Mercora's IMRadio Mobile

Completely missed this one earlier in the week: Mercora, a company which offers an online peer-to-peer radio service that lets you stream music from your PC's hard drive to your friends' computers, has added a new feature that allows you to stream audio to Windows Mobile-powered Pocket PC Phones, too. They offer the service in two different flavors, a free version which restricts how many hours per day you can stream music or listen to other people's streams, and a paid version which gives you unlimited listening and time shifting (they use subscriptions to pay all the necessary licensing and royalty fees needed to keep things nice and legal). They emphasize the social aspect of all this, with users sharing playlists with friends, but you can also use Mercora as an easy way to access the music collection on your hard drive while you're on the go (sort of like
Orb, actually). No matter how people end up using services like Mercora, it's definitely something the wireless carriers aren't going to love, since they're busy trying to get people to pay between $5 and $15 for their own
streaming cellphone radio
services. Too bad they don't get that it's stuff like this that is going to convince people to sign up for high speed 3G wireless data connections, not restricted access to an AOL-style walled garden of mobile content.