Stream Music to your Mobile Phone

Wireless connectivity in handheld digital music players is gaining ground. The MusicGremlin service with its iPod-like Gremlin player connects with Wi-Fi; Microsoft's much talked about Zune player will also feature Wi-Fi for transferring files. But what if you've already got a handheld — your smartphone for example — and just wish you could use that to listen to your tunes?

Mercora plans to do just that for any device running Windows Mobile 5.0, no matter what the connectivity — EDGE, EV-DO, HSDPA, or Wi-Fi. The company's new offering, called simply "M," couples a software applications for the phones with an online service. You can use it to listen to music stored on your PC or, eventually,  the music stored on the PCs of up to five friends. The company also has "social radio" stations, 1,000+ with customized genres and sub-genres comprised of music submitted by users.

"Mercora spent three years building our network technology to allow access to music from all over the world," says Avikk Ghose, the company vice president of business development. "Our software lets people Webcast or share entire music collections."

The current Mercora service has about one million users spread across 140 countries. It's far from U.S. centric, with about 70% of the traffic coming from outside the states.