internet enabled cell phones. Both packages are personalized through zip codes allowing the user to narrow the bird field to the most commonly seen birds in their region. These interactive tools engage bird watchers, including parents and children, as they discover and appreciate, up close, their feathered neighbors.
Three more iPhone applications – Farm Animals, Baby Wild Animals and Wild Animals– have just launched on iTunes and are ready for downloading. Providing the same high-quality content including sounds, images, , , and descriptions in each of these categories, as the Peterson® Mobile Field Guide to Backyard Birds, these applications bring nature on-call and directly to the cross-roads of technology, entertainment and education.
“How many people really know what kind of noise a fox makes or have ever heard a ‘rattle’ up close? Not many,” says Rivel. “Our professional wildlife photographers and sound engineers provide authentic images and noises and we make them mobile, accessible and on-call to nature lovers everywhere. Holding nature in your hand in this way, interacting with the puzzles and sounds, is an open window to better understanding animals.”
The recipient of seven Emmy Awards, Deborah Rivel served as co-producer and director on a onehour documentary she conceived of entitled Life With Big Cats: Tippi Hedren and Shambala, co-produced with Canal Plus and Discovery’s Animal Planet Channel which focused on the extraordinary life and relationship actress Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith share with lions, tigers and other exotic cats they have rescued. She produced a six-part wildlife series for public TV which focused on the human-animal relationship which was shot around the world and which garnered global recognition in the form of three International Chris Awards, a Genesis Award for Outstanding PBS Documentary, a finalist in the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival a Sierra Club Wildlife Film Festival Screening and a Bronze Medal in the International TV and Film Festival of New York among others.
Rivel founded Wildsight Productions, Inc. in 1991 and formed Wildtones.com which went live on the Internet in 2007. A percentage of all sales are dedicated to various non-profit and charitable organizations focused on preserving and promoting wildlife conservation and animal welfare issues. Some of those organizations include, The Alex Foundation, the International Primate Protection League, The Roar Foundation (run by Tippi Hedren), Bill Jordan Wildlife Defense Fund, and Oceanites.
