The general public has a new way to get their voices heard by the presidential candidates: cell phone video messaging.

Start-up Mogreet, out of Venice Beach, Calif., which recently launched a service that lets people send personalized video messages to cell-phones, is empowering the U.S. population by letting them send video messages to the presidential candidates’ cell phones.

Geared toward the younger set, voters can go to www.mogreetthevote.com to pick a video on a topic that matters to them and then personalize the video with their own text message. Mogreet gave each campaign's communication director a cell phone to which the message will be sent.

“Our goal is to make sure the candidates out there understand what young people care about and it’s reflected in what we are hearing on the campaign trail,” said James Citron, chief executive at Mogreet. “It’s a great way to showcase our technology as well as to make sure we are leveling the playing field for young people to get out there and communicate their views.”

Citron noted that some of the popular topics Mogreet users are sending via mogreetthevote include immigration, the economy and the war in Iraq. The personalized video messages are free for users, with more than 15,000 already finding their way to the candidates’ cell phones.

In addition to mogreetthevote.com, the company, which raised funding from early stage venture capital firm DFJ Frontier, charges 99 cents for personalized video messages that don’t have to do with the election.

Mogreet has forged relationships with entertainers including actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, reggae singer Sean Kingston and former pop boy band singer Lance Bass, that made generic video messages that can be personalized and sent to a cell phone for 99 cents a message. Similar to Internet-based greeting cards, Mogreet's Web site has a slew of categories to choose from including birthdays, flirting, thank you and call me, which can be personalized with text.

For instance, if you wanted to let someone know you were thinking about him or her, you could always have Austin Powers--a.k.a Mike Myers--get the point across. In addition to entertainers, Mogreet encourages anyone to make their own video message and send it to its Web site. While viewing the video messages would be ideal on an iPhone that has a large screen, Citron said the service works with older cell phones like the Motorola (MOT) RAZR. He said there are 150 million phones that play Mogreet messages in the U.S. alone. The video messages take up anywhere from 75kb to 120kb of space and you don’t need to have a data package on your cell phone to get the messages. Mogreet has relationship with AT&T (T), Dobson/CellularOne, Sprint (S), T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless (VZ).

“A lot of the new video Web sites have taught consumers how to create high quality video," said Citron. “We’re finding that people want to create incredible content and have it seen. That’s why millions of people send content to YouTube.”

Indeed user-generated video content has exploded ever since Web sites like YouTube came on the scene. Text messaging is also an extremely popular form of communication, especially with young adults and teenagers. According to Citron, there are a billion text messages sent every day in the U.S. and a video message is simply the melding of two popular forms of communications.

“Instead of sending a text message to break up with your girlfriend or say Happy Birthday, you can now do a video message," said Citron. “People are communication like never before…why make it limited to 156 characters [in a text message]?”