Hewlett-Packard confirmed on Wednesday that it had acquired Melodeo, its second recent acquisition in the mobile market.
HP did not disclose the purchase price. TechCrunch first reported on the acquisition.
Melodeo offers a service, called NuTsie, that essentially lets people stream songs that are in their iTunes collections to a mobile phone. A user first exports iTunes playlists to NuTsie online. After downloading an application to their phone, they can start listening to their playlists.
To offer the service, Melodeo uses the metadata for users' songs to find them in its own library of music, then streams the songs to the users. If Melodeo doesn't have the rights to stream a given song, it can't play it for the user.
Users can listen to their own playlists, their friends' playlists or collections created by Melodeo or others. NuTsie software is available for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices, as well as the iPhone and other phones.
HP described Melodeo as a company that offers a cloud-based delivery system for content across multiple devices. “We are excited about the potential of this technology to bring the power of cloud-based delivery services to millions of customers,” it said in a statement.
HP only recently acquired Palm, the mobile-phone software and hardware maker. It has said it plans to continue to develop Palm smartphones and will also use the WebOS software on tablet devices.
